Page:The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII.djvu/402



396 ANGLICAN ORDERS.

even in behalf of those who had received their consecra- tion "minus rite and not according to the accustomed form, of the Church," is to be especially noted. By this ex- pression those only could be meant who had been con- secrated according to the Edwardine rite, since besides it and the Catholic form there was then no other in England. This becomes even still clearer when we consider the legation which, on the advice of Cardinal Pole, the Sov- ereign Princes, Philip and Mary, sent to the Pope in Rome in the month of February, 1555. The royal ambassadors â€” three men, "most illustrious and endowed unth every virtue," of whom one was Thomas Thirlby, Bishop of Ely â€” were charged to inform the Pope more fully as to the religious condition of the country, and especially to beg that he would ratify and confirm what the Legate had been at pains to effect, and had succeeded in effecting, towards the reconciliation of the kingdom with the Church, For this purpose all the necessary written evidence and the pertinent parts of the new Ordinal were submitted to the Pope. The Legation having been splendidly re- ceived, and their evidence having been "diligently dis- cussed" by several of the Cardinals, "after mature deliber- ation" Paul IV. issued his Bull Pra;clara carissimi on June 20 of the same year. In this, whilst giving full force and approbation to what Pole had done, it is ordered in the matter of the Ordinations as follows: "Those who have been promoted to Ecclesiastical Orders . . . by any one but by a bishop validly and lawfully ordained are bound to receive those Orders again." But who those bishops not "validly and lawfully ordained" were had been made sufficiently clear by the foregoing documents and the faculties used in the said matter by the Legate: those, namely, who have been promoted to the Episcopate, as others to other Orders "not according to the accustomed form of the Church," or, as the Legate himself wrote to the Bishop of Norwich, "the form and intention of the Church " not having been observed. These were certainly those