The Old Catholic Churches — Utrecht to the Union

There had been a small church at Utrecht out of communion with Rome since an eighteenth-century quarrel over Jansenism left it electing its own archbishops. It stayed a Dutch curiosity until 1870, when the First Vatican Council defined papal infallibility and a body of German, Swiss and Austrian Catholics — professors, priests and laypeople, with the church historian Ignaz von Dollinger at their head — refused to accept it. Excommunicated, they needed bishops, and Utrecht had them: Joseph Hubert Reinkens was consecrated for the German Old Catholics in 1873 by a bishop of that line. In 1889 five bishops signed the Declaration of Utrecht, binding these churches into a union that professed the faith of the undivided church of the first thousand years and rejected the papal claims of 1870. And then went on to drop compulsory celibacy for clergy and to put the liturgy into the language of the people.