Fove Precantes Trinitas

Bishop Joseph Vincent Brennan of Fresno is nobody's idea of a liberal, and the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin did not list him with Episcopalians and Lutherans as a co-consecrator of Dr Gregory Kimura. In choir dress as an invited guest, Bishop Brennan stretched out his hand to pray God's blessing upon Dr Kimura while other hands were being laid upon him. A total nonstory. Likewise, Archbishop Flavio Pace was bowing his head and making the Sign of the Cross at the invocation of the Most Holy Trinity by Dame Sarah Mullally. He was not receiving her blessing. What she may have been doing with her own hands at that moment was her own affair. But even if you did not know, then you could guess some of the reactions to both of those occurrences. Set, of course, in a wider, if not exactly deeper, context.

Yet it was in respect of the impossibility of the ordination of women that Pope Saint John Paul II made the most recent assertion of the truth that even the Ordinary Magisterium could sometimes be infallible. In any case, when the Pope, the bishop, or, by the bishop's authority, the parish priest teaches, then that is what he is doing. Teaching. Not "expressing his opinion". And the Church's doctrine on, say, war and peace, or the economic order, is precisely that. Doctrine.

These things are usually open to cautious and qualified reconsideration by the authority that promulgated them or, where applicable, by a higher authority. But they are not suggestions. They are not advice. They are the Teaching of the Church. They are that Teaching as it is ordinarily taught and received. They are the Ordinary Magisterium. Or what do we think that the Pope is giving when he is not defining ex cathedra? Racing tips? What did we think that the minority party at Vatican I thought that all Papal teachings were, never mind their own teachings as bishops? Cocktail recipes? Note also the hallucination that small matters such as war and peace or the economic order were not "faith and morals". O ye of little faith. O ye of little morals. Your longstanding de facto schism is on the cusp of formalisation.