We the faithful, the same faithful who financially support the operations of the SSPX and actually provide the canonical justification for the operation of all your clergy, clergy who have no jurisdiction other than with regard to what's necessary to meet the grave spiritual needs of the faithful who request the Sacraments from them, as supplied by the Church only for these emergency purposes, we in turn therefore have a right to insist upon and demand that the SSPX send us valid priests, priests who do not labor under the positive doubt created by the altered Conciliar Rites for the Ordination [sic] of Priests and the Consecration [sic] of Bishops. Even if there (may seem to be) less doubt regarding the Rite of Ordination, few priests remain who were not "ordained" in this New Rite by putative bishops who in turn had been "consecrated" in the New Rite of Episcopal Consecration.
Principle
While the SSPX have made public statements and videos arguing in favor of the validity of these New Rites, barring some defect in the intention of the one confecting [or attempting to confect] these Sacraments, and you can continue to argue for hours until turning blue in the face, the simple fact remains that the BURDEN OF PROOF rests squarely with those maintaining the validity of the Sacraments, since any Sacraments that labor under positive doubt must be treated in the practical order for all intents and purposes as if they are invalid ... except that the faithful may avail themselves of these in danger of death when no alternative can be found. In other words, we are not required to prove them to be invalid, but it is, rather, you who are required to prove that there does not so much as exist a reasonable positive doubt ... and that's a burden you are in no position to meet, having neither irrefutable arguments nor the authority to impose your conclusions on consciences.
By way of basic definition, it is a simple matter to establish positive doubt. Fundamentally, if you can point to something concrete, as opposed to the "what if" types of doubts, that suffices to establish POSITIVE vs. "negative" doubt. Examples of negative doubt would include scenarios like: "I could not hear Father pronounce the words of absolution during Confession. What if he forgot? What if he got them wrong?" Those "what if" doubts are negative doubts. But when the faithful can point to: "Look, they changed what Pope Pius XII had authoritatively declared to be the essential form of the Sacraments." ... that alone suffices to constitute positive doubt. At times, SSPX have added the novel qualifier of insisting that there must be "serious" positive doubt, where you can then unilaterally decide when this arbitrary and rather subjective threshold for "seriousness" has been met, thereby serving as your own referee, as it were, in the debate.
Now, the SSPX have attempted to gaslight the faithful who consider these Orders to labor under positive doubt as [mostly] "sedevacantists", a charge that is at once untrue as it is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Now, normally, when a legitimate Pope has promulgated Sacraments, that would suffice to ensure their validity, due to the infallibility of the Church's Universal Discipline ... except for the fact that the SSPX have effectively denied this prerogative of legitimate papal authority and have made this denial the veritable cornerstone for their entire theological position regarding the crisis ... and of course this simply kicks the can down the road by begging the question that the V2 papal claimants are in fact legitimate popes.
I will briefly discuss here the false and disingenuous arguments being made by the SSPX in their attempts to assure the faithful that the Sacraments do not labor under any positive doubt, and then touch upon the motivations for these false arguments.
Ordination to the Priesthood. Ah, look, they only changed ONE "two-letter" word in Latin. I had been under the impression that the SSPX seminaries taught Latin, and that this particular single word "ut" would have caused much consternation among those struggling with the language as it generally leads to the challenge of understanding the subjunctive mood, and I had also been under the impression that your seminaries inculcated the principles of Aristotelian logic and ontology, the chief fundamentals of which rest on the notion of causes. If you but dust off your Latin dictionary and look up the word, it basically means "so that", where what comes after it is the effect of what comes before it. Interestingly, when Pope Pius XII authoritatively taught about the essential form of Holy Orders, he stated that of the essence are invocation of the Holy Ghost and the unequivocal designation of the Sacramental EFFECT, you know, the "effect" that usually comes after that pesky little two-letter word. In the old Rite, you have an invocation of the Holy Ghost, being invoked clearly IN ORDER TO [ut] make the ordinand into a priest. In the new, you have an invocation of the Holy Ghost. Stop. That's then followed by a prayer, unrelated?, asking that the ordinand be made a priest [by God?]. There's no linking of the Holy Ghost by that little two-letter word to the EFFECT. So why is the Holy Ghost being invoked here? Not sure. To give the man the proper dispositions to become a priest, or the graces necessary to be a good priest? Evidently the infiltrators who have been out to wreck the Church knew their Latin and the teaching of Pope Pius XII better than the SSPX do.
That raises another point. There's overwhelming evidence that bad actors had infiltrated the Church with the intent upon doing as much damage as they could. Why would the "good-willed" modernizers have bothered with that little two-letter word you claim to be meaningless? I guess removing it makes the sentence sound much more modern, and relevant to the laity, right? No, the fact that there's no good reason other than destruction to explain its removal also suggests that this may have been a deliberate attempt to invalidate the Sacrament where "an enemy hath done this".
Then there's the New Rite of Episcopal Consecration [sic]. It's radically different, and the best that various apologists have manage to do is to liken it to some Eastern Rite ceremony ... except that they made the mistake of likening it to an Eastern Rite ceremony for the installation of a patriarch, who was already presumed to be a bishop, rather than as a Rite to confer the Holy Order of Episcopacy upon someone who had theretofore lacked it.
Now, SSPX refer to other mentions of the words "priest" or "bishop" in the respective Rites outside the essential form [as indicated by Paul VI Montini], but these occur AFTER the Sacrament had allegedly been conferred, and do not indicate an action of creating a priest or bishop, but a mere assertion after the fact of having done so, one that's completely inadequate to express the form denoting the sacred action of a Sacrament. So a priest might butcher the essential form of Holy Mass, but then because 10 minutes later you say, "Yep, we consecrated this bread.", that makes it all better, right? So, then, when did the Sacrament actually get confected? Did the Holy Ghost scan forward to detect the future declaration to disambiguate this form? If the priest dropped dead before he added the "Yep, we consecrated this bread.", would there be a valid Sacrament? This reminds me of the controversy over the Eastern Rite epiklesis.
Finally, Pope Leo XIII taught regarding Anglican Orders that what was at issue was not the intention of the celebrant (which the Church presumes, unable to read the internal forum) but the intention of the Rite, where even AFTER the Anglicans had desperately tried to "fix" the form, the Holy Father taught that it was too little and too late, since the intention of the Rite to remove all that was distinctly Catholic in the Rite (sound familiar?) established an objective intention of THE RITE ITSELF (independent of the internal intention of the celebrant). But SSPX have historically INVERTED the emphasis, attempting to claim that they "investigate" the internal forum "intention" of the celebrant that even the Church does not presume to know ... de internis Ecclesia non judicat ... as taught by Pope Leo XIII.
All this suffices to CLEARLY establish OBJECTIVE POSITIVE DOUBT, a much lower threshold than proving the contrary beyond any reasonable doubt, and the faithful have a right not to be subjected to dubious Sacraments. You could keep arguing for hours, but, understand that YOU HAVE NO AUTHORITY to impose YOUR CONCLUSIONS (arrived at by your own private judgment) upon the consciences of the faithful. SSPX have historically claimed that they have the right to RESIST the Vicar of Christ on earth TO HIS FACE, but then gaslight the faithful who don't agree with THEM as proud and disobedient. You reserve the right to disobey the Vicar of Christ, but how DARE the faithful disobey you. Isn't that so? That's to arrogate unto yourselves a greater authority than you do to the Vicar of Christ. So, that expression, which used to be applied to the authority of the Pope in Rome has been re-formulated by SSPX as if it were ... Fellay [aut Pagliarani] dixit; res clausa est.
PETITION / DEMAND
With this petition, therefore, WE HEREBY RESIST YOU TO YOUR FACE and assert that we reject your sending of putative "priests" ordained [sic] in the New Rites by "bishops" consecrated [sic] in the New Rite and demand that you conditionally ordain them before sending them into our chapels.
FINAL ADMONITION
You are also hereby put on notice that you are playing with fire here, and by that we mean the rather literal HELLFIRE, since I hope you're sure enough of your "arguments", such as they are, that you're willing to risk your own eternal salvation ... since you will be in fact be held liable to the judgment of hellfire if you subject the faithful to invalid Sacraments, where souls may be lost as a result ... and let us here be blunt about the motive ... so as not to compromise your ability to continue playing "footsie" with the Modernist occupiers of the Holy Catholic Church. Well, we can't very well expect to have any chance of "regularization" from Rome if we question the validity of their Sacraments, so we're going to engage in intellectual dishonestly to shut down all discussion. If we don't get regularized, how on earth are we going to pay for that 50-million-dollar-and-counting seminary built on the backs of the faithful often working more than one job to make ends meet for their large families when the slight overcrowding problem artificially created by the "Humanities Year" could have been rectified for one or two million dollars through the addition of an extra wing or building on the ample grounds in Winona? What's going to happen to our priests and their livelihood as they sip on hundred-dollar bottles of wine (financed by the faithful), living in groups at priories with a half dozen or so priests while many even-large chapels get a Mass on Sunday and an occasional First Friday ... and the faithful hope that they can hold off dying and needing the Last Sacraments until the priest shows up for the weekend? What'll happen if there's nowhere to shuffle credibly-accused predators? I mean, where else do we send a priest who admitted to predations against young men but to quarters adjacent to the dormitory of a boys' boarding school, from which had ready access to them for additional predations? I do wonder where sentiments of anti-clericalism may have originated. Or have the same enemies who infiltrated the Church at large to begin with planted their men in the ranks of the SSPX ... as such decisions are inexplicable (especially after they should have learned this lesson from the Novus Ordo that the coverups are worse than the crimes) other than as deliberate attempts to harm Traditional Catholicism and give us a bad name. Well, not in our name!
Topic: Petition to SSPX re: Priests from Novus Ordo (Read 1173 times)