Lover of Truth is quite correct in pointing out that I include all traditional Catholics as part of the Church, regardless of their level of comprehension regarding the present state of the Church. But one must genuinely be a Catholic in order to be a member of the Church. The Novus Ordo has visibly indicated their repudiation of any real claim to Catholic membership by expressing their different "law of belief" in the form of their different "law of prayer," namely the Novus Ordo service (it being not right to call it a "Mass" even should some instance of it attain sacramental validity) itself. That is the actual visible and legal demarcation between Catholic and not, between the Novus Ordo and Catholic religions, respectively.
I do not have much time for blogs and as such there is much going on there I know nothing about. It seems many new Catholics, with little else to turn to for fellowship, often begin by joining in on the various blogs, usually with many mistaken assumptions which time may hopefully flush out, as each has quite a learning curve to go through as they discover the fullness of Catholic doctrine, and also where and how that doctrine (and Church) is transmitted today.
Hopefuly most of them also find a place to go to Church, even if some considerable travel may be required, and from there get their souls fed as Mother Church has always done. Then in time that becomes their focus as the world of blogs becomes irrelevant. But others, not finding or willing to attend such regularly, have only the blogs to go by, and then usually end up moving on to other interests. The upshot of all that is that virtually everyone on the blogs is new to it all and as a result much of what transpires here consists of the slightly less ignorant attempting to instruct the slightly slightly less ignorant, all to little effect. It is also why I cannot be bothered to pay much attention to what goes on in the blogs, such that whole obsessions can come and go without my knowlege or interest.
But I do have the benefit of having been around the block a few times and simply having been a true and practicing Catholic longer than some of the folks here have even been alive. Not that I had the good fortune to have been there at the beginning as some real old timers who to this day have never owned a computer, but at least I had the respect to seek out as much as possible of what had gone on before my own discovery of the Church, and to know the whole story, which I captured and wrote into my book.
One thing us old timers should be able to remember (if old age forgetfulness hasn't taken over) is what scrupulous and great lengths the bishops who provided for the future of the Church went to ensure that the bishops they created were not only sacramentally valid (any historically schismatic succession could have provided that) but also lawful and rightfully endowed with the Church's canonical mission to preach the gospel to the whole world and baptise them into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
It is an amply docuмented fact that many of the Church's bishops throughout history have been consecrated in the best interests of the Church but without any mandate from a pope, and some even in the absence of a pope. It is also amply clear that all the provisions against "unauthorized" consecrations were (obviously) not about prohibiting all of these bishops who have one and all always been accepted by the Church, but rather about preventing bishops who might get criminally consecrated against the interests of the Pope and the Church. If it is done, whether for selfish purposes, or at the direction of secular or other non-ecclesial powers, then that is quite a different thing of course. But to sustain the Church when that which most mistook for the Church was abandoning both its sacramental validity and its apostolic mission (along with abandoning the Catholic Faith and practice), this cannot be but completely and absolutely at the express will of the Pope, where the Church to have one at the given moment. For otherwise the Church itself truly would vanish. When Archbishops Thuc and Lefebvre and Bishops de Castro-Meyer and Mendez each provided for the future of Holy Mother Church in this manner, they did not act alone, nor did they act at the will of secular princes or anyone else, nor from any selfish interests, but strictly with this exact purpose.
In all fairness and objectivity I must point out that such criticisms as I have been refuting in the cases of our authorized traditional bishops and priests indeed WOULD apply in the case of any cleric who can only trace their priesthood or episcopacy to the historically schismatic lines such as the East Orthodox, the Old Catholics, the Nestorian church, the Duarte line, and the like indeed do lack any canonical mission. In the case of these (with one or two exceptions I know of where such clerics subsequently applied to the Church, abjured the errors of their line, and whom the Church regularized) the only "jurisdiction" any of them could rightly, or at least with any real assurance, lay claim to really would be ecclesia supplet and epikeia and Canons 209 and 2216.
Newcomers to Catholic Tradition (and who most populate these sorts of blogs) are often understandably ignorant of this historical distinction, and of the actual authorized and ecclesial source of our traditional bishops and priests, and so it becomes easy for the nefarious ones of whom I wrote to try to fool newcomers into lumping one category in with the other, as if both were equally lacking a canonical mission.
The goal of all such legislation by the Church was to protect the Church from bishops and priests empowered to work the sacraments but who would use them in any way against the interests of the Church, whether to advance a heresy or simply a schism (which has always lead to at least some actual heresy, interestingly enough). When Thuc, Lefebvre, de Castro-Meyer, and Mendez did what they did, their actions could not be, and were not, percieved as "schismatic" by anyone, with the lone solitary exception of those of the Novus Ordo persuasion, and furthermore only those particular ones (not all of even them by any means) of that persuasion who actually believed in the Novus Ordo religion while excluding Catholicism, whether itself alone specifically or together with all the other religions that Novus Ordoism actually "canonized."
In other words, our bishops and their priests were "schismatic" only from the specialized and unique point of view of those who took Paul VI and John Paul II to be not only real popes, but real popes even acting within the scope of a real pope's authority when deliberately attempting to cut off all possible valid succession wherever provided for, which was actually only provided for by these four bishops as all others were being rendered invalid through defective form, matter, intention, or minister. No Catholic ever saw our bishops as schismatic, except accidentily through the propaganda and deceptions of the Novus Ordo. Hence those who pertinaceously continue to dismiss our bishops - the only real bishops left who truly can and do belong to Holy Mother Church as authorized bishops carrying forward the apostolic mission Christ imparted to His Church - in the face of all that I have presented as being mere "schismatics" in that demonstrate their (at least latent, but) current affiliation with the Novus Ordo. It is only the non-Catholic non-popes who have refused to recognize our bishops and priests; no realy Catholic Pope could have done anything but have the highest praise and support, for without their action the Church really would have no future.
By the way, there are those who think there must be some remaining bishop(s) who might have been appointed by a true pope and as such might possibly have some sort of superior claim to that of our bishops. There are some small few dozen or less bishops who do date from the time of Pope Pius XII, but they are all extremely old and rapidly dying off, and none of those remaining has proven willing to return to the Church (by supporting Tradition) that once made them bishops. Once the last of them dies off (itself not far away in view of the greatly advanced age of all of them) there will be no bishops left who have been selected and approved by any living pope, but it is a matter of dogma that the Church must go on and will, clear up to the final moment of Christ's return.
Topic: Jurisdiction, Plants and Divided Clergy and Laity (Read 6955 times)