Arnold Mathew

Arnold Harris Mathew
Arnold Harris Mathew consecration
Successor	Rudolph de Landas Berghes, Bernard Mary Williams
Orders
Ordination	1877
Consecration	April 28, 1908 by Gerardus Gul
Personal details
Birth name	Arnold Harris Ochterlony Matthews
Born	August 7, 1852(1852-08-07) Montpellier, Hérault, France
Died	19 December 1919(1919-12-19) (aged 67) Hertfordshire, England
Nationality	British
Denomination	Old Roman Catholic, Anglican, & Roman Catholic

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Arnold Harris Mathew, De Jure Earl of Landaff of Thomastown, Count Povoleri di Vicenza (August 7, 1852–December 19, 1919) was the first Old Catholic bishop in the United Kingdom, the founder of the Old Roman Catholic Church of Great Britain, and a noted author on ecclesiastic subjects.

Mathew was a former Roman Catholic and Anglican before becoming a bishop in the Union of Utrecht. He founded the Old Roman Catholic Church. His early life is the subject of some interest from researchers as a result of his aristocratic connections and his father's connection with colonial India.

Life

Baptized and raised an Anglican, Mathew became a priest in 1877, but left the Church twelve years later when he expressed doubts about Papal infallibility. After flirting with Unitarianism, he joined the Church of England in 1892, became a curate, assumed an Irish earldom, and married (the latter union produced three children, and broke up around 1910).^[1]

In 1899 he returned to the Roman Catholic Church as a layman, writing extensively on Catholic topics and helping to establish Brighton's Zoological Gardens.

Nine years later, he joined the Old Catholic Church of Utrecht, becoming convinced that there was a great future for the Old Catholic Church in England, he approached the Old Catholic bishops for episcopal ordination. He was consecrated as a Bishop, in charge of the European sect's British missionary work. Despite being married, while the Old Catholic Church had not yet abolished its rule of clerical celibacy, he was consecrated at Utrecht in 1908. Mathew eventually split with their leadership, but not before producing an English translation of the Old Catholic Missal and Ritual that is still used today.

Context of his mission

Mathew has been the subject of criticism from the Continental Old Catholics who claim that Mathew obtained his consecration to the historic episcopate in 1908 through deception. The consecration of Mathew as a missionary bishop for England has to be set in the context of La Succession apostolique dans l’Église anglicane (1894) in which some Old Catholics within the Union of Utrecht questioned the validity of Anglican orders and Apostolicae Curae issued (1896) by Pope Leo XIII which concluded that Anglican orders were so lacking in correct intention that they were in effect null and void.

The mission of Mathew was to erect a valid Catholic ministry in England where the Anglican Church was viewed as being deficient in holy orders. Before long, he offended the Old Catholic bishops by consecrating two dissident Roman Catholic priests, without consulting with any other bishop. From that time own, the Old Catholic bishops disowned Mathew and made it clear they would have nothing more to do with him. Mathew then made various approaches to the Church of England, but these were not enthusiastically welcomed by Anglican bishops leery of his motives, sincerity, and reliability.

Despite being married, Mathew was known for his homosexual extra marital affairs which was the cause of scandal in his ecclesiastical life.

Consecration

Mathew was consecrated in 1908 after the Utrecht Union of Old Catholic Churches approved the establishment of a mission in the United Kingdom despite there being a vigorous national (Anglican) Church already in existence in the United Kingdom. It was agreed by the Continental Old Catholics that Mathew had a significant following in Britain, although recent research indicates that his actual congregation varied in the period immediately prior to consecration and during his episcopacy. He was consecrated by Old Catholic Archbishop Gerardus Gul of Utrecht on April 28, 1908. Assisting Gul was Bishop J. J. Van Thiel of Haarlem, Bishop N. B. P. Spit of Deventer and Bishop J. Demmel of Bonn, Germany.

Bishop Arnold Harris Mathew being ordained a bishop by Old Catholic Archbishop of Utrecht Gerardus Gul at Utrecht, 28 April 1908.

Mission in England 1908-1919

Mathew formally established the Old Roman Catholic Church of Great Britain, which for a time was part of the Old Catholic Union of Utrecht. Mathew eventually raised a number of expelled priests to the episcopacy by himself without notifying the Union of Utrecht. Mathew's consecrations including two former Roman Catholic priests, Fathers Howarth and Beale, who had been excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Bishop of Nottingham for embezzling. Mathew then sent documents to Pope Pius X attesting to the episcopal consecrations. Upon receipt of these documents, Pope Pius X published the bull Gravi Iamdiu Scandalo in which he excommunicated Mathew and condemned him as a "pseudo-bishop" without authority and declared him vitandus, a term in church law which meant that Roman Catholics were subject to censure if they had anything to do with Mathew. Pius X also extended his sentence of excommunication to include those who had been consecrated by Bishop Mathew.

On December 29, 1910, Mathew declared his autonomy from the Continental Old Catholics and their Union of Utrecht due to disagreements with certain practices and disciplines that Mathew felt deviated from Catholic tradition, such as the increasing tendency to discourage frequent auricular confession and veneration of relics and saints by continental Old Catholics.^[2]

A noted author and historian, Bishop Mathew had an excellent knowledge of the Orthodox Church and established the most cordial relations between the English Old Catholics and the Patriarchal See of Antioch through his Eminence the Most Reverend Archbishop Gearrasimos Messara of Beruit, Syria, who on August 5th, 1911, received the Old Catholics under Bishop Mathew into union and full communion with the Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch. Thus a genuine and practical raproachment between the Catholics of the East and of the West was for the first time established after a breach which had lasted almost 10 centuries.^[3]

Mathew later consecrated Prince Rudolph Edward de Landes Berghes, an Austrian formerly-Roman Catholic nobleman, in 1913 for apostolic work among Old Catholics (or: Old Roman Catholics) in Scotland. Research in relation to this historic personality is largely unrevealing and more research is required in this area.

In January 1916 Mathew announced that he would be reconciled to the Holy See but changed his mind two months later, because the Holy See insisted he would only be reconciled as a layman and would be obliged to accept the doctrine of papal infallibility and primacy of the Roman Pontiff. Mathew then sought union with the Church of England but the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury refused to give Mathew any position as an Anglican clergyman. Mathew retired to a village in the English countryside and contented himself with assisting at services in an Anglican parish church as a layman.

By this time he had been deserted by his wife (he had married after his suspension as Roman Catholic priest) and had been abandoned by virtually all the priests and bishops he had ordained. Mathew died suddenly in December 1919 and was buried as an Anglican layman in the Parish of Saint Giles, South Mimms, Hertfordshire.

Liberal Catholic Church

Mathew, despite his vagaries perhaps the most genuinely sincere and pure-hearted of the major episcopi vagantes described by Anson, was himself throughout most of his life a devout, orthodox Anglo-Catholic in his religious beliefs. Some of the churches and bishops generated by Mathew were orthodox Catholic in their theology. Like Mathew himself, they preached doctrines common to the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches. Others, however, had strong leanings toward Theosophy, occultism, Spiritualism, and what we would today call "New Thought" ideas, much to "Bishop" Mathew's own shock and chagrin. In 1918, a couple of Theosophical-minded "Bishops" of Mathew's "Old Roman Catholic Church" set up their own "Liberal Catholic Church," a syncretistic semi-Christian Theosophic sect with a "High Church" Catholic liturgy and an eclectic theology incorporating Hindu and Theosophist doctrines like karma and reincarnation along with a terminology of "vibrations," "astral planes," and the like.

The "Liberal Catholic Church" has proved to be one of the bigger, more popular, and more enduring of the sects started by the episcopi vagantes, with several thousand members in England, Europe, North America, and Asia. It was initially the creation largely of the Right Rev. James Ingall Wedgwood (b. 1883), a zealous Theosophist, Mason, and Rosicrucian who also got himself ordained an "Old Roman Catholic Church" bishop by Mathew who later disowned him, and in 1918 became the first Presiding Bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church.

Validity and Hiram Richard Hulse

Critics have questioned the validity of the holy orders conferred by Mathew in the period following his departure from the Union of Utrecht. According to supporters the consecration of Hiram Hulse indicates that the Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA (PECUSA) regarded the Mathew line as being not only valid but even desirable. On 12 January 1915, in New York City, Hiram Hulse was consecrated as a Bishop in Cuba for the Protestant Episcopal Church assisted by Bishop de Landes Berghes in the Mathew line. This indicates that there were no apparent perceived problems in relation to valid holy orders in the 20th Century. The orders of De Landes Berghes, consecrated after Mathew left the Union of Utrecht, were apparently viewed by his contemporaries as valid despite any adverse comments from Utrecht.

Death

In his last years he variously tried to make a go of his independent British church, reunite with Rome, and/or bring his flock into Anglican jurisdiction -- all unsuccessfully. Mathew also consecrated many other independent Catholic bishops, helping to form a vast "episcopal underground" in the Christian world that exists today. He died in poverty, as a practicing Anglican layman, and is remembered today as a key figure in the English-speaking Old Catholic movement.

Contemporary significance

After Bishop Mathew's death the small body of Old Catholics in England remained without legitimate Episcopal supervision of their own, and until a short while ago the Church remained in the protection of the Episcopate of the Old Catholic Church in Poland. Now, cut off from their Mother-house by the European War, the English Old Catholics have placed themselves under the jurisdiction of an American Old Catholic Archbishop.

Mathew's activities as a bishop gave birth to the Liberal Catholic Church, founded by two Theosophical priests he consecrated to the episcopacy, and the more conservative Old Roman Catholic Churches, which are autocephalous churches holding to a Roman Catholic worship style, while rejecting the dogmas of the First Vatican Council (1869-1870) in several ways.

There are hundreds of Churches, 'rites' and ecclesiastic bodies in the English speaking world and some in Continental Europe that are in the Mathew line. This makes Mathew a significant figure in Old Catholic history. In the United Kingdom the traditionalist 'orthodox' position is often maintained by the Old Catholic Church in Europe (ORCCE) which has as its stated aim the maintenance of orthodox Old Roman Catholicism which would support the original aims of Mathew.

References