Old Roman Catholic Church

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The Old Roman Catholic Church was founded by Arnold Harris Matthew, Old Catholic Church bishop for England, on 29 December 1910.

Bishop Matthew issued a declaration of independence of his followers from what he called "Continental Old Catholics" (Utrecht Union) and list "nine points of difference" between the two groups. [1]

In 1914, Bishop Mathew appointed Bishop Rudolph Francis Edward Hamilton de Lorraine-Brabant, Prince de Landas Berges, to establish the ministry of the Old Roman Catholic Church in the United States. Shortly thereafter, Father Carmel Henry Carfora, an Italian Franciscan friar who had left the Roman Catholic Church, was elected to succeed Bishop de Landes Berghes as Archbishop of the Old Roman Catholic Diocese of America. Following Archbishop Carfora's death in 1958, the North American Old Roman Catholic Church evolved into five autonomous, but cooperating ecclesial bodies, one of which is the Old Roman Catholic Church in North America. [2]

These groups, and others like them, are among those that are called independent Catholic denominations, which are not neither in communion with the Holy See of Rome nor with the Old Catholic Utrecht Union.

The term "Old Roman Catholic Church" is sometimes treated as synonymous with "Old Catholic Church". The Old Roman Catholic Church rejects the dogmas of papal infallibility, primacy of the Roman Pontiff and some deny the Immaculate Conception. All Old Roman Catholic Churches ordain married men to the priesthood. They do not require clerical celibacy. While the American branch is more conservative on these issues, the European Old Roman Catholic jurisdictions are open to ordination of homosexuals and women.

The Liberal Catholic Church evolved from the Old Roman Catholic Church and split from it over the question of Theosophy.