January 7, 2026 Show with Donald Philip Veitch on “The Anglo-Catholic Controversy: Is the Very Gospel At Stake?”

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Introduction of Donald Philip Veitch and the Anglo-Catholic Controversy

And I am delighted to have a first-time guest today. My guest today happens to be a mutual friend of a very dear and precious late brother in Christ and personal friend of mine. Many of you have heard him interviewed on this program, Roger Salter, who not long ago went home to be with our Lord Jesus Christ, who he faithfully served for so many years as a biblically faithful Anglican minister in Alabama, although he was originally from Tasmania and later educated in London, England.

Roger was a resident of Alabama for quite a number of years and a rector of St. Matthew's Anglican Church that was located in the Birmingham area. But today, we have a mutual friend of Roger and mine on the program, Donald Filipvich, who is a Reformed Anglican, a Navy chaplain, and moderator of the Twiss House page on Facebook.

And Twiss House is named after William Twiss, a 17th-century prominent English clergyman and theologian, and we'll hear more about him from my guest Donald. And that page is dedicated to the defense, promotion, and preservation of historic confessional Anglicanism.

Today, we're going to be addressing a very controversial theme that will no doubt upset some. The theme is the Anglo-Catholic controversy. Is the very gospel at stake in the rise of Anglicanism's Romish wing?

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Donald Filipvich.

Glad to be with you, Curtis.

It's a joy to have you with us. Finally, we have been talking about an interview for years, and now finally that day has come. I'm very thankful that you have made the time to be my guest today. And I also want to thank you for being so diligent in promoting Iron Trip and Zion Radio to the confessional Anglican community whenever a guest seems to deeply strike your interest.

And I see that you have done that quite often, and I'm honored and grateful for your promotion of this broadcast.

Glad to do it.

Well, let me set the stage here for a moment. I want to let everybody know, even though I've said this on my program before, one of the reasons I have an affection for biblically faithful Anglicanism is because, although I was raised Roman Catholic before being born from above by the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ and becoming a Reformed Baptist, my father's side of the family was Episcopalian, although unfortunately my dad converted to Catholicism when I was about 17 years old, my mother having already been Roman Catholic and who was raised in Catholicism by Polish immigrant parents.

But knowing of my father's Episcopalian side of the family, I began to, years ago, search for and investigate and study the solid biblically faithful remnant of Anglicanism that does exist, those that are theologically Reformed, as I am, in spite of our differences on ecclesiology and on the issue of infant baptism and so on.

I had grown in my respect for, appreciation of, and admiration of biblically faithful Anglicanism and those that are ministers in that movement and those that are congregants in that movement and proponents of that movement.

I remember distinctly, years ago, when my uncle Donald was still with us, before he passed away a number of years ago, he was contemplating being an Episcopalian, he was contemplating converting to Roman Catholicism because of the downfall of the Episcopal Church into leftist apostasy, and my apprehension over his conversion to Roman Catholicism led me on a search to try to find a solid Anglican church near him to see if the Lord would use me to stop him in his tracks.

Sadly, I was not successful in finding such a church, and he did convert to Roman Catholicism before his death. But the subject, having said all that, is just one of great interest to me. And Donald, as you know, on this program, we have a tradition, whenever we have a first-time guest, we have that guest give a summary of their salvation testimony, which would include any kind of religious atmosphere in which they were raised, and what kind of providential circumstances our Sovereign Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to himself and saved them, and I would love to hear your story.

Sure. For some reason, Donald, for some reason, unlike the very long conversation we had before the show started, your voice seems to disappear. I'm not sure what's going on right now. Can you make sure that you're speaking directly into whatever recording device you have, if it's your laptop, sit closely to it, what have you?

Okay, I hope you can hear me. My background is Reformed and Presbyterian. My father was an elder, teaching elder. My grandfather was a ruling elder, and in 1921, my grandfather switched from Canadian Anglicanism, which had been in the family since 1808 in Canada, 1808, 1921, and then the Reformed portion started.

So I grew up around the Bible and in a Reformed home, and I don't ever remember a conversion experience. I do remember about when I was maybe six or seven, maybe. I was at home from church. I was sick, and I was sitting in the basement, and I was reading the Bible, and just out of the blue, I said, this is what I want.

This is what I want. I want you, Jesus. So if that's a conversion or confirmation, I view it as a confirmation. I grew up around the Bible with a father doing Greek and Latin and Hebrew. He was trained in Canadian Presbyterianism.

In high school, he had five years of Greek, five years of Latin, five years of French. And then, of course, he went on to seminary and studied Greek. And so I grew up around a dad who was constantly talking about the Bible, and that was the ethos of the home, and I was going to be a chemical engineer.

And then in undergraduate, I started studying philosophy and fell in love with Augustine and wrote my undergrad honors thesis on Augustine, free will, predestination. And from there, I went on to seminary and then on into the chaplaincy.

So I do believe in adult conversions. I don't believe in baptismal regeneration, although I believe it can happen, like John the Baptist. He was converted in his mother's womb. But I do not make the sacrament of baptism the handmaiden of the minister, but rather God controls the results.

Maybe converted in the womb and at the baptismal font, or like many in my ministry in the Navy who, as adults, came to Christ by teaching the biblical faith. Or like John Newton, who was converted long after being baptized as a Church of England man.

Or Charles Simeon, the same thing. He was converted when he began at Cambridge. Anyways, so that's my little short testimony. Again, emphasizing adults are converted through the teaching of the gospel.

Amen. Now, how did you come to discover—I mean, you already said that you had an ancestral connection with Anglicanism. But how did you rediscover that, perhaps, and get drawn to it so much so that you embraced Anglicanism as your own?

Big question. I was in Westminster Seminary. I was headed toward the OPC ministry, Orthodox Presbyterian. Still love those people, by the way. But I knew—so I was finishing my 61-hour degree. I went to Villanova, got a 30-hour master's in a Roman Catholic school, kind of figuring out.

And during that process, I wanted to finish my MDiv. And Reformed Episcopal Seminary down at 42nd and Chestnut Street was a Calvinistic Episcopal Seminary. No doubt. Unquestionable. And I thought, well, you know, I can go down there, finish the rest of my master's of divinity, and learn something about this ancestral Anglican heritage.

My dad told me that we had it, but I never knew why. I didn't grow up with the prayer book. I was completely un-Anglican in that sense. And I went down there, loved the people, found the prayer book, and embraced it.

The Reformed Episcopal prayer book, that is. It had some eight or ten tweaks to it to cut out the Romanizing germs from the 1789 prayer book.

I fell in love with the people.

It still has some of those germs. We might get to those a little later. But I fell in love with them, and I was served with them as one of their ministers in the Navy as a chaplain. And then finally, after the destroying influences that I discovered after retirement, I had to pull out.

But I was with them from 1982 -83 until 2005. And I pulled out and never looked back. And if anybody wants to investigate the history of the Reformed Episcopal Seminary, you can go on YouTube. My name is Donald Phillip Veach.

Look it up, and then go to Reformed Episcopal Seminary. There are seven 30-minute videos that describe the undoubted Helvinistic heritage of the Reformed Episcopal Seminary. So at the end of all of this, I'm really the weirdo.

I embrace the Westminster Confession and always have. On the other hand, I embrace the old prayer book, which I use this morning. I use every morning for morning prayer. So I got a prayer book and Westminster Confession.

The Presbyterians look at me and squint their eyes. You know, you don't have a prayer book. And the Anglicans say, yeah, but you've got that old Westminster Confession. You know, that's too much. But I am what I am, and I believe it's biblical.

And I found the prayer book to be, show me where it's unbiblical. It needs to be corrected. And I think the RECs had a good 120-year run until Riches and Shifty Sutton of Dallas entered the picture. That's another whole story.

He went tractitarianizing and Romanizing, praying to saints, baptismal justification, telling another professor not to teach Calvinism. And there's more.

And who was that? I'm sorry.

Pardon?

Who was that that you were just describing?

I call him Shifty. It's Ray Sutton, Archbishop of the REC.

So he even went as far as to denounce Calvinism.

That's what the senior professor told in his class up in Philadelphia. That Sutton had told him, the senior professor, not to teach Calvinism. I asked that senior professor, and he goes, I don't remember that.

We had private conversations, but I've always taught Calvinism. So I don't know if he was waving it off or not. I believe the testimony of the two students who heard him say that.

Okay.

And just out of curiosity, a very dear longtime friend of mine who is now in heaven, Dr. Robert J. Cameron, was a graduate of Reformed Episcopal Seminary. He later became an Orthodox Presbyterian pastor.

I was just wondering if you knew the late Dr. Cameron. He was one of the very few black REC pastors and then later very few black Orthodox Presbyterian pastors.

No, I didn't know him, but I know that men went to the OPC from our school. And then in 1955, get a load of this, the RPCNA, the Reformed Presbyterians, the Covenanters up in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, their school is still there.

It was passed at one of their synods that they would be able to send men for theological training to Reformed Episcopal Seminary. And that was, you know, they approved of RES. If a guy lived in that area, he could go there, still join the RPCNA.

So it was brought alongside the old Covenanters, which was surprising when I found that.

William Twiss, Confessional Anglicanism, and Reformed Roots

Now, before I forget to ask you who William Twiss was, the 17th century English clergyman and reformer, why don't you explain why he is a hero of yours and why you named your Facebook page after him?

William Twiss, he was a prayer book man, BCP. It would have been the 15, I'm going to say 1559 edition, which was certainly recognizable down until 1979. And he was a Calvinist, a Calvinist Calvin, I might add.

He was a supralapsarian, which I'm not, an infralapsarian. He also wrote positively and favorably on the Synod of Dort. It's not as good as a few other books, but he was a Synod of Dort man, as many as were the five attendees at Synod of Dort sent by King James.

And he lived up until he was invited by unanimous consent of Parliament to be the prolocutor of Westminster Assembly. So he was in the very beginning of it. And most unfortunately, he died before it fully took root.

But he's one of the old Calvinists, as were the Elizabethan bishops of the day. And that's irrefutable and inarguable, which if we ever get to the subject at hand, you'll know that Twiss is one among so many of those old Calvinists of the old Church of England.

They don't exist today. There's a few. There's some. There's Lee Gatiss in England. There's Gerald Bray, who lives in Cambridge and also in Birmingham. He's a Calvinist, but there's just not many. Yeah, I've had Gerald on the show.

Oh, have you really?

Yes.

Oh, he's a walking scholar.

Well, if anybody wants to look up on Facebook, the page to which I refer, look for Twiss House, that's T-W-I-S-S-E, Twiss House, Reformed Theology, Confessional Reformed Theology. And you will find Douglas Phillip Veatch's page there.

And now tell us, if you could, what a working definition would be of Anglo-Catholicism. I'm sure the average person who is not Anglican, when you mention Anglicanism, especially if you're here in the United States, in fact, when I've had conversations with many people who are not Anglican, they typically jump to two conclusions.

Oh, you mean that left-wing religion that ordains and marries homosexuals and has totally abandoned the pillars of the faith? They may even think of Bishop John Shelby Spong, who is no longer on this planet.

I shudder to think where he is. But he was at one time a bishop in New Jersey. I believe he ordained the first homosexual in the Episcopal Church, USA. I was present at a debate between Bishop Spong and my very dear friend, Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries on homosexuality years ago.

But they either jump to that conclusion or they think, oh, you mean that church that's almost identical to Roman Catholicism? And although Anglicanism certainly has both of those elements on one end of the spectrum to the other, there are and always have been historic, biblically faithful, confessional, Reformed, Protestant Anglicans.

So, if you could, explain Anglo-Catholicism for our listeners.

Wow. Mega question to try to boil that down. I prefer the term Anglo-Romanizing.

Okay.

Because some Anglo-Catholics, in fact, I would say majority, reject Petrine supremacy.

Right.

On the other hand, they embrace many of the Roman ideas. Baptismal regeneration is one of them. The sacerdotal nature of the priesthood. Some argue and practice auricular confession. All of them, to my knowledge, believe in what I call Christ in the Crumbs, which is sacerdotalism, that priest stands with his back to the congregation, lifts up the host, utters the magic words, and commands Jesus in his body, the body he was born with by Virgin Mary, to jump out of heaven onto a million altars and enter into the bread.

They all believe that. Sutton in Dallas believes that. The old RECs rejected that. This became a big subject of controversy when the Tractarians, and really, when you think Anglo-Catholicism, you want to think of when it really took off in the 1850s.

So they believed in a version of transubstantiation. Some of them, like Shifty Sutton, Keith Ackerman of the ACNA, Jack Eicher of the ACNA, they believe in praying to saints. For example, Sutton endorsed, along with Ackerman and the other guy, Mark Haverland, a book called The Anglican Office Book.

It's 350 pages, and 250 pages have prayers to saints. Mary, you name the saint, they're saying, or Pro Nobis, pray for us. It's Roman Catholicism, and at its root, it is an attack on the person of Christ, first of all, as fully God, fully man, and one person, who died on the cross and said, it is finished, and his atonement is complete, efficacious, sovereign, it's done, the price was paid.

So, to invoke other mediators is to detract from his mediation, which is solid and effectual for the elect. So, there's no way around it. That's fully Roman. Now, whether some of these, like I said, Anglo-Catholicism, has all the telltale signs of Roman beliefs that were uniformly opposed by the English reformers.

And that's a part of an additional study. I can list you all kinds of guys who were English reformers, who believed in justification by faith alone, sola scriptura, sola fides, and the five solas of the Reformation.

There's no doubt about it. Cranmer was a sola scriptura man. So, the bottom line, quick definition for someone not in Anglicanism or Episcopalianism, they show all the telltale signs of Romans' belief that at bottom, as Cornelius, Dr. Van Til taught us, always come back to an attack on the persons, three persons of God.

Transubstantiation. Think of that guy and his arrogance, claiming to pull Christ out of heaven as soon as his sovereign word declares him to come down. You're talking about a reversal here and empowering of the priest over the sovereignty of Jesus.

It's an insult. And the reformers saw that. And if, you know, for anybody who's new, doesn't know a lot about Anglicanism, I recommend you get a very simple book by Bishop J .C. Ryle called The Five English Reformers.

It's available on Amazon. He deals in large part with this arrogant, demonic, anti-Christian view of transubstantiation. Now, the rank and file Roman Catholic is not taught this. I think the Anglo-Catholics largely are ignorant.

I think a lot of the clergy are pretty uneducated. But I'm going to tell you right now, Chris, the English reformers opposed this magic, these magic words, this hocus pocus. And that's why they lift the, you know, the element high, because you need to adore Jesus in the crumbs.

And the 39 Articles of Religion were vehemently opposed to that, which were framed by Cranmer himself.

He died for that. And all the English reformers, it was one of the leading points that you denied the sacrament of the altar, because Cranmer lived and grew up in that context. And so they're the very men who are bearing witness against these things.

And for those listening, I'm not trying to sell my book, by the way, but I'd forgotten about it. It's on Amazon .com, and it's called Bibliography, semicolon, Dr. Thomas Cranmer. And it's me, Don Veach.

V-E-I-T-C-H.

Correct. And it's 255 pages of bibliography, not that I was going to do a dissertation on his life. So I'm pretty knee deep in Cranmerian studies, such that I even communicate regularly by email with Professor Dermot McCulloch of Oxford, whenever there's a question that I have.

You know, going back to baptismal regeneration, I think we mentioned that. That was another subject that came up in the English Reformation. Martin Busser, who helped to shape the prayer book, said we baptize infants who are either sheep or goats.

And we do so in reverent agnosticism until they show who they are. So he didn't believe that the magic water on the head converted the baby. God, again, there again, you got the priest who's almighty doing the regenerating rather than—and that's detracting from the sovereign God.

Anyways, we went down a bunny rabbit trail. I was trying to answer a simple question for those unfamiliar with this. I just say, look for Romanizing tendencies and Romanizing doctrine. And this new ACNA thing that arose in 2009, they've got maybe a small group, maybe a third, maybe 20 percent, who still hold all these Romanizing doctrines.

And nobody says anything. They let it pass instead of confronting the anti-Christian doctrines of Rome.

This is what happens when people who, on the one hand, rightfully opposing leftism, but they unfortunately wrongly search for allies wherever they can and link arms with Romanists because they share with the Romanists a vehement opposition to the leftism.

Am I making sense there?

Yeah, you are. There's been a branch of these Anglo-Papists, and some of them are for Patriot supremacy. That's one difference. Anglo-Romanizers, I call them. I lost track of Did you just say, Chris?

I was saying that the reason, in my observation, why you have both Reformed Protestant Anglicans and Anglo-Catholics in the ACNA, the Anglican Church of North America, and it appears to be because people who are in a minority, who are looking for allies as they oppose leftism, and this is not only in the Church of England, this is even in the political arena, people when they're a minority sometimes are so eager to find allies that they make seriously wrong and even heretical choices in their bedfellows, if you will, and they wind up linking arms with people who are actually enemies of the gospel.

Yeah, there's—I would say many, if not most, Anglo-Romanizers in America in the modern period, in the 1977, the St. Louis—whatever it's called—the St. Louis something, they were opposed, of course, to LBGTQ.

They were opposed to women's ordination like any Bible person would be, but there also has been another branch of Anglo-Romanism that went in the liberal direction and still claimed the title Anglo-Catholic, but they continue to be known as affirming Catholics.

And one example of that was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who was a liberal, and they embraced and were influenced in the late 19th century by liberal—Protestant liberal theology.

Tractarianism, the Oxford Movement, and the Re-Catholicizing of Anglicanism

By the way, I'm going to pick up where you left off there because we have to go to our commercial break. If anybody would like to join us on the air of the question about Anglo-Catholicism or Anglicanism in general, if you have a question for Donald Philip Veitch, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Chris Arnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence. If you live outside of the USA, only remain anonymous if your question is a personal and private one.

That's chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. We are going to be right back after these messages.

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Our guest today is Donald Philip Veitch, who is a Reformed Anglican and also moderator of the Facebook page Twists House, a page dedicated to the defense, promotion, and preservation of historic confessional Anglicanism.

Today we are addressing the Anglo-Catholic controversy. This controversy is the very gospel at stake in the rise of Anglicanism's Romish wing. If you have questions, send them to ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. Now, from the days of Cranmer, who drafted the 39 Articles, which are very clearly Protestant and Calvinistic, even though the king at the time, King Henry VIII, from what I understand, was still theologically Roman Catholic, so much so that Cranmer doubted his salvation.

And perhaps you could correct me if I'm misrepresenting this, Donald, but I have heard from Cranmer scholars that on King Henry VIII's deathbed, Cranmer held Henry's hand and said, if you believe in justification by faith alone, please squeeze my hand.

And Henry did, which gave him more assurance that Henry had received a new birth. But where did the Church of Rome rise its ugly head again within Anglicanism? I know that Bloody Mary rose to power and was executing Protestant clergy, but then the pendulum swung back to Protestantism again.

And if I'm not mistaken, I think Queen Elizabeth at that time was trying to have a more moderate view, but perhaps you should explain.

The story you tell about Henry VIII on his deathbed is often repeated. And again, I'm knee-deep in Cranmer's studies, but not him alone, of course. And he was called from Croydon. He was on his deathbed.

Croydon was across the river, the Thames, to come. What's interesting, he did not use the last rites as a sacrament of Rome. And as you told the story about justification by faith, that story comes from Cranmer's secretary, Ralph Maurice, who told it to John Fox, the great martyriologist.

But there's a contradiction here, because Henry VIII, they had what they call chantry chapels. And what you did is you would buy the services of the chantry priest to pray day by day for the soul of your relative or anybody else.

And they were financed that way. Henry VIII, but of course, that was all cut down in the Elizabethan Reformation. So there was no more chantry priests, which they did, they prayed to apply some of those merits to get some time off on purgatory.

He had endowed several chapels in France that continued this chantry ministry of praying for Henry VIII. They continued that until 1710. So Henry did not, in my book, have the gospel clear in his mind.

Now, quite ironically, however, he gave cover to Thomas Cranmer. And I still have not settled that. He loved Cranmer, he trusted him. Cranmer was respectful, and he had like this unique covering. I'm thinking of the Prebendary Plot of 1543, led by his nemesis, Wiley Winchester, a .k .a. Stephen Gardner, Bishop of Winchester.

He survived that plot. And there was an underground of people collecting things from Thomas Cranmer's sermons and his writings. Henry VIII said, no more, you're not doing it, don't touch him. And somehow Cranmer escaped, despite the continuing Romanizing of this king.

And Henry knew what Thomas was about, because in 1537, 1538, and I've got the copies in print, they came out with the Institution of Christian Man and the Bishop's Book. And Cranmer kept writing in, we're justified by faith only.

It would go to Henry, Henry would cross it out, and said, justified by faith and works. Henry was afraid this would unleash antinomianism and make the realm subject to anything goes. But Cranmer did not back off to his credit, despite him being virtually alone in high places.

And back and forth they went eight or ten times. And there was a slight Lutheranizing influence in the Institution for Christian Man in 1537, but ever so slight. As for Cranmer, the great question is, was he a Lutheran before he became Archbishop in 1533?

And Eustace Chapuis, the Spanish ambassador, said that the word on the street was that he was a Lutheran. Now, he had been on two ambassadorial trips for Henry. The first time to go down to the Pope, try to get him to change his mind on the marriage with Catherine Aragon.

Another time to Charles V as an ambassador. And that's when in 1532, despite being a priest, he got married in, I forget the name of the town now, but he married the niece of Oseander, a Lutheran theologian.

And he had a lot of stories about, you know, and Henry knew all that, despite the six articles in 1539 that made it a capital offense for a priest to be married. There were six articles which included and covered the same old standard issues, transubstantiation, mass for the dead, the sacerdotalism, auricular confession, prayers for and to the dead.

That was in 1539. Now, at that point, Hugh Latimer, he also was burned, 16 October, 1555, in one of the Morion Martyrs. In 1539, when these six articles came out, he was the Bishop of Worcester. And as soon as that happened, he said, I'm out of here, I'm no longer a bishop.

But he continued to work for Cranmer. So all of that, going back to this deathbed experience and once he died and King Edward came in, the foot was put to the pedal, pedal to the metal, and they came out with the 42 articles, two prayer books, 1549, 1552.

And I'm gonna tell you right now, Chris, they were Calvinists. And for anybody wanting to study Calvinism, in the Church of England, there's no better volume or volumes than Reverend Augustus Toplety, known for his hymns, Rock of Ages.