Question:
Answer:
We infer that you mean after Newman was ordained a Catholic priest. We found nothing to support such an assertion, which would contradict Newman’s submitting to ordination as a Catholic priest. If he already had validly received the Sacrament of Holy Orders as an Anglican priest to offer the Sacrifice of the Mass and celebrate the Sacrament of Confession, why would Newman not have vigorously protested that he had no need of priestly ordination, as an Eastern Orthodox priest coming into full communion with the Catholic Church could have rightly done? But Newman didn’t.
In addition, operative at the time of Newman’s conversion to Catholicism was Pope Paul IV’s Bull Praeclara Charissimi, which he issued in 1555 and which ruled against the validity of Anglican priestly orders. In his 1896 encyclical Apostolicae Curae, Pope Leo XII cites Paul VI’s bull in definitively reiterating that Anglican orders are invalid:
Wherefore, strictly adhering, in this matter, to the decrees of the pontiffs, our predecessors, and confirming them most fully, and, as it were, renewing them by our authority, of our own initiative and certain knowledge, we pronounce and declare that ordinations carried out according to the Anglican rite have been, and are, absolutely null and utterly void (no. 36, emphasis added).