Independent and Old Catholic
Bodies claiming apostolic succession and catholic sacramental life but not in communion with Rome.
Polish National Catholic Church, Old Catholic jurisdictions, Iglesia Filipina Independiente. Frequently indistinguishable from Roman Catholic in a name-only data source.
Churches that look and pray like Rome — bishops, Mass, seven sacraments — while answering to synods of their own rather than to the pope.
Heritage
The Old Catholic movement organized in Europe after the First Vatican Council defined papal infallibility in 1870, forming the Union of Utrecht in 1889. In America the largest body is the Polish National Catholic Church, organized in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1897 under Franciszek Hodur, born of immigrant congregations' fight for a voice in their own parish affairs. The Iglesia Filipina Independiente (1902) arose from the same instinct in the Philippines and maintains US parishes. Around these stand many small independent jurisdictions claiming apostolic succession through variously derived lines of bishops.
Theological family
Catholic faith and order — historic creeds, seven sacraments, apostolic succession — held without papal jurisdiction: national and synodal rather than Roman. Theology across the family runs from the PNCC's traditional doctrine to small jurisdictions that are markedly progressive.
Who decides what
Bishops in synods, with substantially more lay authority than Rome grants: PNCC parishioners own their parish property and vote in synod — the very issues that brought the church into being.
What a first-time visitor would find
A visitor finds the Mass: vestments, lectionary, Eucharist, the liturgical year — often indistinguishable from a Roman Catholic parish at first sight, which is precisely why name-only data confuses the two.
What it has always cared about
Apostolic succession maintained outside papal communion; the dignity of the national language and the immigrant congregation; lay rights in church government; and, in the PNCC, a sober, rooted parish Catholicism now more than a century old.
Its gift to the wider church
These churches kept catholic sacramental life open to communities estranged from Rome, and their insistence on lay voice anticipated participation that the wider Catholic world embraced only later. The PNCC's long theological dialogues with both Rome and the Episcopal Church have served the whole ecumenical movement.
Commonly confused with
With the Roman Catholic Church, constantly and understandably — a name-only data source frequently cannot tell them apart. With Eastern Catholic churches (which ARE in communion with Rome). And "Old Catholic" does not mean traditionalist-Latin-Mass; it is a specific post-1870 lineage.
Range of views inside it
Enormous for the family's size: from the structured, conservative PNCC to jurisdictions of a handful of parishes; positions on ordaining women and on marriage vary body by body, with the PNCC on the traditional side and many independents not.
A note from the mapmakers: Name-only sources routinely misfile these churches as Roman Catholic, and vice versa; nothing here may be asserted of a specific parish. Whether any body's orders are valid is a question for the churches themselves, not for a map. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "Independent Catholic bodies typically…" and yield to each church's own materials.
Sources: The Other Catholics: Remaking America's Largest Religion (Julie Byrne, Columbia University Press) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press)
Where Independent and Old Catholic churches are on the map
22 Independent and Old Catholic congregations appear on The Church Map, across 15 states.
- Connecticut — 6
- South Carolina — 2
- Minnesota — 2
- Illinois — 1
- New York — 1
- California — 1
- Florida — 1
- Indiana — 1
- Kentucky — 1
- Maryland — 1
Bodies and networks in this family
- Polish National Catholic Church — episcopal — 97 US congregations (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020)
- Ecumenical Catholic Communion — episcopal
- Old Catholic jurisdictions — episcopal
- Iglesia Filipina Independiente (Philippine Independent Church) — episcopal
Moments that formed this family
- 1897 — The Polish National Catholic Church
Polish immigrant parishes in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in conflict with an Irish-led hierarchy over parish property and language, organized under Fr. Francis Hodur into the Polish National Catholic Church — one of the few lasting schisms from Rome to originate on American soil.
Even this split has softened: a century later, the PNCC and the Catholic Church restored limited sacramental sharing through formal dialogue.
Read The American Church Story · Find these churches on the map