The Novus Ordo Ordination Rites similar to the Anglican

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A Vindication of The Bull 'Apostolicæ Curæ', A Letter on Anglican Orders, By the Cardinal Archbishop and Bishops of the Province of Westminster, In Reply to the Letter Addressed to Them By the Anglican Archbishops of Canterbury and York 1898

This Vindication is available in an easy to read PDF format below. It further clarifies the Papal Bull and certainly gives us a moment's pause when considering the similarities between the reasons behind why the Anglican Orders were declared invalid and the milieu surrounding the creation of the Novus Ordo Rite of Orders post Vatican II!




A short excerpt from the Vindication:

Cranmer’s doctrine on the Real Presence

When once it is realised that the true key to the meaning of the omissions and dubious phraseology of the Praver Book and Ordinal is to be sought in the views and aims of Cranmer and his party, it becomes indisputable what the key is. The difficulty is indeed not to find but to select testimonies for citation,and it may even seem superfluous to cite testimonies at all in proof of so patent a fact. Still, we have promised some specimens, and will proceed now to give them. That you may understand better, however,the significance we attach to them, may we remind you again of what has been said above concerning the intimate connection between the doctrines of the Real Objective Presence, the Sacrifice, and the Priesthood? Without the Real Objective Presence there can be no true Sacrifice, and without a true Sacrifice no true Priesthood. 

Cranmer wrote a long treatise entitled A Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine concerning the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ,and in the Preface he tells us very distinctly what were the principal ’corruptions’ he desired to see abolished:

What availeth it to take away beads, pardons, pilgrimages, and such other like Popery, so long as two chief roots remain unpulled up ? Whereof so long as they remain will spring again all former impediments of the Lord’s harvest and corruption of His flock. The rest is but branches and leaves... but the very body of the tree, or rather the roots of the weeds, is the Popish doctrine of transubstantiation, of the Real Presence of Christ’s Flesh and Blood in the Sacrament of the Altar (as they call it), and of the Sacrifice and Oblation of Christ made by the priest for the salvation of the quick and the dead. Which roots, if they be suffered in the Lord’s vineyard, they will overspread all the ground again with the old errors and superstitions.

Here we find the two doctrines which underlie and condition the doctrine of a true Priesthood formally declared to be the roots of evil which most of all needed destroying. This passage is really decisive as to Cranmer’s rejection of the Catholic doctrine, but it will be satisfactory to know more precisely what he himself held; and, faithful to the engagement we have made, we will pass over what he says of transubstantiation.We have to do only with his opinions on the Real Presence. He tells us that Christ is present in the bread and wine only figuratively :
He is not in the bread spiritually (as He is in the man), nor in the bread corporally (as He is in heaven), but sacramentally only (as a thing is said to be in the figure by which it is signified).

Hence it is true to say that He is not in the bread and wine at all, but only in the heart of the receiver :

They teach that Christ is in the bread and wine; we (as the truth itself requires) teach that Christ is in those who worthily partake of the bread and wine... They teach that Christ remains in the sacramental bread, even if it be kept a whole year; but that after the Sacrament has been received, when the bread is ground in the mouth and changed in the stomach, He departs to heaven; but we teach that Christ remains in the man who receives the bread worthily as long as the man remains a member of Christ.

And this, he says in another place, is what is meant by a phrase in the First Prayer Book, afterwards removed as susceptible of a ’Popish’ meaning:

Therefore in the Book of the Holy Communion we do not pray absolutely that the bread and wine may be made the Body and Blood of Christ, but that unto us in that holy mystery they may be so ; that is to say, that we may so worthily receive the same that we may be partakers of Christ’s Body and Blood, and that therewith in spirit and in truth we may be spiritually nourished.

It should be noticed, too, that it is only the worthy receiver of the Sacrament in whom Christ, according to Cranmer, is present.