After doing much to discredit in Absolutely Null and Utterly Void the historical build-up to Apostolicae Curae, Fr Hughes has now tackled the theological questions involved in Anglican Orders. In doing so he pursues his attack on Dr Francis Clark’s two books. This does not make entirely happy theological reading. One is left with the impression that both authors were first quite convinced a priori of the truth of their thesis, and then set out to prove it.

The basic argument of Clark’s Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Reformation was surely not, as Hughes writes (p. 41), ‘that it was not abuses or errors that caused the Reformers to reject eucharistic sacrifice, but their own new conception of grace, justification . . .’; rather was the basic argument that the Reformers did not merely reject current late medieval superstitions about the Mass, but the Catholic doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice itself. In so far as Clark has maintained that a perfectly clear and orthodox doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice was currently taught (and as clearly rejected by the Reformers), and that the prevailing superstitions have been greatly exaggerated, Hughes makes many inroads on his position: Biel’s theology was extremely unsound, even if orthodox by the skin of its teeth; how threadbare Catholic thought was on the point came out in post Reformation apologetic, when it was clear from their twisting and turning that Catholic theologians, though insistent that the Eucharist is a sacrifice, were quite unable to give either a coherent or an acceptable account of why or how it is (and remained so till yesterday or even today); what theological thought there was, lay buried under a mass of devotional and allegorical comment on rubrics; the elevation was wrongly thought of as the moment of offering, Cajetan’s lone voice, that the whole of the Mass was a sacrifice in a sacramental sort of way, going unheeded; above all, theological thought does not exist in isolation, and in this period was embedded in a shocking system of buying the effects of Calvary piecemeal for personal use.