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Post by Pacelli on Feb 11, 2018 13:58:17 GMT -5
I apologize for the length of time in responding to your thoughtful post, but I am back now and will give you my full atttention once again. Thank you for your prayers as well, I appreciate it.
INPEFESS wrote: No problem, I have no issue with keeping this discussion focused on supplied jurisdiction. I do think that the concepts are intertwined in regards to this crisis, and we may be forced to revisit habitual jurisdiction.
INPEFESS wrote:
The issue with this analogy is that you are making the island the entire world, and it is impossible for the mutiny on the ship (the entire Catholic world) to succeed. The diocese of Rome as a local diocese cannot in toto defect, and the successors of the Apostles cannot as a body defect. Both of these groups must remain intact until the end of time.
Therefore, throughout this crisis, the Catholic Church has remained essentially unchanged as an organization to what it was in 1960,1950, 1940 and so forth. All essentiall characteristics, including living office holders for the essential offices were alive, and have been alive.
Another aspect to this crisis, is that the mutineers have elected an illegal captain, who most of the crew believe is the legitimate captain. In this case, the usurper captain has appointed office holders to posts within the ship.
INPEFESS wrote:
As stated above, I contend that this scenario could not happen to the universal Church. If it did, the Church would have failed.
INPEFFESS wrote:
If if you are only talking about a specific ship crashing into a specific uncharted island, the scenario is possible, I won’t argue otherwise, but it seems to me that your analogy is dealing more with the universal Church, the captain being the Pope, etc.
I believe it would never be possible for a scenario such as this to happen in the Catholic Church. The existing offices in the Church are sufficient to care for the faithful. As I wrote above, these offices are capable of being filled even in the absence of a Pope through two ways, one of which is jurisdiction being supplied to the antipope, (common error), and the other is by local appointment of regional hierarchical bishops, also supplied through common error by the presumed will of the last Pope.
Fwiw, a material apostolic succession is not apostolic succession and does not constitute it. It merely continues the holy orders, and does not constitute the mark of the Church to which we profess in the Creed. The Church that we identify through the four marks is one with living apostolic successors, those with both the orders and the mission from the Church, which in this case is (habitual) jurisdiction over a local flock, by holding an episcopal office. The Church that exists without all of these marks is not the Catholic Church, and any Church which lacks apostolic successors cannot by definition be the Catholic Church, it may merely be a close look-alike.
More later....
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Post by Pacelli on Feb 11, 2018 16:12:21 GMT -5
INPEFESS wrote:
This really gets to the crux of the matter in question: can a retired bishop on his own initiative consecrate bishops and ordain priests that will not have an office in the Church, will not be trained by the authority of the Church, and will not have a mission to use their sacramental powers within the Church? I contend that such an idea is utterly foreign to Catholicism, as it lacks any support from any approved Catholic source, Papal, episcopal, theologian, canonist, or even precedent in Church history.
Should Catholics turn to dangerous novelties when sound Catholic solutions are present and achievable?
INPEFESS wrote:
No one may be empowered to use supplied jurisdiction, it’s supplied when the condition are met, and if the conditions are not met, the act is not supplied.
Its worth saying here that both +Lefebvre and +Mendez were not acting as successors of the Apostles when they consecrated the traditional bishops. They were both retired bishops and did not possess jurisdiction, meaning that they at they time did not possess the apostolic succession. They did not appoint the men they consecrated to an office, they merely consecrated them, giving them episcopal orders, not an office. A man with episcopal orders without an office has no status within the Catholic Church greater than a layman. It is the office that matters, not the orders.
INPEFESS wrote:
But, this has been my point, mistakes were made, grave mistakes. and we are paying a great price for those mistakes. When I say this, I am not acting like some imperial overseer who in hindsight is ready to pound on the Catholics in the 70’s. I acknowledge that the time was one of extreme confusion, and and I am not judging Lefebvre, but objectively speaking, and I mean no disrespect to him, Thuc, Mendez and Castro de Mayer, but I will say it bluntly, none of them knew what they were doing, and they all winged it.
They all acted out of a vague “state of necessity,” but none of them ever justified their actions with sound theology or law. It was made up as it went, with Thuc being the most outrageous out of all of them.
Now, we have hundreds of traditional bishops roaming the world, all representing varying flavors of theology or responses to the crisis, each who is autonomous, many who lead organized structures answerable to no one. These bishops enter any diocese at will and many unsuspecting Catholics believe that these bishops have an episcopal authority and are not merely “sacramental bishops,” and the bishops do nothing to correct these mistakes. Many of these bishops and even priests self-identify as pastors, this fact can be verified by a simple internet search of the varying groups bulletins.
This edifice all grew out of the small seed of the “need” for the sacraments, but as we have seen, it didn’t end there. The Catholic Church is built on authority, and the vacuum of it always gets filled, if not by those who have the God-given authority to lead, then it falls to usurpers who take that authority unto themselves.
INPEFESS wrote:
If The Catholic hierarchy who were faithful in the 1970’s acted in accordance with Catholic principles, theology, law, and precedent, the sheep would have never been left abandoned. Does one mistake justify another, and then another, and then more after that, to try to fix the initial mistake? The traditional response was a mistake from the start. Lefebvre s idea of building a seminary and ordaining vagus priests to preserve the sacraments in response to the new heretical sect was a novel and untraditional idea. Catholics bought into this idea, as all were hungry for the sacraments, but everyone ignored the elephant in the room: how can such of unapproved seminaries and mission-less priests be Catholic?
To justify this, Catholics kept moving the goalposts, justifying more and more, the establishment of schools, churches, more seminaries, orders of nuns, the consecration of bishops, new splinter organizations, annulments, and on and on it goes. These new “sacramental bishops and priests” have morphed into quasi-Catholic churches doing everything the Catholic Church did.
INPEFESS wrote:
What you are presenting here is a false dilemma. It’s the tradituonal response verse the modernist sect. I contend that there is a third choice, if a baker is replaced by another who bakes a disgusting malformed cake, and then to fix the mess another baker comes who who quickly and haphazardly bakes another cake that looks good, but is still all wrong, must the customer choose between only those two cakes? The customer then demands that the cake be made right, that all of the correct ingredients and process be used, so it not only looks right, but is made right according to the original recipe. This is the cake to which I am speaking.
The Catholic Church, like the baker and cake, must stick with its Constitution. The new sect broke from the Church, and the traditionalists, like the bad baker tried to build something that looked like the original Church, but was in fact something new, that did not follow the original plan. The response, because it was not thought through carefully, created a new edifice that poses new problems and dangers distinct from those of the sect.
It is only when Catholics recognize the dangers of both the sect and the ill conceived response will they be safe, as dangers exist in both.
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Post by Pacelli on Feb 11, 2018 16:26:43 GMT -5
If I may say one thing before continuing: to see what I am saying, I would urge you INPEFESS and all readers, to act as though you never met any traditionalists. Think like a Catholic who was alive in the 1950’s and 60’s and your books are the approved catechisms and theology manuals in print prior to this crisis. You have not yet read or have been influenced by traditionalist ideas on the “state of necessity,” traditionalist application of epikieia and supplied jurisdiction to this crisis, etc.
Think only as a Catholic who is a member of diocese X, and you want to react as a Catholic, thinking clearly and basing all of your responses on clear thinking in applying Catholic teaching and law. It is only through this method of detangling oneself from traditionalist literature and ideas that one can see through their mistakes, and get one’s bearings straight.
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Post by Pacelli on Feb 12, 2018 14:29:44 GMT -5
INPEFESS wrote:In regards to apostolic succession, only bishops matter, as the bishops with jurisdiction are the successors of the apostles. Priests, although important in the Church, are not successors of the apostles. How do you know that the Church intends “for the salvation of souls doesn’t mean that she wills that their materially apostolic faculties remain impotent and useless in extending her essence to those who need her most as well as fulfilling—albeit to a much more limited, yet always noble, degree—her intention to realize her divine purpose: the salvation of souls.” What if all male members of this forum, seeing the dire need of Catholics for the sacraments decided to get themselves ordained and consecrated as bishops, would the Church also intend for this action? Why or why not? If being sent by the Church doesn’t matter, then any layman can argue as such, the principle is clear, is it not? Just to be clear, the traditionalist principle is this: any bishop on his own initiative can consecrate any man of his choosing to exist in the Church without title or office and roam the world in any territory of his choosing using the sacramental powers of his orders, including ordaining more priests and consecrating more bishops as he sees fit. The concept of titles and offices are not lrelevant in traditionalist theology, the structures of traditionalism are built upon the will of the traditional bishops and priests. Whatever they decide is always justified as the sacramental and pastoral needs of laypeople need to be met. INPEFESS wrote:This is not accurate, the appeal to canons 2261 and 2284 could go on for a long time. The Code does not place time limitation on the requests for the sacraments by the laity. This of course presumes the use of only the sacramental powers of these men, not acts which require jurisdiction. INPEFESS wrote: But, God did establish laws when He created His Church. He didn’t establish a Presbytarian style church in which all decisions and structure would remain under local control, He established a hierarchical Church, with the Pope as the ultimate leader, bishops governing assigned specific territories in union with their head, and priests assigned by these bishops who would care for a parish. The concept of the necessity of bishops and priests needing a mission that is given by God through the intermediary of the pope or bishops of the Church is part of the Apostolic Tradition, therefore Divine Law. I recently made a post on some of the references HERE
Traditionalist theology does not deal with this concept it, it ignores it. You will not find any traditional literature addressing this problem, they skirt around it with non-sequitors. Unfortunately, the only Catholics making any noise on this matter has been the home-aloners, who although undertanding this issue, have made unwarranted conclusions which have only discredited them in the eyes of most even when they were right on some matters. INPEFESS wrote:How is can the traditional bishops have formal apostolic succession to begins with when they possess no jurisdiction, an essential component to making one a successor of the apostles? Its not that the Divine law is prohibiting these men from becoming a successor of the Apostles, it’s just that they do not meet the definition. They do not possess an office in the Catholic Church, they do not exercise jurisdiction that the office gives them the right to do, ergo, they are not successors of the apostles. If these men have no office, have no mission given them by the Catholic Church, then they are no greater in status than you, I, or any other layman. More later....
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Post by Pacelli on Feb 13, 2018 12:40:27 GMT -5
INPEFESS wrote: I agree with you, God wills for us to have the sacraments, and the actions of the enemies are interrupting His Will, (with his permission of course).
This is not really the crux of our disagreement. What I am contending is that traditionalism, as it has existed from the 1970’s, with vagus bishops and priests, along with unapproved “seminaries” is also not part of God’s plan. It’s a deviation from the Catholic Church, it never should have happened, and in my opinion, in many ways has made things worse in the Church, not better.
God did not reveal to us that the traditional model fits within the Catholic Church. It’s a made up idea that has no support in theology or law. The leaves of the tree are supposed to be fed by branches of the tree, and those branches are meant to be part of the tree as designed by God, the tree He meant for us, not an artificial branch, that was forced to grow onto the tree.
INPEFESS wrote:
But, God did not abandon the structure of the Church as designed by Him. The office holders in the Church who kept the Faith, and who had the obligation to act either failed to act, or for the few who did act, acted in a novel manner, and did not take the crisis head using a Catholic response, as they should have.
God does not force His commissioned representatives to do as He Wills. He doesn’t make any of us obedient robots. He gave us the blueprints for the Catholic Church 2000 years ago, we know what it looks like, and for the office holders, their duty is to operate within the plan of God, not change the blueprints to make a new model that fits during this crisis.
So, in your anology, of course, the music should go on, God wills for that, but if the music system was created directly by God and He ordered that the system must only be set up a certain way, is not dangerous to tinker with that system, since it is not playing as it should? Every action to fix the system in a new way that deviates from the system set up by God is in effect setting up a new system not identical with His system and is creating something that was not there before, a novelty.
To take this further, God left ways to fix the system if the music stopped, that could fix the system in accordance with the systems original design. When the music was disrupted in the 1970’s those commissioned to repair the system did not use the approved troubleshooting techniques as given by the Designer and Creator, and deviated with novel fixes that re-wrote the Bluetooth system making it something different than the one given by God. The music from the new system sounds terrible, and is full of static, unlike the original model.
More later...
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Post by Pacelli on Feb 13, 2018 13:40:58 GMT -5
INPEFESS wrote:
In these cases, the bishops in question, followed by the priests under those bishops are illicitly filling sees or posts respectively, that exist within the Church. The people living in these situations believe these bishops and priests are their legitimate clergy. This is why it can be argued that this is a classic case of jurisdiction being supplied due to common error. The same argument applies to the acts of appointments of the antipope, fwiw.
Even though the case being examined is a different one from our own, he gives schismatic clergy more leeway than traditional priests are being given in this discussion. Take notice of the two principles to which the sources appeal in answering this question (italicized above): (1) the greater good of souls and (2) an appeal to the mind of the Church in accomplishing this end by the absence of any "act on the part of the authority of the Church which can be interpreted as a deprivation of those powers." The difference in cases between schismatics and traditional bishops is that the schismatics claim an office, and are believed by those under their “jurisdiction” to indeed posesss that office. The traditionalists clearly, and publicly do not have an office in the Church, so what basis is there for jurisdiction being supplied to one known for not having it for his acts?
INPEFESS wrote:
The two cases are distinct, as I mentioned above. If I, right now, find traditionalist bishop X, get ordained and consecrated as a bishop, which is licit according to traditionalist theology, would my jurisdictional acts (dispensing Catholics, training and ordaining more priests, hearing confessions and giving faculties to priests to do so, etc.) then attract the jurisdiction of the Church? Why or why not? If not, on what basis using the traditionalist interpretation of “necessity knows no law,” can you argue this?
more later....
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Post by Pacelli on Feb 13, 2018 14:18:22 GMT -5
I would like to add that I just re-read Canon Mahoney on the matter of oriental schismatic priests jurisdiction for confessions. Mahoney concedes that the arguments of other authorities is as I stated it above, that jurisdiction could be supplied to these priests due to common error, but then proceeds to argue that the jurisdiction of these priests is not supllied, rather it is habitual, as the jurisdiction for confessions has not been withdrawn from their Patriarchs and bishops by the Church.
I remain unsettled about this line of argumentation, and favor the view of the other authorities who argue in favor of supplied jurisdiction for these acts. But, as Canon Mahoney is a respected authority, and others of repute agree with him, I will say it is at least a tolerated opinion.
Either way, however, whether one argues that the jurisdiction for these priests is habitual due to unrevoked jurisdiction possessed by usurpers of these offices which are occupied by schismatics, or whether these acts are supplied on a case by case basis due to the common error of the people that these schismatics bishops and patriarchs of the east actually occupy these offices,neither position is the same as the case of the traditional bishops, and due to that support for jurisdiction for these bishops, (habitual of supplied) cannot be found in the case of the eastern schismatics.
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Post by Pacelli on Feb 15, 2018 13:33:48 GMT -5
I have misplaced a book (The Jursiidction of the Confessor), that I wanted to re-read prior to continuing my answers. It will be found soon, hopefully, and then I will continue.
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Deleted
Past Member
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Post by Deleted on Feb 21, 2018 13:16:28 GMT -5
Pacelli, I will wait for you to finish responding to the rest of my post before I reply.
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Post by Pacelli on Feb 21, 2018 18:14:16 GMT -5
Pacelli, I will wait for you to finish responding to the rest of my post before I reply. Sounds good, I have been trying to find the book that will help me answer the next section of your reponse. You have clearly put a lot of time, effort, and thought into your post to me, and you deserve that to be reciprocated, so finding this source is important to me. Its very frustrating to lose a book, among thousands of books, so hopefully I will find it soon, and finish my response.
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