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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:
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.
No, he could not have. Bishops are bishops of dioceses and are consecrated as part of their appointment to a specific job. The job they are being appointed to doesn’t, officially, exist. Bishops are not just sacrament machines.
The ‘they’re not being appointed to a job’ is both the SSPX’s main defense against schism and thé reason these consecrations would never be authorized.
The Vatican’s preference was, from a well placed trad perspective, to wait for Bp Galaretta to die, then watch while Bp Fellay pushes the rest of the SSPX into accepting a deal(before the consecrations Fellay led the pro-regularization faction in thé SSPX and Galaretta was affiliated with the anti, and this is likely why Galaretta was the principal consecrator. Fellay on his lonesome was very very unlikely to agree to additional consecrations without permission), and creating some sort of job necessitating a bishop would probably have been part of that deal.
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Oookay. We're getting into the weeds here, but let's take a shot at it (to mix all the metaphors). Basically, it divides into two questions:
(1) Are Protestant marriages valid? Yes
(2) Are Protestant marriages sacramental? Well, does the denomination in question consider marriage to be a sacrament? Luther, for one, did not (the Reformation in general reduced down the seven sacraments to two or three).
The Church may indeed consider that marriage sacramental under certain conditions:
I don't know enough about the different views in different Protestant denominations to say "marriages in denomination X are sacramental in their view and marriages in denomination Y are not".
The thorny question of "is this marriage between two Catholics licit, valid, both, neither, one or the other?" depends in part on the status of the minister. Marriage is the sacrament that spouses administer but if the priest assisting at the ceremony is not properly ordained, or if the couple are doing what they know is forbidden (as would be the case in defying the Pope and getting SSPX married) then they are breaking the rules (and rules came in due to a lot of confusion during the mediaeval period over "is this person/this couple truly married or not?" If you look at cases during the Tudor period, and not just in England but on the Continent, nobility and royalty were making and breaking marriage alliances based on 'were X and Y pre-contracted or not?').
Break the rules = break the law = illicit.
The "local ordinary" is the bishop of the diocese where the parish in which the marriage is taking place is located. Clearly, if it is being performed by an SSPX priest (who are now excommunicated) then it's not happening with the permission of the bishop and the priest has not been delegated by him.
Would I be correct in assuming that a prior divorce would count as an impediment to the marriage in this case?
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You can totally do this. You're golfing: you've got the ball in the weeds, now you're standing over it to make your shot :)
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The reasoning is that the function of penance, in addition to being a sacrament of God's forgiveness, is also about re-uniting someone who's 'excommunicated' from the Church, which mortal sin brings about, into communion. Committing a sin (except one of the really bad ones) isn't an "excommunication" in the legal sense, but it does mean that taking communion without absolution would be another mortal sin. The point is that a priest who's schismatic or cannot licitly confect the Eucharist (which is a statement of unity with the Church as well as with God) cannot admit people to the table that he can't legally prepare. The legal term is "faculty," which is something that the Pope delegates through the hierarchy. The view is that giving absolution to people is an act of "binding and loosing" delegated by Christ to Peter first and then to the other apostles, along with the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and therefore that the Pope as the successor of Peter is the ultimate arbiter of sins being forgiven.
Of course, I should be clear that while penance is the main way in which Catholicism promises to re-unite sinners with God, it's not necessarily the only way (just the only way in which it can be done formally in order to admit people to communion). If you confess your sins accurately to a priest and do your penance, God promises forgiveness, even if you're not sure how bad you feel about your sins or if your only reason is that you're afraid of the possibility of Hell or you just don't want to be seen by Betty from the parish council asking for a blessing from Father instead of taking communion. God meets people at whatever motive gets them into the confessional.
However, my understanding is that canon law says that even a schismatic priest can provide absolution if someone is dying, because the principle of giving people an avenue for sacramental forgiveness before God is more important in that case than Church law. But someone in danger of death, if there's no priest available, can also make an "act of perfect contrition", which is essentially a personal prayer of repentence for your sins based on love for God in his goodness, and not any self-interested reason, which is obviously a high bar.
I think you could say a lot of the Protestant sinner's prayers are essentially a means of aiming to state perfect contrition -- "Lord, I admit I am a sinner. I need and want Your forgiveness. Your mercy and grace is a gift You offer to me because of Your great love, not based on anything I have done," which is a segment of a sinner's prayer I found in 5 minutes on Google, is not too shabby as a statement of perfect contrition, especially because it talks about the love of God as the ultimate source of divine grace. Ultimately Catholicism doesn't make judgments about who's contrition is perfect and whose is self-interested, because parish priest #3462 can't read minds, so the confessional procedure is the way in which it promises people can both receive God's forgiveness and be re-admitted to the table.
In terms of marriage, the point is that going to a Catholic priest who's not in communion to validate your marriage as a Catholic is an explicit step of having a marriage outside the Catholic Church. Catholics who have Protestant or "we got married in Vegas" weddings also fall under that. Protestants and non-Christians aren't held to the same standard, because they aren't Catholic. Catholics are required to marry under the requirements of canon law, like how a state can declare an unlicensed marriage void because they set the law. Protestants aren't bound because they were never subject to the canon law in the first place; California can't declare your marriage invalid because you got married in Vegas.
Good explanation. I think you touched on, though didn't explicitly mention, one of the teachings about the sacraments: they are emphasized because they work (which in turn we know because God promised that they would), but they are not necessarily the only path to salvation. God is not limited by the sacraments, and if he chooses to work in someone's life outside of them, great! But it can be hard to discern God's will, so the safe approach is to stick to the sacraments.
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My understanding is that "schism" in the Catholic usage means 'breaking away from the church'. It's not division, you don't get two churches. You just get the Church and Not!The!Church.
SSPX, who consider themselves to be defending the true Tradition against unlegitimate encroachment, would never see themselves as a breakaway sect.
The Schism of 1054 begs to differ.
Well, the old school way in which both sides of the east-west schism saw each other was very much, "we are the Church, those schismatics are Not!The!Church."
Things have gotten more relaxed, especially on the Catholic side, but the formal view of Catholicism is "Catholicism is the True Church and the Orthodox should be in communion with us" and the formal view of Orthodoxy, which is much more muddled, is fairly close in most circles to "The Pope is a heretic and a schismatic who altered the creed that Must Not Be Altered and we are the True Church which holds to the true doctrine of the ecumenical councils."
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Fair point. And notably the Eastern church is the only one that the Catholics (at least now) consider a real, proper church on a near-peer level. But I don't think it's representative and certainly SSPX isn't on that level.
The mainstream estimate for the SSPX’s numbers is between a half a million and a million(arguments that this is an overestimate are far more plausible than underestimate arguments). This is bigger than several of the eastern churches considered near-peer by Rome, notably the Church of the East.
Really? Mea culpa, I thought it was maybe 10,000 at the absolute max.
Wiki lists 600,000, and that seems to be a reasonable middle of the road estimate. It’s possible that this is a large overcount, but not by a factor of 60- thé arguments that they’re far smaller than that tend to cluster around 100-200 thousand, not 10k. They have individual Sunday congregations getting quite close to that number.
Well, thanks. It's interesting to learn.
They had 15,000 people at econe- and their members tend to be the poorer traditionalists, so the portion of population which can travel to Switzerland is rather lower than the FSSP’s- which points to a fairly large organization, so I don’t agree with a low count, but the lowest number anyone cites while sober is 100k.
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On a near-peer level, that's true, because they're both Chalcedonian. But there are more than one eastern churches.
The "real, proper church" thing (I assume you're referring to the "Church" vs "ecclesial community" split) has to do with the sacramental priesthood and episcopacy rather than doctrine specifically, and generally most of the Eastern churches are considered to be on the same side of that line. Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, the Church of the East, despite their Christological differences, all have a general sense that priests are performing a liturgical sacrifice of the Eucharist to God, which is the requirement Catholicism sets for being a "Church-Church."
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). Both of these I know are described by modern Anglicans (except Anglo-Catholics, who've always jumped through hoops to try and make Anglican theology more Catholic than it ever was) as explicit steps of separation from Catholic theology and alignment with the continental reformation.
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. Henry VIII was extremely Catholic in theology, and if his six articles had survived the test of time, the world may well be quite different.
Historians who study the history of Anglican sacramental theology agree fairly strongly that the CoE genuinely developed a different understanding of these elements, and so I think Apostolicae curae was a solid interpretation, even if the subsequent "we're not going to call protestant churches "churches" thing just annoyed people.
The main reason SSPX isn't on the same level is they don't want to be -- they want the "we are doing things without the Pope because the Pope is doing heretical things" without the "we are the True Church" baggage, which is obviously rather unstable. Technically speaking, the SSPX also doesn't have "lay members" or even "parishes" -- they have chapels and "people who come to mass here."
If they were to start appointing metropolitan bishops and naming a patriarch, both their self-understanding and the way in which mainstream Catholic doctrine sees them would change dramatically. The Old Catholic Churches are considered to be "Churches," though the woman-bishop thing is a problem. I should also note that the Polish National Catholic Church in the US, formed because of some ethnic tensions between Polish Catholics who felt excluded by other Catholic ethnicities -- the cardinals' desire to elect the Polish Wojtyła as Pope to connect with Polish Catholics didn't come from nowhere -- is considered a Church as well, and they also have a problem with the Old Catholics' woman thing.
That's the one without the wife in a box, yes?
I'm kind of sorry for Cranmer, and kind of not, so I can't resist laughing at him. I think he was honest in his beliefs, but man was he ever a doormat for Henry. Granted, it was 'bow or have your head chopped off' but the speed at which he went 'whatever the king says' is amazing. See his letter about Anne Boleyn where he's 'I'm astonished to hear this story but if the king says it, then okay, it must be so!' and he trots off to the Tower to dissolve the marriage that a just few years back he had worked so hard to legitimate, never mind that he owed his rise to the influence of the Boleyns:
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