EPIPHANY · 28 JANUARY · PROVINCIAL FEAST ✞ Bishop & Confessor
The Preservation of the American Episcopate
The Continuation of the Apostolic Succession in the Continuing Anglican Church · 28 January 1978
Denver, Colorado · 28 January 1978 · The Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas in the traditional kalendar
The apostolic succession is not a theory. It is a chain of hands — bishop upon head, generation after generation, carrying across the centuries the commission first given on the evening of the Resurrection: As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you. The Church does not possess this succession as a certificate of ecclesiastical respectability; she holds it as a stewardship, a trust received from those who went before and owed in full to those who come after. Every break in that chain is an amputation. Every act of its preservation under pressure is an act of faithfulness to the whole Body of Christ.
The American episcopate began in Aberdeen on 14 November 1784, when three Scottish bishops — Robert Kilgour, Arthur Petrie, and John Skinner — laid their hands upon Samuel Seabury of Connecticut and made him a bishop of the Church of God. The Church of England had declined to consecrate him because he could not in good conscience swear the oaths required to the British Crown after American independence; the Scottish bishops, who had themselves refused those oaths after 1688 and paid for that refusal with persecution and poverty, understood his position perfectly. They gave him what the Church of England would not, and in doing so they gave the American Church its episcopate. It is from those three pairs of Scottish hands that every valid Anglican bishop in America descends.
For nearly two centuries the American episcopate was held in trust by the Protestant Episcopal Church. Then, in September 1977, the Episcopal Church ratified decisions — the ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopate, and the wholesale revision of the Book of Common Prayer — that a significant body of clergy and laity judged to be incompatible with the Catholic faith and order received from the undivided Church. They gathered at St. Louis, Missouri, on 14 September 1977, and over three days they produced the Affirmation of St. Louis: a declaration of continuing adherence to the traditional faith, orders, and worship of classical Anglicanism. They did not leave the Church. They affirmed that the Church had left them — and that they intended to remain where they had always been.
An affirmation without a bishop is a statement of intent without the means of execution. The apostolic succession cannot be perpetuated by declaration alone; it requires the act — the laying on of hands by those who have themselves received the laying on of hands in unbroken continuity from the Apostles. This is not Anglican peculiarity; it is the universal teaching of the Catholic Church, East and West, expressed in the ancient principle that episcopus episcopum consecrat — a bishop is made by bishops. The Congress of St. Louis knew this. From its first session the question of the episcopate was inseparable from the question of the faith.
The answer came on 28 January 1978, in Denver, Colorado, on the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas — the Doctor Angelicus, the theologian of order, structure, and the rational articulation of grace. Four men received episcopal consecration that day: Charles Dale Doren, Robert Sharp Morse, Francisco Pagtakhan, and Albert Arthur Chambers, the former Bishop of Springfield, Illinois, who had himself resigned his see rather than remain in a church he could no longer in conscience serve. The consecrating bishops included Mark Pae of the Korean Anglican Church and Francisco Pagtakhan of the Philippine Independent Church — bishops standing in independent lines of apostolic succession outside the Episcopal Church, ensuring that what was transmitted at Denver was received from the whole Catholic episcopate and not merely from one provincial branch of it.
The theological significance of Denver cannot be overstated. It was not a schism from the apostolic succession but a preservation of it. The men consecrated at Denver received the same succession that Seabury received at Aberdeen, the same that the Scottish bishops had from the Church of England before 1688, the same that the Church of England held from the medieval Western Church, and that Church from the undivided Church of the first centuries. A chain that might have been broken — not by violence or persecution but by the quiet erosion of doctrinal carelessness — was instead carried forward intact. The Continuing Anglican Church is the continuation, not the revision, of what Seabury received.
Every bishop of the Anglican Province of Christ the King holds his orders from Denver. Every priest ordained by those bishops, and every deacon, and every sacrament validly celebrated in this Province, flows from those four pairs of hands in 1978. When this Province gathers at the altar and the bishop lifts his voice — Lift up your hearts — the hands that ordained him can be traced back, link by link, through Denver to Seabury, through Aberdeen to the Church of England, through the Reformation to the medieval succession, through the Middle Ages to the Apostles themselves. This is not mythology; it is documented history, maintained with the same care that the Church has always given to what she knows cannot be replaced once it is lost.
The feast of the Preservation of the American Episcopate is therefore a feast of gratitude — gratitude for those who saw clearly in 1977 what was at stake, who had the courage to act upon what they saw, and who found bishops willing to extend to them the same generosity that the Scottish bishops showed to Seabury in 1784: the gift of valid orders, given freely, in the service of the whole Church. It is a feast of continuity — of the thread unbroken, the chain unbroken, the succession unbroken. And it is a feast of commission — for the succession is not a possession but a trust, and every generation that receives it is charged to hold it faithfully and transmit it whole.
Almighty God, who in thy great mercy didst preserve the apostolic succession within the Continuing Anglican Church, and didst raise up faithful bishops to hold and transmit intact the orders and faith received from the Apostles through an unbroken succession of hands: Grant, we beseech thee, that we who are the inheritors of this great gift may receive it with gratitude, guard it with faithfulness, and transmit it in its fullness to those who shall come after us; through Jesus Christ, the great High Priest and Bishop of our souls, to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost be all honour and glory, world without end.
Amen.