By +Brian Ernest Brown, CWC
Before Free Catholicism Had a Name: Celtic Christianity, Saint Willibrord, and Utrecht
I offer the following as a historical and theological hypothesis rather than as a claim that can be proven in every detail: the catholic churches of the Celtic lands prior to the Synod of Whitby may be understood as an early precursor of what would much later be called Free Catholicism. Their combination of sacramental faith, local freedom, monastic leadership, missionary adaptability, and communion without rigid uniformity bears a striking resemblance to the Free Catholic vision. Through Saint Willibrord, who was formed within both the Northumbrian and Irish Christian traditions, that ecclesial spirit may also have influenced the developing character of the See of Utrecht. If so, the later emergence of the Old Catholic Church of Utrecht was not wholly disconnected from the Celtic Christian inheritance, but represented, at least in part, the continuation of an older pattern of being fully catholic while preserving the legitimate freedom of the local Church.
Any comparison between Free Catholicism and Celtic Christianity must begin with a caution. There was no single, organized “Celtic Church” standing apart from the Catholic Church of Western Europe. The churches of Ireland, Iona, Wales, Scotland, and northern England shared certain customs, but they were not one jurisdiction and did not consider themselves a separate denomination. They were catholic churches whose local traditions developed at some distance from Rome and from one another.
The Synod of Whitby in 664 did not unite a schismatic Celtic Church with the Roman Church. It was primarily a Northumbrian gathering called to settle differences over the calculation of Easter and the form of the monastic tonsure. The communities shaped by Iona followed practices inherited from Irish monastic tradition, while others followed customs then associated with Rome. They shared the same faith, Scriptures, sacraments, and episcopal ministry even while disagreeing over discipline and custom. Whitby brought Northumbria into greater conformity with Roman practice, but it did not mark the conversion of one religion into another.
This distinction is important. Christianity in the Celtic lands was catholic, but it was not yet governed by the kind of highly centralized and uniform ecclesiastical structure that would characterize the later Western Church. In Ireland and in communities influenced by Iona, monasteries often became the centers of worship, learning, pastoral care, mission, and local government. Abbots could exercise considerable authority, sometimes even over bishops within a particular monastic family, although bishops remained essential to the sacramental life of the Church. This arrangement was not universal throughout every Celtic region, but it allowed the Church to grow through communities, relationships, and missionary networks rather than through a single administrative system imposed from afar.
Here we may recognize an early spiritual resemblance to what would much later be called Free Catholicism. These Christians did not reject catholicity. They understood themselves as belonging to the one Church of Christ. Yet their catholicity allowed considerable freedom in local worship, governance, discipline, missionary practice, and cultural expression. Their unity rested more deeply in Christ, the sacraments, the apostolic faith, and communion with other Christians than in perfect institutional uniformity.
It would be historically inaccurate to call the pre-Whitby churches “Free Catholic” in the modern sense. Nevertheless, we might see in them one of the earliest inklings of the Free Catholic vision: a Church fully catholic in faith and sacrament, yet locally rooted, communally ordered, culturally responsive, and free to embody the Gospel according to the needs of its own people. It was catholicity without the assumption that catholicity required every Christian community to look, pray, or organize itself in precisely the same way.
Saint Willibrord provides an especially important bridge between this early Celtic Christian world and the later Church of Utrecht. Born in Northumbria around 658, only a few years before the Synod of Whitby, he was first educated at Ripon under Saint Wilfrid, the leading advocate of Roman practice at Whitby. At about twenty years of age, however, Willibrord went to Ireland and spent twelve years at the monastery of Rath Melsigi, where he was formed in the prayer, scholarship, missionary discipline, and communal life of the Irish monastic tradition.
When Willibrord departed for Frisia with eleven companions around 690, he carried both inheritances with him. He possessed the catholic and episcopal consciousness represented by Rome, but his method was deeply monastic and missionary. He established communities, trained fellow workers, founded churches and monasteries, and allowed the life of prayer to become the foundation of evangelism. He sought the blessing of the pope and was consecrated for his mission, yet the actual work was undertaken by a small community of missionary monks formed in the Irish tradition. Scholarship concerning Willibrord’s liturgy also indicates that Irish practices were familiar to him and influenced the worship he carried into his continental mission.
Willibrord therefore should not be portrayed as either “Celtic” or “Roman” in opposition to the other. He embodied a fruitful meeting of the two. His life demonstrates that loyalty to the wider Catholic Church could coexist with the freedom, mobility, simplicity, and local character of Celtic monastic mission. He brought this blended inheritance to Utrecht, where he established his episcopal center, and to Echternach, where he founded a monastery that became an important center of worship, learning, and missionary activity.
The later Old Catholic Church of Utrecht continued to honor Saint Willibrord as the first archbishop and great missionary founder of the Church in the Netherlands. We cannot prove that particular Celtic practices were preserved unchanged through every century between Willibrord and the emergence of Old Catholicism. History is rarely that neat. Yet it is significant that the See from which the Old Catholic succession would later emerge was founded by a bishop formed within both Roman and Irish monastic Christianity.
There is also a striking resemblance between Willibrord’s blended inheritance and the ecclesiology later articulated by the Old Catholic Churches of the Union of Utrecht. The Union describes itself as a communion of independent local churches. Its bishops exercise ministry within an episcopal and synodical structure, and its international bishops’ conference ordinarily does not intervene in the internal jurisdiction of its member churches. Old Catholic theology looks to the ancient Church as a communion in which local churches possess genuine integrity while remaining united in the common faith and sacramental life.
This resemblance should be described as a spiritual and ecclesiological continuity rather than an easily documented chain of identical customs. Willibrord did not establish modern Old Catholicism, and the Celtic Christians did not consciously found Free Catholicism. Yet both reveal an ancient possibility that later centralized models sometimes obscured: the Church can be catholic without being monolithic, episcopal without being autocratic, ordered without being oppressive, and united without requiring absolute uniformity.
In that sense, the Christianity of the Celtic lands may represent the first faint glimmer of the Free Catholic ideal. Saint Willibrord carried that spirit, already tempered by communion with Rome, into Utrecht. Centuries later, the Old Catholic Church of Utrecht would recover an understanding of the Church as a communion of local churches, faithful to the ancient catholic inheritance while resisting the concentration of universal authority in one earthly office.
Free Catholicism did not begin at Whitby, Iona, or Utrecht. Nevertheless, it recognizes something of itself in all three. It recognizes the conviction that Christ alone is the true Head of the Church, that sacramental communion is greater than institutional conformity, and that the ancient faith can take root freely within different peoples, cultures, and communities. What later generations called Free Catholicism may therefore be understood not simply as an innovation, but as a renewed expression of a much older way of being catholic.
The Many Streams of Free Catholicism: From Lloyd Thomas to Christ Catholic Church
In my study, Free Catholicism is difficult to describe because it has never been a single denomination, institution, or unbroken organization. It is better understood as a recurring movement within Christianity, one that seeks to remain catholic in worship, sacrament, historic continuity, and spiritual depth while remaining free from coercive authority, compulsory uniformity, and the claim that any earthly leader or institution possesses absolute power over the conscience. Its history is not a single straight line. It is a collection of streams that arose in different places, sometimes independently, and later discovered a strong family resemblance.
Christ Catholic Church belongs to this broad Free Catholic tradition. This does not mean that it can claim direct institutional descent from every group that has used the name. Rather, several Free Catholic streams have converged within its history: the Free Christian and Unitarian vision of J. M. Lloyd Thomas, the Catholic revival within Congregationalism, the Old Catholic and independent sacramental inheritance received by Bishop Karl Prüter, the Free Catholic movement he encountered during his European pilgrimage, and the liberationist Catholic currents that emerged in South America.
One of the earliest clear expressions of the Free Catholic vision appeared in 1907 with the publication of A Free Catholic Church by the Reverend Joseph Morgan Lloyd Thomas. The book was written by Lloyd Thomas himself, rather than collectively by a Unitarian organization, but it was published in Boston by the American Unitarian Association. That fact is significant. The Association was part of the liberal Christian world, but Lloyd Thomas was attempting to reach beyond a narrowly denominational Unitarian identity. He imagined a church that could be catholic without being authoritarian, free without becoming spiritually rootless, and broad without losing its devotion to Christ and the historic Christian inheritance.
Lloyd Thomas came from the Free Christian side of the British Unitarian world. Free Christians resisted being confined by a single theological label, even the label “Unitarian.” They understood catholicity as a willingness to gather Christians of differing theological opinions into one worshipping community. For them, freedom did not mean the abandonment of tradition. It meant the liberty to receive the riches of the whole Christian tradition without submitting the conscience to an imposed creed or centralized authority.
That vision took organizational form in 1914 when Lloyd Thomas, John Stone Burgess, and several other Free Christian ministers gathered at Flowery Field Church in Hyde, near Manchester, and founded the Society of Free Catholics. The Society pledged loyalty to Jesus Christ, encouraged ordered worship and the administration of the sacraments, and sought to unite Christians through the continuity of the historic Church. Its members included Free Christians, Unitarians, Congregationalists, Anglicans, Methodists, Church of Scotland clergy, and even a few Roman Catholics.
The Society was therefore neither simply Unitarian nor conventionally Roman Catholic. It occupied a middle way. It valued the altar, sacramental worship, liturgical order, Christian tradition, and disciplined community, but it believed that authority should be accepted freely rather than imposed by threat or exclusion. It also advocated social equality across barriers of class, sex, nationality, and race. Women made up much of its membership, and the Society included early women ministers among its supporters.
Internal disagreements eventually weakened the Society. Lloyd Thomas emphasized theological freedom and a creedless church, while the Congregationalist leader William Edwin Orchard moved steadily toward a more dogmatic and Roman form of Catholicism. Orchard eventually entered the Roman Catholic Church, while the Society ceased functioning in 1928. Yet the vision did not disappear. Its influence remained in liturgical renewal, ecumenism, Free Christian worship, and the continuing hope that catholicity and freedom did not have to be enemies.
A related movement arose within American Congregationalism. Bishop Karl Prüter’s own account described early Congregationalism as strongly Christ-centered, with Christian community gathered under the headship of Christ rather than under a distant hierarchy. During the twentieth century, a small number of Congregational ministers and parishes began recovering Catholic forms of worship. They celebrated weekly Communion, adopted richer liturgies, affirmed the Real Presence, and, in some cases, sought sacramental ordination from Old Catholic bishops.
Prüter was part of this liturgical and sacramental revival. Before he became known as Bishop Karl, he served as the Reverend Hugo Rehling Prüter, a Congregational minister. He was pastor of North Berwyn Congregational Church in Illinois and worked to preserve a Catholic inheritance within Congregational life. For Prüter, Congregational freedom did not mean that each church could invent Christianity for itself. It meant that the local congregation was free to obey Christ, celebrate the sacraments, and receive the historic faith without domination by either a pope or a denominational bureaucracy.
The proposed union of the Congregational Christian Churches with the Evangelical and Reformed Church became a turning point. The United Church of Christ was formed in 1957, bringing together traditions that valued both Christian unity and local freedom. Some Congregationalists nevertheless feared that the merger would weaken historic congregational autonomy. Approximately 100,000 members eventually entered continuing bodies such as the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches and the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference.
Prüter initially attempted to preserve the Catholic revival through continuing Congregational organizations, including the National Association and the Midwest Congregational Christian Fellowship. He also worked with the Pilgrim Missionary Society and attempted to establish a Catholic-minded Congregational mission in Itasca, Illinois. He eventually concluded that these organizations were interested in preserving Congregational identity but not necessarily its recovered Catholic and sacramental expression. In 1965 he resigned his parish and traveled to Europe in search of clarity.
Christ Catholic Church’s received history records that Prüter visited several Old Catholic churches and then sought spiritual direction in a small chapel at Traunwalchen in Upper Bavaria. There he became convinced that he should return to the United States and establish the kind of Free Catholic parish for which he had been searching. The experience was decisive, but the surviving account does not clearly identify the chapel or the precise jurisdiction of the Free Catholic clergy he encountered.
This is where an intriguing historical possibility emerges. A Free Catholic Church with South American roots was already present in Germany. The German Freikatholische Kirche developed from the Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church and was brought to Germany by Johannes Peter Meyer-Méndez in 1949. Its original German center was in Cologne, and its headquarters later moved to Munich in Bavaria in 1976.
Because Prüter’s Bavarian pilgrimage occurred in 1965, more than a decade before the German church moved its headquarters to Munich, we cannot simply assume that the group he encountered was the same institution. The geographical and theological resemblance is suggestive, but it is not proof. No document presently available establishes a direct institutional connection between Prüter’s experience at Traunwalchen and the German Free Catholic Church’s Brazilian lineage. That connection should therefore be preserved as a thoughtful historical hypothesis rather than stated as settled fact.
The South American story begins most clearly with Bishop Carlos Duarte Costa, who founded the Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church in 1945 after separating from the Roman Catholic Church. The Brazilian church retained Catholic sacraments and episcopal order while rejecting papal jurisdiction, compulsory clerical celibacy, and several elements of Roman discipline. It developed a distinctly national and socially conscious identity, expressed in its motto, “God, Land and Freedom.”
It would be historically inaccurate to call the Brazilian church’s founding an expression of liberation theology in the later technical sense. The term and movement emerged primarily during the 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless, the Brazilian church created an independent Catholic structure in which married clergy, national self-determination, social reform, and freedom from Roman control could be joined to sacramental Christianity. These concerns prepared fertile ground for later liberationist expressions within the wider independent Catholic world.
Liberation theology emerged in Latin America from the conviction that the Gospel must be proclaimed not only as personal salvation but also as liberation from poverty, oppression, political violence, and unjust social structures. Gustavo Gutiérrez gave the movement one of its most influential formulations in his 1971 book A Theology of Liberation, emphasizing the dignity of the poor and the Church’s obligation to stand with them.
In Argentina, this Christian liberationist movement was embodied by the Movimiento de Sacerdotes para el Tercer Mundo, the Movement of Priests for the Third World. Its clergy worked among laborers, impoverished communities, and residents of the villas miserias. The movement became a major expression of liberationist Christianity, calling the Church toward social engagement and, at times, revolutionary transformation.
One priest associated with this world was Rómulo Antonio Braschi. Braschi had connections with the worker-priest movement and the Movement of Priests for the Third World. Following repression and disillusionment with the Roman hierarchy during Argentina’s years of dictatorship, he established an independent Catholic community in Buenos Aires. He was later consecrated to the episcopacy by Hilarios Ungerer of the German Free Catholic Church.
Braschi’s story offers one of the clearest traceable points at which South American liberationist spirituality entered the broader network of Free Catholic and independent sacramental churches. This does not mean that every Free Catholic church adopted liberation theology, nor that a single South American body controlled an international movement. It means that the Free Catholic world provided a sacramental home in which the worker-priest tradition, concern for the poor, resistance to dictatorship, and Catholic independence could meet.
Prüter returned from Europe convinced that the parish he sought did not yet exist and would have to be built. After settling in Boston, he approached Archbishop Peter A. Zurawetsky of Christ Catholic Church of the Americas and Europe. Zurawetsky received him into Catholic orders, gave him the religious name Karl, and authorized him to establish a parish in Boston’s Back Bay. Prüter was consecrated bishop in 1967, and his congregations became Christ Catholic Church, Diocese of Boston.
Prüter did not create Christ Catholic Church out of nothing. He received an existing jurisdictional inheritance that Christ Catholic Church traces from Bishop Joseph Zielonka’s Polish Old Catholic Church, through Bishop Peter Zurawetsky’s Christ Catholic Church of the Americas and Europe. What Prüter supplied was a new synthesis. He joined Old Catholic orders and sacramental continuity to Congregational freedom, Free Catholic theology, mystical spirituality, worker clergy, local responsibility, and an uncompromising conviction that Jesus Christ alone is the infallible Head of the Church.
This is why Christ Catholic Church cannot be adequately understood as simply another small Old Catholic jurisdiction. Its Old Catholic inheritance is real, but it exists within a wider Free Catholic identity. Catholicity provides sacrament, tradition, apostolic order, and continuity. Freedom protects conscience, local responsibility, theological exploration, and resistance to authoritarianism. The two belong together.
My own journey into Free Catholicism developed independently before Bishop Prüter entrusted Christ Catholic Church to my care. I had studied in depth, Lloyd Thomas and the Society of Free Catholics and had been drawn to the idea of a Church that was genuinely catholic and genuinely free. When Bishop Rodney Rickard consecrated me in 2006 and placed a jurisdiction under my charge, I chose the name Ecumenical Free Catholic Communion. I was also influenced by what I understood of South American Free Catholicism and its association with liberation theology, solidarity with the poor, and ministry among those excluded by established churches.
That history matters because my succession to Bishop Prüter in 2007 was not merely the passing of an institution from one bishop to another. It was the convergence of two related Free Catholic callings. Prüter brought the historic jurisdiction, the Congregational Catholic revival, Saint Willibrord Press, the Prince of Peace ministry, and a lifetime of study in Old Catholicism. I brought a Free Catholic vocation formed independently through my early formation within the Celtic Catholic Church and deepened by the study of Celtic Christianity, new monasticism, worker ministry, Lloyd Thomas, the Society of Free Catholics, and liberation theology. In one another, we recognized a shared understanding of the Church.
Free Catholicism, at its best, is not Catholicism with less commitment. It is not freedom from faith, tradition, sacrament, or accountability. It is freedom for faithful Christian community. It is the freedom to gather around Christ without pretending that any human institution can contain the fullness of God. It is the freedom to celebrate the sacraments without using them as weapons of exclusion. It is the freedom to preserve ancient faith while speaking honestly to the needs of the present age.
Within Christ Catholic Church, that inheritance continues as a commitment to Jesus Christ as the sole Head of the Church, the celebration of the seven sacraments, the historic creeds and councils, congregational participation, accountable episcopal oversight, the Cure of Souls, peace, social justice, and welcome at Christ’s table. We have come to describe this as embracing a generous orthodoxy. It is generous because Christ’s mercy is generous. It is orthodox because Christ remains the center.
The history of Free Catholicism is therefore not the story of one founder or one institution. It is the story of an ancient fire carried from hearth to hearth, rekindled in new places and given fresh expression in every age.. Its first kindling may be glimpsed in the evolution of the Celtic Christianity, which developed afar from the Church of the Empire, with its sacramental faith, monastic character, local freedom, and unity without rigid uniformity. Saint Willibrord carried something of that inheritance into his missionary work at Utrecht, where it continued to evolve within the ecclesial tradition that would centuries later give rise to the Old Catholic Church. Lloyd Thomas carried the fire into the Free Christian world. The Society of Free Catholics carried it into ecumenical and liturgical renewal. Congregational Free Catholics carried it into independent local churches. Prüter carried it from Congregationalism, through Bavaria, into Christ Catholic Church. South American clergy carried it among workers, the poor, and those resisting oppression. Each expression was different, and not every connection can be demonstrated institutionally, but the underlying yearning is unmistakable.
It is the yearning for a Church that is ancient but alive, ordered but free, sacramental but welcoming, mystical but engaged with the suffering of the world. It is a Church in which Christ is not merely spoken about but encountered, at the altar, among the poor, within the community, and in the quiet freedom of the human conscience. That is the Free Catholic inheritance Christ Catholic Church has received, and it is the inheritance we are called to carry faithfully into the future.