![]() After 1990, the Vatican never requested the return to the B-rCC of places of worship and other properties which the communists transferred to the Romanian E.O. hierarchy had worked hand-in-glove with the communists to outlaw the Byzantine-rite Catholic Church (B-rCC) in 1948 and even today denies the right of the latter to exist. (The fact that the latter had been an agent of the communist party and security police, particularly of Ceauşescu, bestowed a sad irony on the situation.) Even worse, John Paul II refused to have an official meeting with the Byzantine-rite (B-r) catholic bishops, in order to placate his E.O. At the time of his visit to Romania, John Paul II accepted that the place of highest honor in the procession should be accorded to the E.O. In most respects, the attitude of the Vatican toward the E.O. church, already mentioned, is an example. ![]() Such churches are called not in full communion with the Catholic Church and sharing of sacraments with them is limited. The validity of sacraments conferred by non-Catholic churches follows from the concept of ecumenism defined at the Vatican II Council. Have they lost their “licensing” powers and have the sacraments administered by their priests become invalid?Īnyway, the territorial dioceses did not originate with the apostles, but were created after Christianity became legal in the Roman Empire the term “diocese” was taken from the imperial administrative units. The recent case of the Chinese Catholic Bishops replaced by the Vatican with appointees of the Communist government,needs clarification. ![]() If someone says, however, that today Catholicism is not in crisis, he must be coming from another planet. One might argue that those bishops and priests lived in times of crisis. He had no “permit” to give absolution in those places, as he was for years believed dead, nor was there a bishop who could grant it. Where a women’s camp was adjacent to his, he went to walk for hours on his side of the barbed wire fence, in the dread of Siberian winter, while the penitents, one by one, walked on the other side and confessed. In camps, he heard confessions regularly. He celebrated marriages and baptisms, gave absolutions and extreme unctions, until the KGB got wind of it, closed the parish and carted him to another place, where, undaunted, he did the same thing. In those places he created parishes, mostly among people forcibly moved there from Lithuania, Poland, or Ukraine, for whom he offered the Mass regularly. He spent 24 years in prison camps and in supervised residence in Siberian cities. Ciszek was in Eastern Poland at the Soviet invasion. To take another example of a priest at-large, in 1939 the American priest Walter J. To have their faculty to hear confessions recorded in the books of a diocese was not necessary for the salvation of souls. Outside prison, the priests served secretly the faithful wherever they could, that is, also at-large. None of them was assigned to a diocese all were consecrated at-large.Some survived, were released, and functioned underground. Thus, in 1948 when the Byzantine-rite Catholic (B.r.C.) church was outlawed in Romania and its bishops were sent to various prisons, Bishop Frenţiu (beatified on June 2, 2019) secretly consecrated as bishops a few of the younger priests imprisoned with him. The discussion here presents the perspective of the educated layman.įirst, it is worthwhile to examine the argument that the bishops of the Saint Pius Society (or societies) are “bishops without no ( sic) diocese.” That situation is not unprecedented. ![]() Therefore, their absolution is valid.”Ī rebuttal of the thesis of the above authors was presented by the SSPX bishops. The SSPX bishops are not diocesan bishops, the reasoning goes, “being thus an anomaly unheard of in Christian tradition,”“By contrast, an Orthodox priest is in communion with a bishop who has a diocese. In layman’s terms, this is equivalent to the license needed to practice a profession. Even a priest incardinated in a territorial diocese under the Vatican cannot confer these sacraments in another diocese without a special permit from the local bishop. As it was stated in a magazine and a blogdedicated to Catholic apologetics, both sacraments are valid when received from an Eastern Orthodox (E.O.) priest, but not from a priest of the Saint Pius X Society (SSPX), because although the latter possesses the sacramental authority coming from his ordination, he does not possess the juridical authority coming from the bishop as the chief judge of the diocese. Some years ago, a debate took place about the sacraments of penance and marriage administered by priests in the filiation of the late Archbishop Lefebvre.
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