Apostolicae curae

Apostolicae curae is the title of a papal bull, issued in 1896 by Pope Leo XIII, declaring all Anglican ordinations to be "absolutely null and utterly void". The Archbishops of Canterbury and York of the Church of England responded to the papal charges with the encyclical Saepius officio in 1897.

The principal objection to validity of Anglican ordinations, according to Pope Leo XIII, was the alleged deficiency of intention and of form of the Anglican ordination rites. Leo XIII declared that the rites expressed an intention to create a priesthood different from the sacrificing priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church and to reduce ordination to a mere ecclesiastical institution, an appointment or blessing, instead of a sacramental conferral of actual grace by the action itself.

The view of many Anglican bishops and apologists was that the required references to the sacrificial priesthood never existed in many ancient Latin Rite ordination liturgies, or in certain Eastern-Rite ordination liturgies that the Roman Catholic Church considered to be valid. In the Roman Catholic view, the differences between these rites are a matter of tradition or custom, and indicate no intention to exclude a sacrificing priesthood.

Prior to Apostolicae curae, decisions had already been given by Rome that Anglican orders were invalid. The practices of the Roman Catholic Church had supposed their invalidity. Whenever former Anglican priests desired to be priests in the Roman Catholic Church they were unconditionally ordained. As the Oxford Movement progressed, several members of the clergy and laity of the Church of England argued that the Roman Catholic Church practice of unconditionally ordaining clerical converts from Anglicanism arose out of a lack of inquiry into the validity of Anglican orders and from mistaken assumptions which, in the light of certain historical investigations, could no longer be asserted.

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