‘Archbishop’ Sarah Mullally’s welcome at the Vatican – what it really means

 It’s yet another scandal from Leo XIV’s Vatican. Let’s break it down.

Anglican Orders

First of all, the Catholic Church authoritatively and definitively taught that Anglican orders are invalid. What does that mean? It means that their priests are not real priests, and their bishops are not real bishops. When they say “Mass”, nothing happens – nor do they believe anything happens, for the most part. When they confirm, nothing happens. And so on.

Pretty much everyone knew that this was the case when the Church of England made its liturgical reforms in the sixteenth century. That’s why the brief period of Queen Mary’s reign, when the Catholic religion was restored in England, those who had been ordained in the new rites were re-ordained.

At some point, there was a more “Catholicizing” trend in the Church of England, and they started to argue that their rites were indeed valid. This caused a bit of confusion, which Leo XIII settled in his Apostolic Letter Apostolicae Curae.

Leo XIII explained how the liturgical changes, which had stripped both the “Mass” and the ordination rites of the Catholic notion of sacrifice and a sacrificial priesthood, meant that the Church of England had extinguished Holy Orders in its heretical and schismatic sect.

That’s why he defined, in very strong terms:

We pronounce and declare that ordinations carried out according to the Anglican rite have been, and are, absolutely null and utterly void.

 It’s an absolute scandal to be welcoming Anglican fake-priests and fake-bishops into Roman basilicas, letting them celebrate their heretical rites, and treating them as if they are true ministers of Christ. In fact, it’s a sacrilege: the violation of holy places.

But that’s with regard to Anglican ministers who are male. The problem with Sarah Mullally is even worse.

Female Ordination 

The sight of a woman in full clerical dress, the dress of an Anglican bishop, going around Rome, blessing bishops, treating with Leo XIV like an equal… is just so visually striking.

There have been Anglican clerics there before, allowed to behave in the same way. But a male fake-priest or fake-bishop is at least in the position to become a real priest or bishop if he converts and is re-ordained.

But a female fake-bishop is just a new level.

That’s because Catholic teaching definitively holds that only men – and not women – can receive Holy Orders.

This was the teaching of the Fathers: St Irenaeus, Epiphanius and Augustine considered those who ordained women to be heretics. St Paul himself taught the Corinthians, in very politically incorrect terms:

Let women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted them to speak but to be subject, as also the law saith.

But if they would learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is a shame for a woman to speak in the church. (1 Cor. 14.34-5)

 And he wrote to St Timothy:

Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to use authority over the man: but to be in silence. (1 Tim 2.11-12). 

Our Lord also chose only men to be his apostles, whose successors the bishops are, and in whose ministry the priests participate. And Our Lord was not bound by any human conventions at all: he broke them where necessary, but not here.

As recently as 1994, John Paul II wrote in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis:

Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.

Women are ontologically incapable of receiving priestly ordination or episcopal consecration. It is impossible.

To allow Anglican fake-priests and fake-bishops to minister in Rome as if they were real priests, and to speak of them and to treat them in that way, is bad enough, but that runs against Apostolicae Curae alone; to allow a female fake-bishop to do so runs against both Apostolicae Curae AND Divine Law and the perennial tradition of the Church. It’s a scandal.

Communicatio in Sacris

But then there’s another ground for scandal, and that’s praying in common with non-Catholics, especially in liturgical prayer.

And that’s exactly what Leo XIV and Sarah Mullally did. It was announced that they’d be praying Midday Prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours together, and there are videos of them doing so – standing together on an equal footing. See below, at 6 minutes in:

What should we make of this?

It’s generally considered to be acceptable to pray with non-Catholics in private, under certain circumstances.

But there’s a very striking event at the end of the life of the English martyr Margaret Clitherow, who was condemned to death by being crushed by a door loaded with heavy stones. She was charged with harbouring priests during the reign of Elizabeth I, and she wouldn’t plead innocent or guilty so as to avoid having her family called to testify against her.

After a long imprisonment and many efforts to force her to testify, eventually the day of execution arrived.

Just before she was ordered to remove her clothes – “as judgment was given and pronounced against her” – her executioners invited her to pray with them.

But the martyr refused. “I will not pray with you,” she said, “and you shall not pray with me; neither will I say Amen to your prayers, nor shall you to mine.”

And that was that. In the end, having been begged by everyone around her, the executioners let her keep a long linen smock. She was laid down on a sharp stone the size of a fist, the door put on top of her and her arms stretched out and bound, and heavy stones laid on the door. The stones broke her ribs, which burst out of her skin, and after fifteen minutes of this torment, she died and received the martyr’s crown.

And another English martyr, Fr Everard Hanse, was at the gallows, just before he was hanged, drawn and quartered, and the Anglican ministers called for him to pray with them

He said that he could not pray with heretics, but asked all Catholics to pray for him and with him. And so his gruelling execution began.

What we see here – Leo taking part in the public and official prayer of the Liturgy of the Hours with Sarah Mullally, is a betrayal of those martyrs.

The Church has been very clear on what’s called “communicatio in sacris” – communication in sacred things.

When it comes to non-Catholics taking an active part in our sacred rites – exercising functions and so on – this was always considered forbidden by the Church. Two respected Dominican Moral Theologians, Frs McHugh and Callan, wrote that “The Church has always refused to tolerate this kind of participation.”

A 1949 document on the ecumenical movement ruled that “Communicatio in sacris be entirely avoided” at all meetings with non-Catholics. It said that “recitation in common of the Lord’s Prayer or of some prayer approved by the Catholic Church” could be done at the open or close of ecumenical meetings, but even then reiterated: “In all these meetings and conferences any communication whatsoever in worship must be avoided.”

It doesn’t matter whether what Leo XIV and Mullally did was “Catholic prayer” – the point is she should not have been permitted to play that role in it. Nor can the recitation of the Liturgy of the Hours, in an official way with singing and so on, be considered merely two Christians praying together. The Liturgy of the Hours is public prayer – and this recitation of it was also filmed and published.

That’s because prayer and worship are a kind of profession of faith, and it is impossible that those who are divided in faith take an active and official role in Catholic worship. It’s a scandal that conveys, without words, that the other religion is legitimate and that its adherents are somehow united with the Church. And they are not.

And that final point is the chief scandal of this whole affair.

Conclusion: Outside the Church there is no Salvation

It conveys that there is salvation outside the Church, or that the Catholic Church is not the only true Church, or that heretics and schismatics are somehow a part of the Church.

That’s precisely what is conveyed by what we’ve just seen, and in calling Mullally “Her Grace” and so on.

It’s what’s conveyed when Leo says, in his address to Mullally, that he is “grateful for the ministry of the Anglican Centre in Rome.”

It’s conveyed when he says that Catholics and heretics can “proclaim Christ in the world together,” as he said in the same address.

And it’s what’s conveyed when he says, “I pray that the same Holy Spirit will remain with you always, making you fruitful in the service to which you have been called.” But Mullally has not been called to any service as a fake-bishop in a fake heretical sect.

As the Council of Florence dogmatically and infallibly defined:

All those who are outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans but also Jews or heretics and schismatics, cannot share in eternal life and will go into the everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels, unless they are joined to the catholic church before the end of their lives.

And:

[T]hat nobody can be saved, no matter how much he has given away in alms and even if he has shed his blood in the name of Christ, unless he has persevered in the bosom and the unity of the Catholic Church.

This is what Leo’s “Synodal Church” denies. The aim of the “Synodal Church” is to be a one-world church of dogma-less humanitarianism, in which Anglicans and Orthodox can all be a part – as the 2024 document The Bishop of Rome clearly set out.

One last thing. Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Mortalium Animos on the “ecumenical movement”, said that the idea that all religions are “more or less good and praiseworthy” are “altogether abandoning the divinely revealed religion.”

And that is just another way of saying apostasy.

May God have mercy on us.