The comments in the previous blog raise the interesting question of whether the ordination of an unbeliever is valid. That is, if I man was baptized, but has lost his faith and seeks ordination anyway, is he validly ordained a priest or consecrated a bishop?
In two cases (including Rudy Kos) I have come across memos that indicated the chanceries in Dallas and Santa Fe considered asking the Vatican to nullify the ordination of priests.
As far as I know this request was not carried through, nor were the grounds specified. I presume the grounds were fraud: Rudy Kos wanted to be ordained solely to get access to boys. The other priest has had a checkered career as a Jew and as Buddhist. One does wonder whether he was ever a Christian.
A marriage can be declared null: that is, it never existed, on such grounds as insanity, fraud, or consanguinity. The grounds for nullifying the ordination of a priest would presumably include fraud or insanity. But nullifying the ordination of a priest would mean declaring that all the masses he celebrated were not masses and all the confessions he heard were not sacramental confession. This would create an enormous crisis of conscience for many of the laity.
But I wonder whether at least some of the sexual abusers were not indeed frauds: that is, they either were not believers at all or sought ordination for evil purposes. Can such a man really be ordained? Was Maciel ever really a Christian? Can you become a priest without being a Christian?
Father Michael Koening
It leads one to ask some uncomfortable questions. For example, what of the communists who inflitrated the priesthood (Catholic and Orthodox) in the Soviet Union and other countries (including, if we can believe Bella Dodd, the US and other western states)? What if some of them became bishops? We can rule out the silly idea of Pope JP II’s media man that homosexuals could not be validly ordained (imagine what a mess that idea would lead to given the Church’s history!) But one does wonder about atheists who accept ordination simply to advance an anti-Christian agenda. I would be interested in reading other peoples’ views. IF it was something of this nature that was warned about in any part of the “third secret of Fatima” that remains unpublished, one can understand why it would be kept under wraps.
Sardath
“… they either were not believers at all or sought ordination for evil purposes. Can such a man really be ordained? Was Maciel ever really a Christian? Can you become a priest without being a Christian?”
These are excellent questions, and I think there are good and entirely orthodox arguments for answering them in the negative. See my second comment under “The Quality of Mercy” below.
Mary
One related factor is that there is the canonical principle of “ecclesia supplet” – the Church supplies, when something is innocently wrong or missing in the concrete celebration of a sacrament. However, I do know that Baptisms that are performed invalidly on purpose (for instance, with the “Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier” formula) are required to be re-done. Still, in the case of the individual receiving the sacrament, I am sure that God supplies!
Sardath
At least as it is used in the Code of Canon Law (canon 144), “ecclesia supplet” is a remedy for innocent defects of jurisdiction. I don’t think we can safely assume that it automatically covers other kinds of errors–especially the failure of the recipient to be properly disposed, which is what is really at issue here.
There is a good discussion of this issue at:
http://canonlawblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/we-need-to-be-careful-with-notion-of.html
Mary
I was referring to the sacramental graces that ought to be received by a person who is innocently receiving an invalid sacrament from someone who is invalidly ordained. In other words, the sins are forgiven, the communion graces given.
Sardath
Mary, you may well be right about this. But if so, then that raises an even larger issue: If anyone acting in good faith can be assured of receiving the grace of the sacrament they thought was being celebrated, even if it isn’t actually a sacrament at all (e.g., either because it was performed improperly or because the minister of the sacrament lacked the power to administer it in the first place), then it would seem that there is no real need for validly ordained priests–just good actors who have learned their parts sufficiently well to fool the faithful into sincerely believing them to be priests, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
In fact, it would not even be necessary that these pseudo-priests pretend to be Catholic, or that their pseudo-sacraments be celebrated in a Catholic church; any Protestant pastor who did a good job of stirring up honest conviction in his own flock should be able to do the same. The Church already admits that Protestants can receive the graces of Baptism and Matrimony without recourse to a validly ordained priest; but until now it has maintained that the graces of the Eucharist, Confirmation, Reconciliation, and Anointing of the Sick are dependent on the celebration of those sacraments by a validly ordained priest. If that should turn out not to be the case, then by the same logic that applies to Baptism and Matrimony all those other sacramental graces should be available to Protestants in their own churches as well. The only sacramental grace that would then be lacking to Protestants is Orders, and that would no longer matter very much anyway because valid ordination would no longer be necessary to the successful exercise of the priestly role.
Somehow I don’t think Rome would be very happy with this line of thought.
Bill deHaas
A couple of responses – typically in canon law when they run into this type of situation, they will retroactively declare that the person or sacrament was valid but illicit.
On another subject, you need to dig deeper into the files on Rudy Kos – he entered Holy Trinity Seminary and the vocation director, rector, etc. have witness statements from his wife (marriage was annulled on the grounds that Kos could not consummate the marriage and his “wife” discovered that he had abused members of his own family). For whatever reasons (lost paperwork, God knows what else), the “wife” was seen as non-0bjective and biased and Kos was accepted to the seminary. His behaviors in the seminary raised many red flags; yet he was still ordained and placed in a number of assignments. In 1986, the diocese in June had a priests’ meeting in which Doyle, Mouton, and Peterson presented their report…..rumors were already swirling about Kos and his behaviors – at that time assigned to St. Luke’s in Irving under the pastor, Daniel Clayton.
It would be hard to understand how the diocese or seminary could appeal to Rome to invalidate Kos’ ordination – every person I named above plus diocesan consultors (including a canon lawyer who is now bishop of Victoria, TX), the rector (Michael Sheehan, later bishop of Lubbock and now of Santa Fe, NM) signed off and approved every step of this man’s formation.
If you truly wanted to invalidate someone, need to take a hard look at the folks who have operated Holy Trinity Seminary since the late 1970’s – the percentage of each ordination class that has allegations against it, etc.