Separate Ways

Although one never quite knows, no one really expects any women or other surprises on the forthcoming list of new Cardinals. Pope Francis has only been in office for eight months. But the kite has been flown.

Complainants will need to be directed to the creation of a Personal Prelature for Opus Dei, of the special Statutes for the Neocatechumenal Way, of a Pontifical Commission for those who did not wish to follow Lefebvre into schism, of the arrangements in Campos, of a universal permission to celebrate the Extraordinary Form, and of the Personal Ordinariates. Next to those, the appointment of women as Lay Cardinals will be very small canonical beer indeed.

Not only, although primarily, will the Princesses of the Church drive the self-appointed voices of Catholic womanhood up the wall by their identities and by their articulation of Catholic Truth, but the reaction to their very existence will be yet another exposure of the fact that the Lefebvrists are irreconcilable.

What, then, will become of these bearers of the spirit of Jansenism and Gallicanism?

The rise of Unitarianism among the English Presbyterians, the Dutch Remonstrant Brotherhood, the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland, the Socinian 'New Licht' within the early Free Church of Scotland, and the descent of New England Puritanism into little more than "the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, and the Neighborhood of Boston": all alike are stark and timely warnings of the perils of hyper-Augustinianism.

Efforts at Catholicism-without-the-Pope, always of the view that they would in principle accept the Papacy if it did this or that of the schismatics' own haeresis, have similarly sorry histories, past and present.

Doctrinal error (Kenoticism and Universalism are both endemic even among supposedly traditional Anglo-Catholics, and an official Ordinariate publication has already propagated at least one of them), political extremism of various kinds, sexual deviancy and the attendant cultural features, an obsession with the minutiae of ceremonial, alternatively a disregard for the importance of such matters, a retreat from normal life: it is all happened before.

The Old Catholics, with their Jansenist and Gallican roots, have combined both fates. So, too, did the Petite Église of always Gallican and often Jansenist dissidents from the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and from the Napoleonic Concordat.

Like a section of the Russian Old Believers, the Petite Église ended up with no bishops and thus no priests, so that instead the local congregation chose its leading layman to administer Baptism and to lead a service of popular non-sacramental devotions. Slow but inexorable decline followed.

The Old Catholics are not far from that. The Lefebvrists are not quite there yet, but they are only a couple of generations behind the Old Catholics, if that.

Or else they will apply their purported argument from necessity to the conferral of sacramental Ordination by certain abbots, including one in England, to whom Medieval Popes had granted that privilege, which the four Cistercian Proto-Abbots were exercising without hindrance in respect of the Diaconate into the seventeenth century.

Of course, they would simply ignore the need for a special exercise of the Papal power for the valid exercise of this potestas ligata contained, like that to confirm, in the priestly power of consecration. If, that is, any such potestas ligata exists at all. It would exist to them if they said so, and woe betide anyone who said otherwise.

In either event, their adoption of a presbyterian or a congregational polity alongside the advanced liberal theology of those who were once Augustinian, but who had had no Magisterial restraint on their pursuit of that system to whatever fallacious conclusion, will conform to a very easily recognisable historical pattern.

As will, and as already does, their accumulation of theological, political, sexual and general oddballs who believe that there ought to be a Pope, so long as he agrees with them. In the absence of which, they just do as they like, and scorn everyone else. The line between the most exaggerated devotees of Saint Augustine and the perennial re-emergence of Donatism is always a very, very fine one, indeed.

It is an old, old story. The Lefebvrists are about to become, and are already becoming, only the latest in the long, long line of those who have acted it out. With our without women as Cardinals.