"As the Old Catholic Movement combines the tradition of the great spiritual leaders of the latter ages of the Christian Church, it has also effectively united the factors in Catholic Christendom that Hague untiringly labored to preserve: the first administrative principles of the Apostolic Church -- to hold inviolate ‘the faith once for all delivered to the Saints.’ The undaunted spirits of the great Christian revolutionaries, the Port Royalists, the so-called Jansenists, the Mariavites and many others have served to prove by their struggle against ecclesiastical intolerance and phariseeism, that in every age within the church they loved the same struggle has been manifest in the lives of but a handful of people at all times. The torch they carried from age to age may have been dimmed at times, but it has always been carried forward, never dropped, never entirely extinguished. Today their efforts are merged in handfuls of many people in almost every part of the world to whom the sympathetic hands of the great Oriental Christian Church lends strength.

    "Added to the growing Old Catholic Movement in America were the independent Portuguese Catholics under the Rt. Reverend Bishop Antonio Rodriguez of Massachusetts in 1917 and the appointment of the Rt. Reverend Joseph Zielonka of New Jersey, after his reception into union with several Polish congregations in 1924. The joint Encyclical the Old Catholic Bishops in America in 1925, in which an outline of a really Christian society was advocated, met with such approval by representatives of the Eastern Orthodox Church that the Metropolitan John of the Holy Synod, of Russia, representing 127 Bishops and Archbishops in Russia, received the Old Catholic Church in America into union with that body in the same year. In 1933, under an agreement jointly entered into, the Orthodox Archbishop of Prague and Czechoslovakia, Savvatios, under the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, placed the Orthodox Czechoslovaks in America under the jurisdiction of the American Old Catholic Archbishop, while at the same time Savvatios wa named Protector of the Old Catholics in Czechoslovakia. Thus with a threefold rapprochement with the church of the East, a practical and organized unity of a great part of Catholic Christendom has been realized by Old Catholics under a program inaugurated by Archbishop Mathew of England in 1910. Underlying the terms of this union are the fundamental principles of Old Catholicism -- an acceptance of the doctrinal points of unity prevailing in the undivided Christian Church prior to the year 1054 A.D., i.e., a belief in Seven Sacraments and in the dogmatic Decrees of the Seven Ecumenical Councils.