Like the Druids, it's whatever you want it to be, as should be apparent from both the Anglos and the Presbys managing to use it at the same time.
And my apologies for the lack of clarity, but when I say "Catholic" with a big "C", I mean the Big Bad Bishop of Rome and all his entourage, while "catholic" with a little "c" means the Church Universal.
Well, different people use history for their own different purposes. Rome’s version of history, the one where the fullness of The Church is found in one man and all the local dioceses and national or regional churches are merely franchises of the Roman home office is a version Roman has, until quite recently, been peddling ever since the Great Schism. Now, because it is so intent on reunion with Holy Orthodoxy, it no longer presses that definition of The Church.
As for the Celtic Church, as one of the articles on the blog points out, monasticism in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales was distinctly Eastern. It bore little resemblance to Western Benedictine style monasticism. The ties of the monks at Iona and elsewhere with the monks in the Desert between Egypt and Jerusalem is very well documented. The Conciliar/Synodal system prevalent in the British Isles before the arrival of Augustine at Canterbury, a system recognizable as thoroughly Eastern and thus Catholic stands in stark contrast to the pyramidal system set up under Rome’s local managers.
I am not saying, AM, that I am convinced for one minute that any form of modern Anglicanism is that ancient Celtic Catholicism. In fact, I think it is at best a pale imitation, but it has been my experience that Episcopalians/Anglicans who come to Orthodoxy have a much easier time and come to understand Orthodoxy and its mindset much, much quicker than converts from Roman Catholicism. This is counter intuitive because of course Latin theology and Orthodox theology are pretty much the same, but the mindsets are 180 degrees off each other. The way we live the Faith and respond to it are opposite. The Anglicans seem to get that almost immediately. It takes Latins as long, sometimes longer, as Evangelicals to understand the Orthodox “phronema”. There is something of a vestigial Orthodoxy lurking there in Anglicanism. I can only assume its a reflection of a long past Eastern way of looking at The Faith.
The Celtic Church is not entriely myth. It centers on the line of bishops descending from St. Patrick of Ireland. When the pagan Saxons took over England, the Church in Ireland/Hiberia and its missions in Scotland/Caledonia were cut off from the rest of Christian Europe. Eventually it would be the only part of Christian western Europe that was not under the control of the Frankish Empire and its senior prelate- the Bishop of Rome.
At the Synod of Whitby, the Celtic bishops and the Roman bishops recognized each others’ validity and agreed to join forces.
The problem of the Celtic Church today is that very little of its liturgy has been preserved. The result is a “black box” church which people with agendae (particularly feminists and enviro-wackos) morph into justifying their own theological innovations. We know as fact that the Celtic Church was monastic and evangelical. Since no contemporary prelate (Rome, Constantinople, etc) is known to have accused them of heresy, we can infer that the Cletic Church was entirely orthodox. Still that does not stop feminists from claiming some “heritage of St Bridget” to support women’s ordination.