Old Romans (Jerome Lloyd): Thoughts?

[Prayerful]

I slightly know of Archbishop Lloyd from Facebook - he has wonderful vestments and does the TLM well.

That said, to put it mildly, I would not go to Mathew et al. (Vilatte, Carfora et al.) "succession" a.k.a. d.b.a. "independent Catholic" clergy and churches. Most of them were rightly turned down for ministry by actual churches and are playing at being priests. If one of the first things a bishop or priest does when you meet is try to prove his "lines of succession," run.

There's one of those, with an actual church, the town's former Episcopal church, rather near to me. It's run by a bishop who like Abp. Lloyd does the TLM perfectly. He was a Catholic and last I heard was running a little seminary based on what he remembered from 1960s Catholic seminary.

There are no more real Old Catholic churches in America. The little Polish National Catholic Church (Novus Ordo clones) and they parted ways around 15 years ago. The official American representatives of the Archbishop of Utrecht are... the Episcopal Church.

There's also a Czech version who are Novus Ordo too. The funny thing is both are conservative enough, rejecting women priests and other impossibilities, so the Utrecht Union broke ties with them. Yet the somewhat liturgically conservative Dutch movement is utterly woke. A common old Cath thing is having more bishops with extravagant titles than believers, but the PNCC and others like the Mariavites have tolerably strong numbers. Jerome Lloyd was part of an Orthodox Latin Rite effort (usually an English rendering of the old Mass with Ortho touches), mainly aimed at or attracting former Anglicans. Now the Old Romans are another small independent community. SSPX, diocesan TLM, FSSP, ICKSP, sedevacantism and so on, are imperfect, but the older pre V2 trad / indy efforts never really worked.

[Bonaventure]

I would agree with what Young Fogey and Prayerful have said regarding Old Roman Catholics.

I know some of the de Landes Berges - Carfora line. Charitable, interested in tradition. However, sloppy in several regards, and frankly wouldn't be able to eke it out in either a traditional or Novus Ordo setting.

For the most part seem to be men who have wives and/or priests who leave Catholicism because of celibacy.