Uh, okay...
I wish to comment upon some wise words written by Ambrose on the thread that bears the same title as this one in the "Crisis in the Church" sub-forum:
http://athanasiusofalexandria.blogspot.de/
The Most Reverend Markus Martin Ramolla was ordained to the Holy Priesthood on November 16, 2007 by the Most Reverend Daniel L. Dolan. After working as assistant pastor at St Gertrude the Great Roman Catholic Church, Cincinnati and as pastor of St Clare's, Columbus he established St Albert the Great Roman Catholic Church, Fairfield. He was promoted to the Episcopacy and consecrated by a true Roman Catholic bishop deriving his lineage of consecration from Archbishop Pierre Martin Ngo-dihn-Thuc. In June of 2012 Bishop Ramolla returned to his homeland Germany, Europe. This blog will inform the reader about the Apostolate of bishop Ramolla during the current crisis of the Roman Catholic Church.
Please note that the "parishes" Fr. Ramolla served (St. Clare in Columbus, Ohio and St. Albert the Great in Fairfield, Ohio) no longer exist. He was consecrated by an anonmyous "true Roman Catholic Bishop." He now operates a "Seminary" in Germany from a blogspot.
The point is that disaster seems to follow wherever (the now Bp.) Ramolla goes and it's always someone else's fault when he brings destruction to those he "serves."
Interesting. Aside from all this controversy, I think one point being missed here is how one can be a "pastor" when that office must come from a diocesan bishop.
A loose use of canonical terms can very easily lead to the impression that traditional priests have an office in the Church and authority over Catholics.
The traditional chapels cannot be equated to pre-Vatican churches. They exist only for the emergency at hand, but can never become a parish and have pastors. This crisis should never become a game of "let's pretend."
Yet this movement has become a "game of pretend" or "make believe" – and no one seems to be having any fun...
The
clerici vagi atque acephali – that is, the minor clerics, Priests and Bishops that form part of that anti-modernist resistance which has broken away from the institutional structures of Holy Church – neither have the authority nor competence to present themselves formally as preacher or teachers before the faithful. They can only be “facilitators” who merely witness a process of “clarification of values” – non-authoritative discussion upon principles and the sharing of each individual’s interpretation and practical application of the same – amongst those Catholics whose spiritual welfare they profess to serve. Bereft of valid and legitimate claims to Apostolic succession (
formaliter) – together with the ordinary jurisdiction and Canonical
officio and
missio whereto they are inexorably and indissolubly concomitant – the above clerics cannot pretend to constitute the
Ecclesia docens, nor can they arrogate to themselves in any way whatsoever the privileges and prerogatives proper to the Catholic hierarchy alone. These vagrant and acephalous clerics cannot, therefore, demand the assent of the faithful nor pronounce anything normatively or definitively.
Furthermore, to give the contrary impression to the layfolk – for whom alone the aforementioned clerics may avail themselves only of that jurisdiction which Holy Church supplies in every individual instance necessitated by the
salus animarum fidelium – would be a catastrophic aberration: ultimately leading to the creation of an abortive, pseudo-ecclesiastical entity that hearkens back to the sects whereby the schismatics and heresiarchs of past ages led the faithful astray from the filial devotion and obedience they are ever to pay to the Apostolic hierarchy of Holy Church alone.
Such an aberration ineluctably leads to two consequences that are as much of moment as they are lamentably deleterious: (1) the distortion or outright negation of the hierarchical and Apostolic nature of Holy Church – the most august office of the Supreme Pontiff being both the foundation and crown thereof – and the Catholic understanding of ecclesiastical
magisterium; and, what is more disturbing, (2) the marginalization and bastardization of the ontological dignity bestowed by the Sacrament of Sacred Orders as a peripheral or accidental datum whose value is to be determined as useful or desirable by a novel “Sacramental pragmatism” that ultimately reduces Holy Orders into a ceremonial ornament that can claim only a subjective sacrality. In this the acephalous and vagrant clerics of the extra-institutional traditionalist movement ironically accomplish the same “ecclesiological positivism” whereby the modernists have endeavored to undermine the
sensus Catholicus and
regula Fidei throughout the past four decades.
With the loss of confidence in the institutional structures of Holy Church, and relying solely on fiduciary contractual relationships with individual clerics – more often than not based more on subjective impressions than on objective reality, more on sentiment than on logical cogitation, more on utility gauged by self-serving beneficence than on anything else – which ultimately prove to be all too fragile and ephemeral, the faithful place themselves in great peril. For as soon as these covenantal compacts with individual clerics are exposed to be as artificial and insubstantial as the clerics’ characters or backgrounds – especially if such relationships are based on distortions or outright deceit – then the faithful lose the stability requisite for the cultivation of the interior life. The spiritual detriment of this phenomenon manifests itself in private and public fora of these Catholics’ lives, as is shown in the labyrinthine dynamics of the extra-institutional “traditionalism” with all its scandals, dissensions, doctrinal and moral depravities, and so forth.
Those faithful of this anti-modernist resistance who are blessed with the company of clerics who prove themselves worthy of their credence by their sanctity and probity of life, together the requisite learning to competently and decorously fulfill the onerous duties which they themselves undertook by their own impetus, are not exempt from what has been described. As soon as their fiduciary compact is broken by the disillusionment of discovering a cleric’s fraud or by some contingency which lies beyond the control of human agency – such as separation due to extraordinary circuмstances, illness or death – they must face the harrowing alienation to which they have been abandoned. More often than not, such Catholics succuмb to the puerile credulity which they have mistook for faith and find another cleric to continue the delusion of a “non-institutional church" if not defect from the faith altogether.
Thus, a new
abominatio in desolationem (cf. Dan. cap. xi., 31, cap. xii., 11), or, rather, a new
abominatio desolationis (cf. Dan. cap. ix., 27, S. Matt. cap. xxiv., 15, S. Marc. cap. xiii., 14) has now arisen: not only a Church without a Pope, but a Church that has no need of a Pope to “function.” It is a new and vile form of
fideicide the fruits of which are too painfully obvious to deny, and for the which reason such souls as Padre Pio never entertained the notion of breaking communion from the institutional structures of Holy Church to form acephalous, fragmentary "movements."
Topic: Bishop Slupski (Read 4518 times)