Hieronymus
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User ID: 419
Hieronymus
1d ago
Anglicanism is in an interesting category because there are priests and bishops, and the Eastern Churches are relatively warm to them on that basis, but the longstanding view of Catholicism is that Anglican orders are null and void because the Church of England, especially in the 15-1800s, relativized its understanding of what the priesthood was to more of a ministry in the Protestant sense than a sacrificial office, while the Eucharistic sacrifice was described as a "sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving" (added to the first BCP communion rite by Cranmer).
It’s worth noting the counterarguments offered by the archbishops of Canterbury and York in response, alleging that this view was inconsistent.
There's an alternate universe perhaps where Edward's minority didn't give Cranmer an in to push his agenda, or Elizabeth had a desire to impose more of her own liturgical conservatism and insisted on maintaining sacrificial priesthood as a pillar of the English establishment, and in that universe the Church of England would probably be called a "Church" by Catholic doctrine.
Perhaps. But I think that there would have been the same incentives for the pope to create a Roman Catholic shadow hierarchy to mirror the Anglican one, and given such competing hierarchies there would have been the same incentive to deny the validity of Anglican orders.
Thank you for the reply. I am sorry that I didn’t wait to post until I had time to lay out my thoughts better and to respond more promptly.
In trying to understand the Roman Catholic view of the sacraments, the best examples for me have been baptism and the eucharist, both because we Protestants also acknowledge them as sacraments – whether individual denominations use that word or not – and because the R.C. view is pretty clearly defined: There are certain requirements of form and matter, and if they are met you have a valid sacrament ex opere operato. If those requirements are met under forbidden circumstances you have a sacrament which is valid but illicit. So far I understand.
As a Protestant I regard marriage as a creation ordinance, and I do not see a category of sacramental marriage distinct from natural marriage. But Rome does, and interestingly it puts a wedding between two Protestants in a Protestant church into the sacramental category. So such a wedding must meet the requirements of form and matter, and it must do so with an officiant who is not in communion with Rome and whom Rome does not regard as a validly ordained priest.
My expectation would be that a wedding of two Roman Catholics performed by an SSPX priest would be valid but illicit. They have met at least the same requirements of form and matter as the Protestant spouses have, but they have done so in contravention of canon law. Yet the Vatican’s announcement and the canon you quoted say that such a wedding is invalid. What gives? I am particularly weirded out by this passage:
Only those marriages are valid which are contracted … according to the rules expressed in the following canons and without prejudice to the exceptions mentioned in cann. 144, 1112, §1, 1116, and 1127, §§1-2.
Does this mean that canon law can add requirements to a sacrament, affecting its validity as well as its lawfulness? If so, that’s a rather startling claim. If not, this canon law must be restating requirements of form or matter that already exist for other reasons; but then how are Protestant marriages, which don’t meet those requirements, valid? Consider two silly thought experiments:
- An SSPX priest performs a wedding of two Lutherans. (Let’s say they all want to thumb their noses at Pope Leo.) Is this marriage valid?
- The pope amends canon law to require that baptisms be performed with holy water to be valid. Does this genuinely invalidate other subsequent baptisms?
Edit: Corrected some typos, and now pinging @urquan too.
Hieronymus
3d ago
It seems clear that the Vatican wanted SSPX to die out as a movement, with its people folded into the mainstream Roman Catholic Church over time. The pope kept appealing to SSPX to avoid these consecrations in the name of unity; but, if unity had been his highest priority, Leo could have simply authorized the consecrations in the first place and avoided the problem. Given a choice between division and dying out, SSPX chose division; I think that they would quibble with the word “schism” for subtle canonical reasons that I am too evangelical to understand.
But, as someone whose understanding of the sacraments does not resemble Rome’s in the slightest, I am curious about this part:
Finally, the holy People of God are warned that the sacred ministers of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X administer the sacraments illicitly, and that the sacrament of penance administered by them and marriages assisted by them are invalid.
How, in Roman Catholic theology, does that work? I could sort of guess at a logic for penance, although I have zero confidence that I could predict Rome’s reasoning. But the rules for the validity of sacramental marriage have never made much sense to me. Rome recognizes the marriage of two baptized Protestants as sacramental, right? So why do the extra rules for Catholics affect the validity of the marriage instead of just its lawfulness? I know that rules added in the Counter-Reformation era were said to affect validity, even though they were new, and I find that difficult to explain.
Hieronymus
3d ago
It’s interesting, insightful, from an angle the Motte rarely sees, and kind of whitepilling. Fully deserved.
Hieronymus
4d ago
My dudette, I am sympathetic to some of your points, but the snark level makes it difficult to tell which are serious.
In any case I don't think the Roman Catholic justices need to worry about excommunication. Their bishops are far too institutionalist to impose it, even if they felt it were appropriate.
Hieronymus
6d ago
Well, yes, but then the pope stopped claiming to abrogate Catholics' oaths of loyalty and demanding the creation of a Roman Catholic state. If you imply similar developments within Islam, please elaborate on what you see there.
Hieronymus
8d ago
The comment above yours is still filtered.
I think your point is the most valuable in several good posts in this subthread. The more pluralist a society becomes, the less classical liberalism works for it. But America of all places is kind of in a bind on that front. A change in immigration policy might help us stop digging the hole we're in, but even that much is outside the Overton window.
That's one of the fundamental questions on the American right at present: Does classical liberalism necessarily produce a level of pluralism it cannot survive?
Hieronymus
11d ago
The fairness doctrine was eliminated in the U.S. in 1987, so modern NPR is safe.
Hieronymus
13d ago
The trads/progs, as different flavors of conservative, ...
I am pretty consistently baffled by your insinuations on this point. Could you clarify what you mean? I'm familiar with the meme of conservatives as progressives going the speed limit, and I'm familiar with the idea that conservatives keep progressives' mistakes from being corrected, and so on. But you seem to be using these words in a very idiosyncratic way.
Hieronymus
26d ago
"Actual sin" is a theological term to describe sin one has committed personally in contrast to original sin. It doesn't imply that original sin isn't real. I just mean that no human being has just cause to execute someone for original sin.
Use logic not vibes.
If there is a logic to your objections of inconsistency, it relies on an unstated premise I can't quite get at. Maybe you're working from the basis that killing a human being is an offense only against him, whereas in the Christian view it is a sin against God also.
As for the state, God has delegated to the state some authority for capital punishment. Within those parameters, it has some wiggle room. But it's not carte blanche.
Hieronymus
28d ago
How can you argue from Christianity and also argue the fetus is innocent? It has as much expected original sin as you do.
Original sin perhaps, but not actual sin. In any case, the child is obviously innocent of any offence that would justify his death at human hands.
How do you believe in the hereafter and still attach so much sentimentality to the body here and now?
There is a sense in which it's worth weighing temporal things against eternal ones. But, ironically given the question, Christians usually apply that principle to endure the suffering such killings are meant to avoid. Death in this fallen world is sometimes a divine mercy, but there are only a few situations where men are entitled to deal it out.
I don't know if I've managed to get at the underlying disagreement here. It's not a matter of weighing utilons.
There are many examples in the Bible of God commanding people to kill.
Agreed. I am not a pacifist.
Murder is a particular type of killing that doesn't seem to apply to voluntary euthanasia or abortion of people who would not want to live anyway.
Why not?
(As an aside, the discussion started with the abortion of a Down syndrome child, and Down's patients usually do not want to die. But the principle is worth discussing anyway.)
Hieronymus
28d ago
Pro-lifers are framing the debate correctly, but they have the wrong answer.
Could you unpack that? My tentative reading is that you agree that abortion is the killing of an innocent human being but that you also hold utilitarian principles which allow that sort of thing.
Of course most pro-lifers are not utilitarians, and I'm no exception. I also have a relative with Down syndrome, though not so close a relative as your brother. He is blessed with excellent parents. But if they had killed him in utero they would be no less guilty of his blood than if they killed him today.
People think they can find pragmatic, utilitarian compromises with reasonable stopping points. But over the generations things don't work out that way. Rare abortions in difficult cases became abortion on demand, which greased the slope for doctor-assisted suicide, and the Netherlands and Canada are showing us how that goes.
There's now a whole social media genre of posts acknowledging that the socons were right and slopes were in fact slippery. People had believed that they would handle this or that loosening of the moral law responsibly because their culture took the issues seriously. But the culture only took the issues seriously because of its residual Christian understanding of the moral law, which that loosening eroded.
To the Christian this sounds a lot like the situation in Romans 1, where men denied God despite their knowledge and he gave them over to their sinful desires. But, Christian or not, experience shows that utilitarian principles won't hold you on the middle of the slope.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
Nice! I didn't realize that. I haven't played CounterStrike since the original Half Life mod, so I only knew what I'd read.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
I never played it myself because I prefer to get headshotted by the sweats in CounterStrike...
Didn't they shut down CSGO when they launched CS2 (which was actually CS5)?
Hieronymus
1mo ago
I, once adjusted for differing sexual morality standards, don’t particularly disagree...
Isn't that adjustment extremely relevant here, though? If I were to define statutory rape of a teenager, I'd just call it seduction of a minor. Sexual morality is fundamentally tied up in defining the crime. The fact that much of secular society can't admit this muddles the conversation a lot.
Yeah, the practical consequences of seduction will vary for boys and girls, but in practice that seems to be (more than) adequately covered by consideration of mitigating factors in sentencing.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
Man, here, will say that men (or at least attractive or otherwise high status men) will fuck promiscuous women but never marry them. But that isn't really true.
I think that this used to be far truer than it is today. Yes, some men in the past married their mistresses. But for the most part mistress and wife were steps on different relationship tracks.
I am the least qualified person to summarize modern courtship mores, but the progression looks to me like this: sex, then long-term relationship, then moving in together, then marriage. In old-fashioned terms, most men in the early stages are asking, "Will she make a good mistress?" Only once that works out will they ask, "Will she make a good wife?" The wife filter is happening late in the process, and the function of marriage then is to cement a relationship that already exists.
By contrast older mores encouraged men to check for wife material earlier in the relationship, and a man who was expressly looking for mistress material wasn't putting her on the wife track.
I seriously recommend either a good intro class or a good book for self study. (My recommendations on those would be pretty outdated now, so I can't offer any names myself.)
What WhiningCoil says about programming being a diverse set of skills in practice is true. But there is a core aptitude of thinking algorithmically. Some people can do it off the bat, some people can't do it at all, and some people need to try it from several angles before it clicks. This isn't really a matter of being smart enough; once you're over a certain threshold of intelligence, there just seem to be some people who are wired for it and some who aren't.
So I'd start with that. If it clicks, you can move on to study the other stuff in whatever way is best for you. If it doesn't, you can know that you gave it a fair shake.
Edit: As an addendum, I recommend learning your second programming language soon after your first. Some people fret about this and think it will be harder than it is. But it isn't that hard, and having experienced it will change how you evaluate your tooIs.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
Page not found for me, so I'll just use the featured comments.
OP's quotes are accurate but not fully representative. Fortunately Gillitrut posted an archive link below, if you want to read the whole thing.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
In between logical proofs and personal experience, don't neglect the category of publicly available evidence, of which historical evidence is one important species. ( @WandererintheWilderness gets into this a bit below.) If you are convinced by the evidence for Jesus' resurrection, you can get at the existance of God that way.
Separately, if you are trying to understand how people work through these things in practice, it is helpful to think about how and why people move in both directions: theist to atheist as well as vice-versa. There is extra-rational movement both ways.
She is trying to break down a set of problems as she sees them among American converts to Eastern Orthodoxy. I don't know the situation there. I am inclined to give her more credit because she acknowledges the reasons we'd expect the facts on the ground to be different. On the other hand, she pattern matches to someone who treats the other sex's read of the vibes as a core part of the problem and her own sex's read as objective truth, which is a common failure mode for analysts of both sexes. So I don't know.
I think it is a mistake to take her analysis for granted and then extrapolate from her niche to the broader church.
But, in any case, the church exists to preach the gospel, to worship God, and to edify believers. None of those goals is really compatible with choosing your members to maximize your impact as a social club. If a church heeds Scripture in choosing its leaders, those will be men who have their acts together, judged by Christian standards rather than by secular ones.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
The kind of people who insist on VIM over an IDE and will argue for days about whether Python private functions should be prefixed with underscore.
My people! If the world loses them, it will be poorer for it.
I am not a professional developer. But in my IT experience, it’s helpful to have a mix of wary skeptics and early adopters for many kinds of technology. Strongarming your skeptics before you have to is a mistake. And while I believe much that I’ve heard about the benefits of coding agents, nobody knows what the final picture will look like. The grumpy old fogeys aren’t prophets, and I am not saying that they are, but they come by their battle scars honestly.
To my recollection, the Romans and Etruscans had similar levels of IE vs EEF genes, but the Romans had an Indo-European language and the Etruscans did not. This may reflect a broader difference between the cultures, but of course their influence on one another was so enormous as to kind of muddle any early differences.
Quick edit: Ah, looks like SS's citation covers that.
Hieronymus
2mo ago
I feel like this week has had a greater than usual number of weird, semi-hostile takes, but more than one have started subthreads that rewarded reading anyway. The initial posts were kind of rough to get through, and I didn’t have anything of value to add, but the other comments made it worth it.
But this sort of effort to milk the lolquokkas, or whatever – and I suspect it’s not the only one this week – poisons the well and erodes my willingness to endure my fellow weirdos’ off-the-wall rants, and that saddens me.
Thank you for all the yeoman’s modding, and for making the effort to make the call regardless. It’s appreciated.
Hieronymus
2mo ago
Everybody is agreeing that the internship looks like the better offer given what you have said here, and I think they’re right. That said, I would put more weight on the particular teams and companies, if you know anything about them. Some teams will actively look to give juniors room to grow, and others will just install them as a cog in the machine and leave them there.
The German state church is to Lutherans as the German R.C. bishops are to Catholics.
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