The Ancient Liberty of Utrecht: Who We Are and Where We Come From
Not a New Church. An Old One.
The Old Catholic Churches International is not a product of modern religious dissatisfaction. It is not a protest movement, a reform experiment, or a church founded in reaction to something else. It is the continuation of a Christian community whose institutional history stretches back to the seventh century and whose claim to independence from external ecclesiastical control was not invented by theologians but confirmed by popes and ecumenical councils.
When people ask why the Old Catholic Church separated from Rome, the honest answer is it did not. Rome departed, gradually and incrementally, from the ancient order of the Church. The Church of Utrecht held its ground.
The Foundation: Utrecht, 695 AD
The story begins in the year 695, when Pope Sergius I consecrated the missionary Willibrord as the first Bishop of the Frisians at the Church of Saint Cecilia in Rome. From that founding moment, the Diocese of Utrecht took its character not from Roman administration alone but from the intertwining of episcopal mission with the framework of the Carolingian and later the Saxon empire. Through successive grants of immunity and privilege from German kings and emperors, the Bishops of Utrecht exercised a degree of institutional independence that distinguished them from the outset as something more than creatures of Roman appointment.
This is not the origin of a diocese that was ever wholly subject to papal direction. From the beginning, Utrecht stood in its own right.
The Concordat of Worms, 1122
In 1122, the long conflict between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire over the appointment of bishops was resolved by the Concordat of Worms. The Emperor Henry V declared that in all the churches of his kingdom and empire there may be canonical election and free consecration. The right of church chapters to elect their own bishops was established in law.
The Church of Utrecht did not merely receive this right in common with other sees. It possessed and exercised it in a form more complete than any comparable diocese in the empire. While most chapters across the empire gradually lost their independent electoral powers as Roman centralization advanced through the thirteenth century and beyond, Utrecht uniquely retained a multi-chapter electoral structure: the Cathedral Chapter of Saint Martin’s and the chapters of the Old Munster Church, Saint Peter’s, Saint John’s, and Saint Mary’s all held the vote. This was not an arrangement granted by Rome. It was an ancient local tradition that the Concordat of 1122 confirmed and that Rome was thereafter bound to respect.
This is why the Old Catholic Church places 1122 as the foundational moment of its institutional independence: not because something new was created then, but because rights that had always belonged to Utrecht were formally recognized in the highest available legal framework of the age.
Papal Acknowledgment, 1145
In 1122 Rome acknowledged Utrecht’s rights in law. In 1145 Rome acknowledged them by name. Pope Eugene III, at the petition of Emperor Conrad III and the Bishop of Utrecht, issued a bull formally recognizing the right of the Cathedral Chapter to elect its own successors to the see in times of vacancy, without the requirement of papal approval.
The distinction matters: the bull acknowledged pre-existing rights. It did not create them. When Rome, in later centuries, sought to impose its own appointments upon the see of Utrecht, the chapter did not claim rights that had been granted to it by a generous pope. It defended rights that had been recognized as already belonging to it, rights that reflected the universal practice of the early Church before the progressive centralization of the medieval papacy had altered the ancient order of ecclesiastical governance.
Confirmed by an Ecumenical Council, 1215
The privileges of the Church of Utrecht were not left to rest upon a single papal document. In November 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council, convoked by Pope Innocent III and attended by more than four hundred bishops and eight hundred abbots and priors, formally confirmed the electoral privileges of Utrecht among its canonical provisions governing episcopal election. The multi-chapter electoral structure of Utrecht received universal conciliar confirmation. There is no higher canonical authority in the life of the Church than a general council.
The Old Catholic Church does not rest its claim to institutional independence on the events of 1724 nor on the controversies of 1870. It rests that claim on rights that were recognized, confirmed, and entrenched at the highest levels of ecclesiastical authority before the end of the thirteenth century.
Tested and Vindicated: The Crisis of 1423
History provides a proof of this claim that is as instructive as it is often overlooked. Nearly three hundred years before the events most commonly associated with the Old Catholic Church’s formation, the Church of Utrecht was compelled to defend its ancient rights against direct papal interference, and it prevailed.
When Prince-Bishop Frederick of Blankenheim died in 1423, the collegiate chapters of Utrecht duly elected Rudolph of Diepholz as his successor. Pope Martin V refused to acknowledge the election and imposed first Rabanus of Speyer, then Zweder of Culenberg, upon the see. The chapters rejected both. Rome imposed ecclesiastical censures. The clergy and people of Utrecht endured them and refused to yield. The impasse continued for nearly a decade. In the end it was Rome that conceded. Pope Eugenius IV recognized Rudolph of Diepholz as the lawful bishop.
The ancient rights of the Church of Utrecht had been tested under severe pressure and had held. When, two and a half centuries later, the same rights were again invoked in the face of the same Roman overreach, the chapter of 1724 stood upon ground that their predecessors of 1423 had already proven firm.
The Crisis of 1702 and the Consecration of 1724
In 1702, Archbishop Petrus Codde was suspended by Pope Clement XI on charges of Jansenist sympathy. Those charges had already been examined by a formal congregation of cardinals under Innocent XII and unanimously rejected. The theological pretext was thin. The true object was the imposition of Roman control over a see that had governed itself for centuries.
The chapter of Utrecht refused the papal-imposed replacement. They did not do so in a spirit of defiance for its own sake. They did so because the surrender of their ancient and repeatedly confirmed rights would have been not merely a practical concession but a capitulation to a claim of universal jurisdiction that had no foundation in the constitutional settlement under which their church had always lived. They had the precedent of 1432. They had the bull of 1145. They had the Fourth Lateran Council. They stood upon all of it.
In 1724, the chapter elected Cornelius Steenoven as Archbishop of Utrecht. He was consecrated by Bishop Dominique Marie Varlet. Both were subsequently excommunicated by Rome. Under the constitutional law as the Church of Utrecht had understood it since 1122, 1145, and 1215, the consecration was entirely lawful. The apostolic succession of the Old Catholic communion proceeds from that act and from the unbroken episcopal line that stretches back through it to Willibrord and to the undivided Church.
The Expansion After 1870
The First Vatican Council, in July 1870, defined the doctrine of papal infallibility. For a significant number of faithful Catholics in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, this was a step beyond what the tradition of the ancient and undivided Church could support. The German theologian Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger gave voice to what many felt when he refused to accept the definition as consonant with the faith once delivered to the saints. He was excommunicated in 1871. By that year, nearly fourteen hundred Germans had formally rejected the infallibility decree as an innovation contrary to the ancient faith, and they sought episcopal consecration from the Church of Utrecht.
In receiving it, they were joined into the apostolic succession that had been preserved in Utrecht in unbroken continuity since the seventh century. The Old Catholic movement that emerged from 1870 was not a new creation. It was a new branch upon an ancient tree whose roots reach to Willibrord, and through Willibrord to the apostolic mission of the undivided Church.
What We Believe
The Old Catholic Churches International stands today as the continuation and worldwide expression of this tradition. We hold the faith of the ancient and undivided Church: the seven sacraments, the threefold order of bishop, priest, and deacon in apostolic succession, the authority of the seven Ecumenical Councils, the patristic consensus as the normative guide for doctrine, and the principle that Scripture is received and interpreted within the living Tradition of the Church.
We are neither Roman Catholic nor Protestant. We did not depart from the ancient faith, and we have not invented a new one. We hold what the Church held before the divisions of the eleventh century, the sixteenth century, and the nineteenth century successively fragmented the Western Christian world.
When you receive the sacraments of this communion, you receive them through an unbroken chain of apostolic succession that the historical record confirms and that no act of excommunication has the power to sever. The faith we profess is the faith of the councils, the faith of the Fathers, the faith once delivered to the saints.
A Summary of the Historical Record
| Year | Event | Significance |
|---|---|---|
| 695 | Willibrord consecrated first Bishop of the Frisians | Diocese founded with imperial immunities; institutional independence from origin |
| 1122 | Concordat of Worms | Utrecht uniquely retains multi-chapter electoral rights beyond all comparable sees |
| 1145 | Pope Eugene III acknowledges Utrecht’s free election privilege | Papal recognition of pre-existing rights, not a grant |
| 1215 | Fourth Lateran Council confirms Utrecht’s electoral privileges | A universal council ratifies Utrecht’s independence at the highest canonical level |
| 1423-1432 | Utrecht defies Pope Martin V’s imposed bishop; Rome concedes | Constitutional independence tested, defended, and vindicated |
| 1517 | Pope Leo X’s Debitum Pastoralis | Rome itself legally confirms Utrecht cannot be subject to outside canonical tribunal |
| 1702 | Archbishop Codde suspended | Chapter invokes ancient rights and refuses Rome-imposed replacement |
| 1724 | Cornelius Steenoven consecrated Archbishop | Apostolic succession preserved; constitutional rights exercised |
| 1870 | First Vatican Council defines papal infallibility | Theological rupture triggers international expansion of Old Catholic communion |
| 1871 | Döllinger excommunicated; Old Catholic movement formally organized | International Old Catholics receive episcopal succession through Utrecht’s apostolic line |
Read the Full Encyclical
The historical claims summarized on this page are drawn from the pastoral encyclical De Antiqua Libertate Ultraiectensis (On the Ancient Liberty of Utrecht), issued by Bishop Greer Godsey on the Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter, 2026.
The encyclical sets forth the full historical and canonical argument for the institutional independence of the Church of Utrecht, from its founding in 695 through the Concordat of Worms, the bull of Eugene III, the Fourth Lateran Council, the crisis of 1423, and the consecration of 1724. It concludes with a summary historical table and an exhortation to the clergy and faithful of this communion.
It is commended to all who wish to understand not merely what the Old Catholic Church believes but why it exists, what ground it stands on, and what it has always refused to surrender.
Read the full text: De Antiqua Libertate Ultraiectensis
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