Anglican Ministers Are Not Mass-Priests

Article 36. Of Consecration of Bishops and Ministers The book of consecration of archbishops and bishops, and ordering of priests and deacons, lately set forth in the time of Edward the Sixth, and confirmed at the same time by authority of Parliament, doth contain all things necessary to such consecration and ordering; neither hath it anything that of itself is superstitious or ungodly. And therefore, whosoever are consecrated or ordered according to the rites of that book, since the second year of the forenamed King Edward, unto this time, or hereafter shall be consecrated or ordered according to the same rites; we decree all such to be rightly, orderly and lawfully consecrated and ordered.

"The importance of the article lies in the fact that the Anglican ordinal differs from the Roman Catholic one that it replaced. Ministers of the Church of England were not priests in the Roman sense, ordained to offer eucharistic sacrifices on the altar of the church during the celebration of mass. Rather they were called to be pastors and teachers, as were the ministers in other Protestant churches. This was not seriously questioned until the nineteenth century, when the rise of Anglo-Catholicism prompted some people to argue that there had been no substantial change at the time of the Reformation and that Anglican clergy were therefore identical both in form and in substance with their Roman counterparts. Cold water was poured on this idea by Pope Leo XIII, who in his bull Apostolicae curae, published on 18 September 1896, declared Anglican orders to be null and void, largely because of what he called their ‘defect of intention’. Put in layman’s language, what this means is that Anglicans are not ordained as mass-priests, so they are not mass-priests in the way that Roman Catholic clergy are. Anglo-Catholics have never accepted this, of course, and have tried to have the bull overturned at various times, though without success so far. We may be grateful to the pope for his clarity on this point, because the claims of high church Anglicans about the supposed ‘catholicity’ of Anglican orders are false, and rejected by the papacy with good reason. We do not want our clergy to be mass-priests, and are glad that they are not officially recognised as such by those who are in a position to know what they are."

Gerald Bray, The Faith We Confess: An Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles (London: The Latimer Trust, 2009), 199–200.