If it's an emergency situation/sacrament, and there's a material defect, then I can see God would accept such.
But in a normal situation, the Church provides rules PRECISELY to a) catch any material defects, b) rectify them.
That's why there's an MC who helps the bishop. That's why (normally) there's a co-consecrator. That's why there's witnesses.
If the principle is, "Well, do your best and God will fill in the blanks." then you wouldn't need any of the above.
The famous case of the monastery using apple wine for decades. God should've provided, per your view. But the Church's rules state that all those masses had to be re-done. So I don't see any precedent for your "fill in the gaps" ideal, under normal circuŠ¼stances.
Unless it was such a small matter that the MC missed it, the bishop missed it, the witnesses missed it, the candidate missed it, etc. THEN God would provide, I suppose. But that probably means the mistake was non-essential. Hard to believe that all those people would miss an essential mistake.
So, we're not talking about situations where someone is there and has noticed a defect, and where there would be an obligation to (at least conditionally) re-administer the Sacrament.
I'm not sure where you're emotionalizing this into "Well, do your best." I'm talking about a situation where someone just messed up, due to the tendency for humans to err, someone who WAS trying his best, but nobody happened to catch it.
"All those people" either miss essential mistakes all the time, and there aren't always witnesses who know (despite what Bishop Kelly claimed, there's no such requirement that there be witnesses who know and who pay attention to the essential form so they can testify that it was done correctly).
Simple example. Bishop Williamson routinely administered conditional ordinations and even a consecration (+Vigano), and actual consecrations for a couple of the bishops he consecrated (non-conditonally). Who were "all those people" who should have caught the mistake? And some of the essential forms aren't the easiest Latin, and it's why +Wesbster and +Slupski tripped up, so somehow if the Latin is difficult enough to trip up the consecrator, some layman or some other priest perhaps, who doesn't know Latin better than the bishop in question, would just know that he got it wrong just by hearing it? Sometimes you can't even hear it perfectly, and the closes one to the Rituale would be the MC, who's often a layman with questionable comprehension of Latin.
This has nothing to do with emotional reasons like "well, do your best" or "hard to believe that all those people would miss".
None of this angst here has any bearing on the question at hand, a hypothetical scenario in which a Bishop botches an ordination and the end result would be potentially millions of invalid Sacraments over the decades. I botch the ordination of a priest. I could be expert at Latin and be trying my hardest, but somehow had a mental lapse. I've occasionally done things like throw my laundry into waste basket and my trash into the laundry basket since I'm just a bit distracted. It's called being human. But despite my competence and my best efforts, I botch the ordination of a priest. Then this "priest" is "consecrated" a bishop, and, as bisop, he "ordains" many "priests", and then some of those "priests" go ont to be "bishops" themselves, to ordain more "priests". Again, +Lienart. Let's say he's a Mason and was trying to invalidate ordinations, so he goes ahead and very quickly slurs over a word in the essential form, substituting it with something else, thereby invalidating the essential form, and he did it so slyly that nobody noticed.
Just look at that Mass said by +Cushing for Kennedy's requiemt. Of all those [many thousand] of people, including many priests, well-trained MC and other servers, with microphone and video camera, when +Cushing slurred the words of the consecration of the wine so badly that it was unintelligible ... where were they all correcting him. Perhaps it raised some eyebrows, but many of them felt it was not their place, to, what?, go up there in the middle of Mass to tell +Cushing to repeat the essential form? Or maybe they THOUGHT they heard something but then ... weren't sure that they really heard the error, etc. There can be myriad reasons why it's not "caught" and "corrected".
But there's the other aspect of treating the words as if they're almost some magical incantation. So, the reason for needing the essential form is so that the minister can communicate what he's doing and to disambiguate the matter, and as long as "ah, I see, I get the idea" and you adequately communicated it to someone with common sense, I hypothesize that it suffices for validity.
Topic: A "Bishop" who was a Bishop until this past week... (Read 3704 times)