It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way

JD Flynn makes an excellent suggestion:

The leadership of the Society of St. Pius X has announced this week the names of four priests it intends to consecrate to the episcopacy, and by that, incur the penalty of schism.

We have spent a lot of ink at The Pillar on the SSPX, and we’ll doubtless spill more — in part because we’re watching in real time a new ecclesial rupture unfold, or at least be cemented, and one that comes with maddening insistence that disobedience is really the highest form of obedience.

There is some sense in which the consecration of the new bishops provides a sort of finality to the saga of the SSPX, who have occupied a gray area in ecclesiastical life for several decades. Priests will be consecrated bishops, they will be excommunicated, and the status of the society will more clearly reflect the break of ecclesial communion that goes unspecified in terms like “imperfect communion,” which have been favored by the Vatican in recent years.

The positive effect is that the break will offer Catholics — including the SSPX’s priests — a choice: You’re either obedient to the pope in a moment of black-and-white instruction, or you’ve thrown yourself in with disobedience, because of how you justify it.

That choice may see some SSPX Catholics choose to return to a more normalized sacramental life — especially if the pope seems more open to the liturgical preferences which often lead people to the SSPX in the first place.

But at the same time, the consecrations will have made four bishops who feel no compunction to obey the Supreme Pontiff when he gives them direct orders, and the Church’s ecclesiology is clear that whenever that happens, it’s a crisis.

Which is why I’m a bit surprised the pope hasn’t exercised an additional canonical option. Thus far, the Apostolic See has done all the penal law things that might be expected — issuing warnings with clear consequences, for those involved in the consecrations. I expect that the four announced priests will soon get personal warnings from the pope, outlining the imminent prospect of their declared excommunication, and the consequences thereof.

But if they disobey, they’ll still be bishops, consecrated with the episcopal character of the apostles’ successors, and with all the power that bishops have to ordain.

Except it doesn’t have to be this way.

Canon 841 establishes that “since the sacraments are the same for the whole Church and belong to the divine deposit, it is only for the supreme authority of the Church to approve or define the requirements for their validity.”

This is the canon which confirms that the Church can decree that Catholics can marry validly only according to canonical form, and before a delegated ecclesiastical witness, while other baptized Christians can contract the sacrament of marriage on horseback on the beach, or rappelling off the Sphere in Las Vegas, so long as they observe the civil law on marriage, making a true and recognizable consent to marriage’s essential goods and properties.

The Church sets strict requirements for Catholics who aim to validly contract marriage, because she believes those help to form Catholics to appreciate the sacred character of their marriages. And the Church has the power to do just that.

Which means, insofar as I can tell, that the pope can also decree that Catholic bishops can’t validly consecrate other bishops without a papal mandate. He would likely not want to take that so far as to say that no bishop can consecrate validly without a papal mandate — papal efforts to legislate over the Orthodox would set ecumenism back by about 500 years — but it’s not hard to imagine Catholic episcopal consecrations facing at least the same level of merely ecclesiastical regulation as Catholic marriages.

Now, I can’t be the first person to have conceived of this plan. But the pope hasn’t done it. And there may be good reason. But in case he’s reading it for the first time, I offer only that it’s within his power to do so, and that the canonists at The Pillar would be glad to suggest some colleagues who could draft the decree.