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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.
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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