The See of Caer-Glow is a jurisdiction of the Old Roman Catholic Church, maintaining the faith, liturgy, moral teaching, and sacramental life of the Catholic Church as it existed before the upheavals of the 1960s. We celebrate the Traditional Latin Mass. We hold without qualification to the doctrinal definitions of the Council of Trent, the First Vatican Council, and twenty centuries of consistent Catholic teaching. We baptize, confirm, ordain, marry, anoint, absolve, and offer the Holy Sacrifice exactly as Catholics have always done.

We are not a breakaway group nursing grievances. We are not a nostalgia project. We are not a protest movement.

We are Catholics who believe the Faith delivered to the Apostles cannot be revised, updated, or synodalized out of existence, and who have concluded that preserving it whole, in this moment of profound institutional confusion, is itself an act of fidelity to Christ.

We are not sedevacantists, though we respect those who have reached that conclusion in good conscience. We do not claim the Roman See is vacant.

We are not in formal communion with Rome, though we hold everything Rome has always taught before the current crisis. The rupture, from our perspective, is not between us and Catholic Tradition. It is between Catholic Tradition and much of what currently operates under that name.

We bear no animus toward Catholics who remain within the institutional structures, including those who attend the new Mass in good faith, or who serve in dioceses they did not choose. God judges the heart. We do not.

If you attended one of our Masses and felt drawn but uncertain, the question forming in your mind is probably not really about Canon Law. It’s something more fundamental:

If I receive a sacrament here, does it count?

That question deserves its own careful answer, and we’ve provided one on our page On Validity and Liceity. The short answer, the one even hostile chanceries will confirm if pressed, is this: our sacraments are valid. The apostolic succession through which our clergy was ordained and consecrated is real and unbroken. What Rome disputes is our canonical authorization — our liceity — not the sacramental reality itself.

This is not a small distinction. It is the distinction.

A priest validly ordained but serving without a diocesan assignment is illicitly functioning. His Mass is still the Mass. The question of authorization is a canonical question. The question of sacramental reality is a different question entirely. We address this fully for those who want the complete theological account.

In the 4th century, St. Athanasius stood against an institutional Church that had largely embraced Arianism — the heresy denying Christ’s divinity. Most bishops had accommodated the new teaching. The Pope wavered. Athanasius held firm, was exiled five times by Church authorities, and died having never compromised.

Was Athanasius the schismatic? Or was he the Church?

We exist because we believe that the question is not merely historical. When an institution introduces teachings and practices that contradict what it solemnly defined — on marriage, on worship, on the nature of other religions, on the blessing of what Scripture calls abomination — faithful Catholics are not obligated to follow the institution into error. They are obligated to hold the Faith. The See of Caer-Glow exists to hold the Faith.

To offer the sacraments. To form souls in authentic Catholic teaching. To be, for those who find their way to us, a place where the ancient Faith is not a museum exhibit but a living reality.

This community exists for several kinds of people, and you may recognize yourself in more than one.

Perhaps you are a Catholic who senses something has gone wrong but cannot quite name it. The parish feels different than it did. The preaching has grown vague where it was once clear, Marxist where it was once supernatural, accommodating where it was once honest. You have raised quiet concerns and been made to feel unwelcome in your own Church, too traditional, too rigid, not sufficiently pastoral. You are not imagining it, and you are not alone.

Perhaps you are a Catholic who has watched the institution you trusted move, document by document, appointment by appointment, toward positions that would have been unrecognizable to every pope before living memory. You haven’t left the Faith. You feel the Faith is leaving you. We understand that experience, because it is our own.

Perhaps you come from a Protestant tradition and have been following a thread, through Scripture, through history, through writers like Chesterton or Belloc or Newman, that keeps leading you somewhere older than your denomination, older than the Reformation, older than the medieval disputes that produced it. What you are finding is the Faith that roughly ninety percent of Christians held for more than three quarters of Christian history. That Faith has a home.

Perhaps you are unchurched entirely, spiritually serious but repelled by what passes for religion in most of what you’ve encountered. The therapeutic, the political, the performative. You sense there must be something that makes genuine and totalizing claims about reality and actually means them, something that has stood the test of centuries rather than chasing the spirit of the age. You are right that such a thing exists.

To all of you: you are welcome here. Bring your questions, your doubts, your frustrations, and your hunger. The ancient Faith is not a museum exhibit or a nostalgia project. It is a living encounter with the God who does not change, mediated through sacraments that have sanctified souls across twenty centuries.

Come and see.

Pax et Bonum.

+D. Edward Meikle
Archbishop of Caer-Glow