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Time for another news from the original culture war, the religious war. The affair might seem weird and obscure to normies, even well learned and informed normies, but might well turn to be of more importance than any other current habbenings.
The long awaited event, unauthorized conscecration of new bishops by Society of Saint Pius X finally happened, despite papal final warning.
And so did the inevitable response.
Yes, the big holy hammer fell as expected, the most trad catholics that ever tradded are catholic no more. Not only the leadership, but the lay followers too.
No surprise, there are few red lines remaining in today's catholic church, but unauthorized ordination of bishops without papal approval is one of them, and had always been so.
The church always wanted to prevent proliferation of vagrant priests and hobo bishops with no official position just wandering around the countryside and making trouble.
See Code of Canon Law, article 1387
Analogy from the secular world: Imagine army general one day walks into military base, meets private Billy Bob, is impressed and promotes him on the spot. "Billy Bob, you are now general too!"
You would not expect the general getting away with this in any organized military force of the world.
Where is no analogy with secular world is that the ordinations are illicit but valid.
The four new bishops are bishops, with all spiritual powers of bishops, and no one can take them away. They can do anything that bishop can do, including making more bishops, nothing can stop them.
This event can end with reconciliation like the first illicit consecrations in 1988, but this can also be beginning of full counter church arising from SSPX.
There were attempts in modern time, all flopped, even the most successful true trad church is not so important in grand scale of things. But the Vatican has still good reasons to be worried.
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.
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.
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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