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Introduction
Henry St John, O.P.
In Bishops at Large Mr Peter Anson has carried out a detailed and thorough exploration of some little-known by-paths in nineteenth and twentieth century ecclesiastical life. He is not an absolute pioneer in this work; others have preceded him and given him assistance, to whom he makes due acknowledgment of debt and tribute of gratitude in his Foreword. The work he has himself put into his explorations, however, is tremendous, and its result is the setting out of the story he has to tell with a completeness never before achieved.
The story is one of the strangest and most fantastic religious movements to be found in the whole range of what may be described, in general terms, as the erratic 'goings on' of the ecclesiastical underworld. The use of the word underworld in this context must be taken as connoting ecclesiastical eccentricity rather than roguery or crime, though neither of the latter is wholly absent from its records. The story is closely though not exclusively connected with movements of a 'Catholic' type mainly deriving from dissatisfied and unstable elements in Catholicism or Anglo-Catholicism. They stand as a rule for 'Catholicism' without the Pope, but their preoccupation, amounting to obsession, is the recovery of Christian unity by the widespread, and, in effect, indiscriminate propagation of 'valid' episcopacy and priesthood.
In almost every case the priesthood of these multiple movements have been at pains to obtain episcopal consecration, from sources often remote and seldom wholly unquestionable, which they hoped would be indisputable. Having obtained episcopal character they proceeded to found a 'Church' based upon it, and their own particular version of what true Catholic orthodoxy is. In this way, so the visionary hope takes shape in the minds of these dreamers, their Church will become the centre and foundation upon which the unity of Christ's Church could be re-built.
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