Spectator's Journal/The Lefebvrite-Feminist Coalition?

...And others, including the Pope's fellow bishops, would have their minds concentrated on the question anew if a Catholic woman were to be ordained, however irregularly...

...Other critics note that the doctrine puts the Roman Catholic Church in the embarrassing position of recognizing as "valid" the holy orders of various ecclesiastical free-lancers and cranks...

...But she adds that excommunication, while a "serious" matter, is "in 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 some ways a medieval concept," and she notes that "sometimes people disobey orders in order to obey God's call...

...The important divisions in the Roman Catholic Church today, whether they concern the divinity of Jesus or the morality of abortion, turn on creed, not credentials...

...The second source of the Popes sorrow, he told the cardinals, was his failure to avert a final rupture between the papacy and the ultra-traditionalist movement of Marcel Lefebvre, the "rebel archbishop" (in the Associated Press's wonderful sobriquet) who believes the Roman Catholic Church has been subverted by modernism...

...The bishop so ordained may be an outlaw, but he possesses all of the sacramental powers of the episcopacy, including the ability to ordain priests and—the worst-case scenario from the standpoint of church unity—more illicit bishops like himself...

...I t would be ironic if Archbishop Lefebvre's example inspired a ceremony that he, even more so than the Pope, would regard as a sacrilege...

...It wasn't the first time John Paul had described the ordination of women in Anglican churches as a stumbling block to reunion between Rome and Canterbury...

...Given the doctrinal divisions in Roman Catholicism, shifting the focus from sufficiency of orders to sufficiency of belief might not make very much difference...

...In 1896 Pope Leo XIII issued an encyclical declaring Anglican holy orders "absolutely null and utterly void," partly on the grounds that post-Reformation Anglican bishops didn't intend to confer the powers of the priesthood as Rome and the Eastern churches understood them...

...The Vatican reluctantly excommunicated the octogenarian French prelate in 1988 after he defied the Pope by ordaining four bishops for his breakaway church...

...Indeed, a conventional analysis would portray the Lefebvre ordinations as thunder from John Paul's right, and the Anglican imbroglio as a challenge to his traditional theology from the left...

...Might John Paul not be afraid that, to hasten the inevitable, some Catholic women might persuade a liberal "rebel bishop' perhaps one who has retired from his diocese—to ordain them "illicitly...

...The Pope said that the Anglican agreement to disagree on female bishops "poses serious obstacles" to the rapprochement between Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism, "which in the course of recent decades has arrived at such promising results...

...Archbishop Lefebvre could have used the same words in justifying his decision to defy the Pope...

...In that document, the commission notes that "the early churches may well have had considerable diversity in the structure of pastoral ministry" and it acknowledges that "just as the formation of the canon of the New Testament was a process incomplete until the second half of the second century, so also the full emergence of the threefold ministry of bishop, presbyter [priest] and deacon required a longer period than the apostolic age...

...An important wrinkle in the theory is that the chain is not broken when a bishop ordains (or "consecrates," to use a term now out of fashion) another bishop in defiance of the larger church...

...But the maddening thing about them is that, in a certain sense, they are real...

...For one thing, the traditional doctrine is a stumbling block for the ecumenical movement...

...Leo's pronouncement has a bad press among contemporary Catholic theologians, but it hasn't been overruled...

...But the ironies wouldn't stop there...

...After the Pope reiterated his opposition to women priests last September, advocates of female priests insisted that they still regarded the ordination of women as inevitable...

...But they are wandering bishops...

...Ruth Fitzpatrick of the Women's Ordination Conference, a pro-ordination group in the United States, says that in the event of an unauthorized ordination of women, "we assume that the people who were ordained would be excommunicated and so would the people doing the ordaining...

...Even Anglicans, who have asserted such a claim, have found it challenged by the Vatican...

...Another character explains the term: Some person, who is, historically speaking, a consecrated bishop with full apostolic authority, has consecrated these people bishops...

...Needless to say, however, many other Roman Catholics take a different view...

...Eventually, the Episcopal Church changed its position and endorsed the ordination of women as priests (and, more recently, as bishops...

...After all, whatever those trendy Episcopalians might think, John Paul doesn't believe that women can be ordained priests...

...Julian Charley, an Anglican member of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, "the apostolicity of the Church is what matters most, not the credentials of its ministers...

...The question is how that more nuanced standard would be applied to the case of Archbishop Lefebvre, not to mention that of a "rebel bishop" who decided to use his sacramental powers to admit women to the priesthood...

...W hat does this have to do with the ordination of women...

...In taking ecclesiastical law into his own hands, Archbishop Lefebvre Michael McGough is editor of the editorial page of the Pittsburgh PostGazette...

...With the assistance of an Anglican prelate from Costa Rica, the bishops ordained eleven women as priests...

...Interestingly, the eleven women elevated to the priesthood irregularly in 1974 were not re-ordained...

...Lefebvre's ordination in Switzerland of his four "rebel bishops" was not the first unauthorized ordination rite to make the front pages of American newspapers...

...In what some would call a characteristically legalistic distinction, the Roman Catholic Church regards such an ordination as "valid" but not "licit...

...Roman Catholic and Anglican critics of the traditional doctrine argue for a more dynamic theory of apostolic succession, one focused less on a historically questionable relay race of ordination rites than on a continuity of belief and witness...

...The key is the Roman Catholic doctrine of ordination in the "apostolic succession...

...q THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 29...

...The theological objection to the doctrine is the complaint by some theologians—including, it can be assumed, some supporters of women's ordination—that the "pipeline" theory of apostolic succession demeans the ordained ministry by isolating it from the larger "faith community" and by seeming to fetter the Holy Spirit, the true source of an authentic ministry...

...One was the decision of the worldwide Anglican Communion to acquiesce in the decision of any national Anglican church to ordain women as bishops...

...In the words of the Rev...

...Even the Roman Catholics recognize that they have episcopal orders, though not of course episcopal authority...

...In Roman Catholic terminology, the women's ordination was valid but not licit...

...The Episcopal Church in the United States crossed that threshold in February with the ordination of the Rev...

...This predicament is hilariously dramatized by A. N. Wilson in his novel Unguarded Hours, in which an unwary young Englishman is (very) illicitly ordained to the priesthood by a retired electrician who turns out to be a "wandering bishop...

...They don't have a diocese...

...Is it possible that the Pope was appalled by the ordinations of the Lefebvre bishops not only because they sealed a schism in Roman Catholicism but also because they might remind Catholic feminists that a bishop doesn't need Vatican approval to administer holy orders validly...

...Charles Curran is not a validly ordained priest...

...Like Eastern Orthodoxy and Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism traditionally has taught that bishops are the successors of the original apostles of Jesus Christ, not only in the sense of perpetuating his teachings but also through a succession of layings-on of hands...

...An unauthorized ordination a la the Episcopal rite of 1974 would exploit a doctrine, the mechanical or "pipeline" theory of apostolic succession, that holds little appeal for liberal Catholics in other contexts...

...They wander about the place making other people into clergymen as spurious as themselves...

...This is the body that has been largely responsible for the Anglican-Roman rapprochement that the Pope says is now in jeopardy...

...In truth, there is a convergence between the two developments that makes the Pope's yoking them together less coincidental than it might seem...

...Most Protestant denominations (including the Lutherans, with whom Roman Catholics otherwise have much in common) do not purport to be in the apostolic succession in the sense in which Roman Catholics traditionally have understood that term...

...They invent churches of their own and then they invent titles for themselves, often of the most ignorant and fanciful character...

...Most New Testament scholars, Catholics included, have discarded the notion that a "chain" of bishops can be traced back reliably to the earliest days of the church...

...Barbara Harris as the suffragan bishop of Massachusetts...

...Still, the Vatican hasn't questioned the validity of the bishops' ordinations...

...Even if unauthorized ordinations of women were to take place, it can be argued that the Pope might simply ignore them...

...No one in the Vatican contends, for example, that the Rev...

...At first glance, these papal headaches might seem to have nothing in common...

...unwittingly may have provided an example for Roman Catholics who believe that the Anglicans have got it right on the question of female clergy...

...Ecumenism aside, contemporary scholars criticize the traditional doctrine of apostolic succession on both historical and theological grounds...

...Therefore, as was not the case with Archbishop Lefebvre and his clergy, a Roman Catholic bishop who conferred the priesthood on a woman would be engaging in mere mummery...

...According to this theory in its full-blown form, every bishop alive today could trace his ordination back to the apostolic generation...

...The Vatican held its fire when Archbishop Lefebvre ordained mere priests for his Catholic traditionalist movement, but his ordination of bishops was a threat of a different order (literally) because it guaranteed that the priest-making machine would survive after Lefebvre's death...

...Their orders are more indisputably ancient and catholic, very often, than those of their opposite numbers in the Church of England...

...It was high drama (as well as high church) precisely because something supernatural was thought to be occurring despite the Episcopal Church's official refusal at that time to ordain women...

...Shortly before last Christmas, in his version of the News of the Year in Review, Pope John Paul II unburdened himself to an audience of cardinals about the developments that caused him pain in 1988...

...the ordination would be neither licit nor valid...

...This revisionist consensus is reflected in a joint statement on the ordained ministry issued in 1973 by the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, a group of bishops and theologians appointed by their respective hierarchies...

...Skeptics would argue that the Pope couldn't be troubled by that scenario because Roman Catholic bishops are almost by definition less individualistic than their Anglican counterparts—and the papacy.less forgiving of deviations than is the notoriously tolerant Anglican Communion...

...In 1974, three retired bishops of the Episcopal Church in the by Michael McGough United States gathered in the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia to exercise their spiritual powers in a way forbidden by their church...