The following outline history is extracted in part from Archbishop Kersey’s book “Arnold Harris Mathew and the Old Catholic Movement in England 1908-52”, which is available from European-American University Press.
Antecedents in Old Catholicism
Liberal Catholicism is a development of the Old Catholic movement which in turn separated from the Roman Catholic Church in the early eighteenth-century. The Old Catholics rejected the First Vatican Council of 1870, with its declarations of Papal infallibility and the Marian dogmas, and this position brought about increased support from other Catholics who took a similar line. In the following years, Old Catholicism developed beyond its initial home in the Netherlands to other countries in Europe, and brought about a network of national Old Catholic churches that became known as the Union of Utrecht.
In 1908, the Dutch Old Catholic Church consecrated Arnold Harris Mathew (1852-1919) as their regionary bishop for the British Isles. The following year, Mathew was further conditionally consecrated as bishop for the Order of Corporate Reunion, which he proceeded to revive, becoming a source for several hundred Anglo-Catholic clergy of the Church of England to receive conditional reordination in a succession recognised as valid by Rome.
However, tensions developed between Mathew and Utrecht, which was moving in a more liberal and Protestant direction, and these caused Mathew to separate from the Continental Old Catholics in 1910. He went on to sign an Act of Union between his church and the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch in 1911 and with the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria in 1912.
In 1915, as a result of the prompting of an ultramontane member of Mathew’s clergy, he was persuaded to issue a condemnation of membership of the Theosophical Society, to which the majority of his priests then belonged. That group of priests saw this membership as fully compatible with the Catholic faith, and continued independently of him, with their leader, James Ingall Wedgwood (1883-1951) being consecrated by a bishop who had previously separated from Mathew. This body adopted the name The Liberal Catholic Church in 1919.
The Founders
James Ingall Wedgwood was a man of significant accomplishment, education and spiritual gifts. He was the great-grandson of the famous potter Josiah Wedgwood, and studied music and analytical chemistry at University College (later the University of) Nottingham. As a High Church Anglican he served as junior choirmaster at York Minster.
In 1904, Wedgwood attended a lecture in York by Mrs Annie Besant, president of the Theosophical Society (T.S.), and at first was antipathetic, doubtless realising the dim light in which the Anglican hierarchy saw the T.S. He determined to attend a second lecture to rid himself of the influence of Mrs Besant, but the experience had the opposite effect. Three days later, he became a member of the TS, and in consequence gave up his involvement with the Church of England. He served as General Secretary of the TS in England and Wales between 1911 and 1913. He was also from 1911 Very Illustrious Supreme Secretary 33° of the British Federation of International Co-Freemasonry, a body deriving from John Yarker. In this latter role, Wedgwood visited Australia in 1915, where Co-Masonry had been established since 1911. Here he met for the first time and inducted into the Co-Masonic Order the noted occultist and esoteric teacher Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854-1934).
Leadbeater was ordained priest in the Church of England in 1879 and served as curate of Bramshott, Hampshire, where his uncle was Rector. He became a member of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament in 1882. He took an interest in Spiritualism and visited séances in London given by the noted medium William Eglinton, who was a member of the TS. At this time, Leadbeater became interested in Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-91) and the Theosophical Society, which he joined on 21 November 1883. This was to set the course of his future life. In 1884, he gave away his possessions to the boys of Bramshott and embarked with Blavatsky to India, where the Theosophical Society was headquartered at Adyar. He worked in various capacities there while studying comparative religion, particularly Buddhism, and further developed powers of clairvoyance.
Leadbeater became convinced that a boy he had met in India, Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986), was an avatar of the Lord Maitreya, a being whom Leadbeater identified with Christ. In 1911, Leadbeater’s protegé George Arundale (1878-1945) (later President of the Theosophical Society) formed the Order of the Star in the East for those members of the T.S. who wished to support Krishnamurti.
Establishing the Liberal Catholic Church
Concerning the breach with Mathew in 1915, Wedgwood wrote,
“Our situation was not an easy one. We had not entered the movement with any idea of starting another Church. Nothing was further from my mind. It had been a disappointment to me that I could not enter the Anglican ministry, and when the opportunity presented itself of assuming “the sweet but heavy burden of the priesthood” under these conditions of greater freedom I gladly and happily embraced it. Had there been any thought of founding an independent church one would have taken information as to Abp. Mathew’s relationship with the other Old Catholic Churches and would certainly have decided to seek opportunity elsewhere. But things were not to be so. We found ourselves in relation with a devout and earnest congregation who had learned to value greatly the spiritual privileges which the movement afforded them. Experience had shown us that inevitably we should come to grief with orthodox leadership. There was no option but to go ahead, no matter how formidable and distasteful some of the outer consequences of that course were likely to prove. The decision to carry on was therefore taken.”
In Australia on 23 July 1916, Wedgwood consecrated Leadbeater, and the two men worked together to develop the nascent Liberal Catholic Church. The Statement of Principles was the first document to appear (from which the current Statement of Principles of E.A.D.M. is derived), followed in due course by the Liturgy and hymnbook. The movement grew, and by the end of 1917 there were ten priests in Australia, three in New Zealand, six in America and others in England. Between June 1917 and January 1920, 123 persons were baptized and 100 confirmed within the church in Great Britain alone. By late 1920, Wedgwood had established relations with Archbishop Eulogius of the Russian Orthodox Church in Europe, who recognised the orders of the L.C.C., but not those of the Anglicans.
The L.C.C. was never intended to be a “theosophical church” or merely to cater for T.S. members. Writing in 1921, Leadbeater made this very clear,
“In case any question is asked, allow me to repeat, as head of the Liberal Catholic Church here, that it has never at any time sought to influence the Theosophical Society in any way whatever, and that it desires nothing from the latter but ordinary courtesy and abstention from misrepresentation and vilification.”
This comment was necessary, because there were within the T.S. parties who were strongly opposed to the L.C.C. and indeed to any form of Catholicism. Conflict emerged on these lines during the 1920s, and in 1923 resulted in Wedgwood’s resignation of the position of Presiding Bishop in favour of Leadbeater. At this point, Wedgwood first took a doctorate in musicology at the Sorbonne, and then returned to a quieter role as a Bishop-Commissary for the L.C.C. On 11 September 1925, he consecrated Mrs Besant in Archangel St Michael and All Angels, Naarden, Holland, in the presence of +Sigfrid Fjellander (then a priest of the L.C.C. and later its Regionary for Scandinavia).
Developments after 1929
On August 3 1929 at a public meeting, Krishnamurti dissolved the Order of the Star in the East and disclaimed organised belief systems. He never denied being the World Teacher, though he held the matter to be irrelevant, and spent the remainder of his life lecturing, writing and offering individual guidance on spiritual matters. This event saw the beginning of a significant decline in the numbers of the L.C.C. from their peak of 45,000 to perhaps a few thousand by the 1940s.
This aspect too marked the move of the LCC into an era where the emphasis was on the codification and enduring nature of religious practice, rather than the previous years of active searching for the ideal form of worship and structure for the church. Put simply, the LCC believed that this ideal form had now been found, and that it remained only to ensure that it was maintained as such a sacred duty required. Although freedom of belief was indeed still a feature of the LCC, an outsider would be struck more by the extent that what was nominally liberal was in fact decidedly unliberal in a number of aspects.
Elected as Presiding Bishop to succeed Leadbeater was Frank Waters Pigott (1874-1956), who had served as Regionary Bishop for Great Britain and Ireland since 1924. Pigott was responsible for a concerted attempt to preserve Leadbeater’s work as an enduring tradition of the L.C.C., and to a large extent his approach also reflected Leadbeater’s considerable Traditionalism and social conservatism on a number of matters. In time, it became obligatory for clergy in major orders to accept Theosophical principles (most if not all were members of the T.S.), and also for them to follow a vegetarian diet and abstain from alcohol (the L.C.C. uses unfermented grape juice at the Eucharist) and tobacco. Although clergy were not stipended, their expenses on church business and those of the wider church were met from central funds. There were stringent requirements that any consecrated articles in the possession of clergy became the property of the L.C.C. and had to be returned in the event of death or resignation.
The schism of the 1940s and its consequences
In 1941, conflict developed within the L.C.C. when Charles Hampton (1886-1958), who had succeeded Cooper as Regionary Bishop of the United States, wished to make Theosophy and reincarnation an optional belief for the clergy. Hampton himself was a Theosophist, but having in mind the expressed opinions of the Founders towards the broader vision of the church, he believed that a liberal view of this matter was the right one. Presiding Bishop Frank Waters Pigott disagreed, maintaining that all clergy must continue to be members of the T.S. and that reincarnation was an official teaching of the church, and as well as deposing Hampton, began a lengthy legal battle over church property. Pigott appointed John T. Eklund as Regionary Bishop to replace Hampton.
The result of this was that two opposing factions developed, one supporting Hampton and the other supporting Pigott/Eklund. Judgement in the court proceedings was finally delivered in the Superior Court of the State of California on 13 April 1961 in favour of the Hampton faction, Hampton by then having passed on a few years earlier. The main descent of the Holy Orders of E.A.D.M. from the Liberal Catholic Church is via Hampton. The successors of Hampton won the right to call themselves the Liberal Catholic Church so far as the United States was concerned, and they have since adopted the name Liberal Catholic Church International for their missions outside that country, absorbing a number of independent Liberal Catholic churches on the way. A former bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church of Ontario, a body that was later absorbed into the L.C.C.I., provided the source of the initial Holy Orders received within E.A.D.M.
The Pigott/Eklund faction, meanwhile, which formed a new corporation in Maryland in 1962, is known as the Liberal Catholic Church, Province of the United States of America, within the United States, and as the Liberal Catholic Church outside it. It split further during the 1990s, producing several smaller jurisdictions which have since established themselves, and more substantially in 2003 over the ordination of women, producing two separate synods, which are jurisdictionally independent but both use the name The Liberal Catholic Church.
Liberal Catholicism today
There are thus several organisations today that profess various forms of Liberal Catholicism. Together, we consider them to constitute what is best described as a worldwide Liberal Catholic movement, and we also consider that movement to include a number of esoterically-minded Independent Catholic churches whose orders derive from the Liberal Catholic Church. Since the foundation of the Liberal Catholic movement rests on freedom of faith and conscience, we do not accept any definition of Liberal Catholicism that is based merely on the acceptance of specific matters of doctrine and practice that are not shared by all within the movement. Notwithstanding this, it is true to assert that those churches calling themselves Liberal Catholic are in general agreement with the Statement of Principles and Summary of Doctrine set out by the L.C.C. Founders. In E.A.D.M., as in some other reformed Liberal Catholic churches, these are promulgated as significant and distinctive teachings, rather than as dogma.
