On Roving Bishops

Anglican Bishops

In the wake of the SSPX episcopal consecrations, one of my former Church of England clergy friends commented that the Catholic rebels remind him of Anglo-Catholics. Lots of Catholic claims and catholic customs but cut off from the source.

The Anglo-Catholics are fond of promoting the “branch theory” that they are one of many branches of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic church. Our Lord’s parable about branches that are cut off from the vine seems lost on them.

My own journey into and then out of the Church of England is told in my autobiography There and Back Again. That journey took me into some ecclesiastical corners of eccentricity and downright looniness, and one of the books that brilliantly chronicles the believe it or not museum of church groups is Peter Anson’s Bishops at Large. Reading it is an entertaining but sad cautionary tale about those who cut themselves off from the church and yet present themselves as the true guardians of the faith.

Here is the review I wrote some years ago on Anson’s book:

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When I was an undergraduate at Bob Jones University I came down with a serious illness called “Anglophilia.” It is a particularly tenacious malady most often caught from a germ picked up from reading too much C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and T.S. Eliot.

As an English and Speech major, I remember studying these great authors as well as George Herbert, John Donne, and Henry Vaughn, and wondering what religion they followed. They were Christian writers, but clearly they did not belong to the Four Square Adventist Church of God Prophecy.

Crossreferencing to what I was learning in my history lessons, I concluded that they were “Anglicans.” This information added to my affliction. If these great men were Anglicans perhaps I could be too. In the library I found a book titled Anglicanism by W.H. Griffith Thomas. His Evangelical explication of the Anglican faith was reasonable and attractive to a budding scholar, and then the Anglophilia problem was exacerbated by the discovery that there existed a little conventicle in Greenville called “Holy Trinity Anglican Orthodox Church.”

The Anglican Orthodox Church was founded in 1963 by an Episcopal clergyman from North Carolina who was disenchanted with the modernist drift of the Episcopal Church of the USA. The Rev. James Parker Dees got himself consecrated as a bishop by by Wasyl Sawyna of the Holy Ukrainian Autocephalic Orthodox Church of North and South America, assisted by Orlando Jacques Woodward of the United Episcopal Church Anglican/Celtic Rite.

Bishop Dees was a larger than life figure—a former opera singer, he had a florid, beefy face, a booming voice, and an uncompromising stance against modernism in all its forms. In addition to forming his own church, he received an honorary doctorate from Bob Jones University. My introduction to Bishop Dees’ little denomination was also an introduction to the bizarre world of episcopi vagans—otherwise known as “wandering bishops.”

Bishops at Large is the title of a fascinating volume by Peter Anson. Anson researched the topic exhaustively and tells the stories of numerous episcopal pretenders of varied levels of eccentricity. In a delightful introduction, Henry St John O.P writes, “The story is one of the strangest and most fantastic religious movements to be found in the whole range of what may be described, in general terms, as the erratic ‘goings on’ of the ecclesiastical underworld.” Anson recounts the biographies of the self-styled bishops who compete for grandiose titles and acclamations. Their vanity and lack of self-awareness will delight anyone who has a penchant for the ostentatious, bizarre, and downright loopy side of humanity.

How can you resist learning about Jules Ferrette, aka Mar Julius I, Bishop of Iona and Patriarchal Legate of the Syrian Jacobite Church for Western Europe; or Ulric Vernon Hereford, aka Mar Jacobus, Bishop of Mercia and Middlesex, Administrator of the Metropolitan See of India, Ceylon, Milapur etc. of the Syro-Chaldean Church and of the Patriarchate of Babylon and the East-Founder of the Evangelical Catholic Communion; or His Imperial Majesty Marziano II Lavarello Basileus of Constantinople and of all the Christian Orient, crowned in Rome by the Prince Patriarch Joannes Maria Van Assendelft-Altland, Primate of the Eglise Catholique apostolique primitive d’Antioche et Syro Byzantine? These are but three of the Episcopal buccaneers Anson memorializes. In addition to the freelance bishops, Anson chronicles the hundreds of schismatic groups descended from this offshoot of the Apostolic Succession.

Anson’s book is not only an absorbing and entertaining addition to anyone interested in ecclesiology, but it also sheds light on the state of both the Anglican and the Catholic Church in our day. With the ordination of women and the mainstream Anglican drift into modernistic faith and morals, the breakaway Anglican churches continue to proliferate. This webpage lists nearly 150 independent Anglican churches. Nor is the schismatic tendency limited to Anglicans.

Catholics like to do their own thing too—though not so numerous, Wikipedia gives interesting info on the phenomenon here, and this webpage lists about 25 “Independent Catholic Churches”—an oxymoron if ever there was one. So Catholics don’t have too much room for chuckling at the episcopal pretensions of our separated brethren. They may have roving bishops. Catholics of the sedevacantist opinion not only have self-appointed bishops they have their own popes. There have been dozens around the world in recent decades in one form or another. To name a few: Francis Schuckhardt was part of the Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima, Elected in Montana in 1998, Lucian Pulvermacher was Pope Pius XIII head of the “True Catholic Church” and Pope Michael—David Bowden—was elected pope by six laypeople in Kansas, including his parents and himself. Bawden died in 2022, and his successor Rogelio Martinez was elected and took the name of Pope Michael II.

There has always been a certain amount of cross-fertilization between Anglicanism and Catholicism, and this mixture of cult is seen in another contemporary freelance hierarch, Papa Rutherford. His Holiness Bishop Rutherford I Ralphovich of Rome-Ruthenia is the Papa-Catholicos of the Catholicate of Rome-Ruthenia and Supreme Pontiff of the United Roman-Ruthenian Church. He is 266th in succession from St. Peter the Apostle as Prince of the Romans, 74th Grand Duke of Ruthenia, 142nd in Gallican-Antioch succession from St. Peter, 169th in Greco-Russian succession from St. Andrew the First-Called, 145th in Armenian succession from Saints Thaddeus and Bartholomew, and 116th in Syrian-Antioch succession from St. Thomas the Apostle. If that is not enough, his full biography can be found here.

In his introduction to Anson’s book, Henry St John O.P. opines about wandering bishops:

In all this there is a queer mixture of the irrepressible, the ridiculous and the pathetic; naive goodness and sincere idealism, unconscious vanity and, at times, conscious roguery: its promoters frequently unstable to a degree, eccentric in some cases to the point of craziness, moving in a dream world of unreality. A marked characteristic of this dream world is a folie de grandeur of high sounding titles and more than extravagant pretensions; these generally in inverse ratio to the number of their adherents and the size of the conventicles in which they worship and still worship with elaborate ritual and ceremonial.

Indeed, and while chuckling at the lunacy of extremists, one has to consider the bottom line: Are the episcopal rogues and rascals recorded in Anson’s book any worse than mainstream Anglican and Episcopal prelates? If the apostolic claims of the freelance Anglican eccentrics are bogus and bizarre, are not the apostolic claims of the mainstream Anglican bishops just as empty? When contemplating the present state of the Church of England, Henry St John’s observations seem apt: “A marked characteristic of this dream world is a folie de grandeur of high sounding titles and more than extravagant pretensions.”

If the Anglican roving bishops’ apostolic claims are null and void, what of the Catholic independent ecclesiastical entrepreneurs? Anson’s book needs a sequel.

What Anson’s collection of apostolic oddballs teaches us is that to be cut off from the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church is to descend into a self-styled fantasy world of religion—a world where the reality is no deeper than the scarlet silk of one’s ferraiolo.