THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDECH A Defence of ... - Rore Sanctifica

Cardinal Manning was equally insistent that the manifest goodness of so many Anglicans must be
attributed to the grace of God.
To ascribe the good lives of such persons to the power of nature would be Pelagianism. To deny
their goodness would be Jansenism. And with such a consciousness, how could anyone regard his
past spiritual life in the Church of England as a mockery? I have no deeper conviction than that the
grace of the Holy Spirit was with me from my earliest consciousness. Though at the time, perhaps, I
knew it not as I know it now, yet I can clearly perceive the order and chain of grace by which God
mercifully led me onward from childhood to the age of twenty years. 23
Father Barnes explains that the Anglican sacraments can certainly be occasions of grace for those
who assist at them with sincerity and devotion, quoting Newman to illustrate his point.
No Catholic has any desire to deny that God may be actually giving grace today through Anglican
sacraments. Why should He not? Spiritus Domini replevit orbem terrarum. "Grace is given for the
merits of Christ all over the earth; there is no corner even of Paganism where it is not present,
present in each heart of man in real sufficiency for his ultimate salvation. Not that the grace
presented to each is sufficient to bring him at once to Heaven, but it is sufficient for a beginning. It
is sufficient to enable him to plead for other grace, and that second grace is such as to impetrate a
third and thus the soul may be led on from grace to grace and from strength to strength," even
outside the Church. But such grace is ex opere operantis, the reward of the devotion of the
individual worshipper, and is no evidence of the validity of the means which in good faith he is
using. "When a member of the Establishment (Church of England) has accepted God's word that He
would make Bread His Body and honoured God by the fact that he has thus accepted it, is it not
suitable to God's mercy if He rewards such a special faith with a quasi sacramental grace, though
the worshipper has unwittingly offered to a material substance that adoration which he intended to
pay to the present but invisible Lamb of God?" God, we must always remember, is not bound by the
sacraments which He Himself has instituted-----but we are. 24
In the face of the accelerating drift to neo-paganism throughout the west, every Catholic must be
grateful for all that so many Anglican clerics do to uphold so much of the essential Christian faith in
the face of so much discouragement, not least from the liberals within their own Communion.
While we can pray that one day they will come to the fullness of truth, we can rejoice in the truth
that they already embrace. But while we can rejoice in what unites us we would be failing in charity
towards our Anglican brethren to gloss over what separates us-----and this is just what we would be
doing if we gave the Anglo-Catholic clergy the impression that we believe they have valid orders
and are sacrificing priests in the Catholic sense. Indeed, the great majority of Anglican clerics
would reject with indignation any suggestion that they were sacrificing priests.
1. RMP, vol. 1, pp. 448-451.
2. Ibid., p. 451.
3. Ibid., p. 456.
4. Cranmer and the Reformation under Edward VI (Cambridge, 1926), p. 229.
5. ESR, p. 204.
6. Bonner's Profitable and necessarye doctryne (London, 1555), p. 40; cited in
QAO, pp. 58/9.
7. PAD, p. 21.
8. T .A. Lacey, A Roman Diary and Other Documents (London, 1910), p. 8.
9. PAD, pp. 23/4.
10. ESR, p. 16.
11. The Churchman, March 1962, pp. 23-30.
12. Scottish Journal of Theology, March 1957, pp. 109-11.