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This is interesting. It seems like as far as validity is concerned, bishops can self-replicate.
Now I am wondering about the possibility of some bishop (SSPX or mainline) due to some weird circumstance making some pink-haired lesbian a bishop, who then proceeds to consecrate every consenting christened person she runs across a bishop, and so forth. Think of all the mayhem they could wreck -- working in a bakery and randomly transsubstiating rolls in secret (or tetrapacks of supermarket wine), marrying ONS-havers for shits and giggles, baptizing frozen embryos, offering OnlyFans channels with the confession of the sin of lust included (like flights with carbon offset), and so forth.
I mean, as an atheist I am automatically (latae sententiae) excommunicated, but trying to catch the rest of the conditions would be a fun quest. (Personally, I would not throw a shoe at the pope, but all of the rest seem achievable as an illicit but valid priest.)
You can't be excommunicated if you were never Catholic in the first place. If you are a baptized cradle Catholic who lapsed in young adulthood, you are probably excommunicated latae sententiae for apostasy. But if you are just a rando, the Church doesn't claim any authority over you.
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Archbishops Pierre Martin Ngo Dinh Thuc and Carlos Costa Duarte both consecrated a rather lot of people, sometimes for money and sometimes for being asked nicely. The former is mostly known for consecrating traditionalists(and one gay Nazi Spaniard who declared himself pope in a hallucinatory fit and founded a cult, which is mostly schizophrenia today but maintains a few traditional aesthetics) illicitly but those are his less problematic consecrations. Obtaining valid holy orders is done by all manner of people who are dedicated enough, most of them because they're crazy.
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