Liturgy
The Old Catholic Church shares some of the liturgy with the Roman Catholic Church and similar to the Orthodox, Anglicans, and high church Protestants.
Christ-Catholic Swiss bishop Urs Küry dismissed the Roman Catholic dogma of transubstantiation as well as consubstantiation because these Scholastic interpretations presume to explain the divine mystery of communion using the metaphysical concept of "substance." Like the Orthodox and Methodist approaches to the Eucharist, the Old Catholic Christian ought to accept an unexplainable divine mystery as such, and should not cleave to or insist upon a particular theory of the sacrament.
Because of this approach, Old Catholics hold an open view to most issues, including the role of women in the Church, the role of married people within ordained ministry, the morality of same sex relationships, the use of one's conscience when deciding to use artificial contraception, and liturgical reforms such as open communion (because no human can presume to exclude any Christian from communion). Its liturgy has not significantly departed from the Tridentine Mass, as is shown in the English translation of the German Altarbook (missal).
In 1994 the German bishops decided to ordain women as priests and put this into practice on 27 May 1996; similar decisions and practices followed in Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands. The Utrecht Union allows those who are divorced to have a new religious marriage, and it has no particular teaching on abortion, leaving such decisions to the married couple.
An active contributor to The Declaration of the Catholic Congress, Munich, 1871 and all later assemblies for organization was Johann Friedrich von Schulte, the professor of dogma at Prague. Von Schulte summed up the results of the congress as follows:
- adherence to the ancient Catholic faith;
- maintenance of the rights of Catholics as such;
- rejection of the new dogmas,
- adherence to the constitutions of the ancient Church with repudiation of every dogma of faith not in harmony with the actual consciousness of the Church;
- reform of the Church with constitutional participation of the laity;
- preparation of the way for reunion of the Christian confessions;
- reform of the training and position of the clergy;
- adherence to the State against the attacks of Ultramontanism;
- rejection of the Society of Jesus;
- solemn assertion of the claims of Catholics as such to the real property of the Church and to the title to it.
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