Can "garage bishops" be presumed valid?

[Stone]

From the Archived Catacombs - by The Recusant:

Below is an article by Fr. Anthony Cekada.  Obvious caveat: we wouldn't agree with him on everything, for one thing I take issue with some of the things he is on record as having said concerning Archbishop Lefebvre, for another he's about as sedevacantist as they come! That being said, this article isn't about sedevacantism or about his historic disagreement with Archbishop Lefebvre, it doesn't really even touch on any of those things. The article is concerning the question of bishops and priests who have had not one day of proper seminary training, who don't know any Latin, have only sketchy theology, etc and/or who were ordained by men who were equally as ignorant and untrained. His point that to ordain someone with no training is "un-Tridentine" in that it goes directlly against the Council of Trent is a well made. And he does make a number of other very good points which bear directly on the case of Fr. Pfeiffer's supposed "episcopal" consecration, "bishops" Webster, Hennebery, Terrasson, et al.

One of the things he says is something I was reaching for myself, though I fear I could never have expressed it as clearly as he does here, and it is this. If there is a general presumption of validity when it comes to valid Holy Orders outside the Church (the schismatic Orthodox, for instance), does that extend to garage bishops with not one day of seminary under their belts? And the answer has to be a resounding "No!" If anything, the contrary is true: one ought almost reasonably to expect a garage bishop to bungle the ceremony because, due to his lack of training, he really doesn't have a clue what he's doing. If anyone had any doubts about that, the scandalous example given by so-called "bishop" Webster recently, in the OLMC video of Fr. Pfeiffer's "consecration," is an eloquent lesson.

Here are a few extracts. The whole thing is well worth a read, and can be found here: www.traditionalmass.org/images/articles/UntrainedUnTrid.pdf

But how far does this presumption extend? Does it extend  even to orders conferred by an underworld traditionalist “bishop” of the type mentioned at the beginning of this article — someone canonically unfit for the priesthood himself, lacking a  proper ecclesiastical education, summarily ordained a priest, and raised to the episcopate, perhaps by a bishop equally ignorant and canonically unfit?

I doubt that any Roman canonist explored such an issue in a pre-Vatican II canon law manual — Holy Orders conferred by, say, a chicken farmer-bishop untrained in Latin and theology.

The principle to be applied, nevertheless, is clear enough: Unless someone has received proper training, no presumption of validity is accorded to the sacraments he confers, because he may not know enough to confer them validly.
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Old Catholic Schismatics

Canonists such as Beste26 and Regatillo27 concede the presumption of validity to orders conferred by the Old Catholic bishops in Holland, Germany and Switzerland only. Of orders conferred by the countless other Old Catholic bishops operating (in the U.S., England, etc.) at the time they were writing, the canonists say nothing at all.

Here too, the distinction appears to be based on whether or not the clergy had an ecclesiastical education. In Holland, Germany and Switzerland, Old Catholic clergy were required to have theological training. [Dutch Old Catholics studied at their theological school in Utrecht or at a university, Germans at a theological school in Bonn, and the Swiss at the University of Berne. P. Baumgarten, “Old Catholics,” Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Appleton 1913) 11:235–6. These groups were also organized and somewhat centralized. They consecrated a limited number of bishops, kept proper records, followed the old ordination rites, and had clear lines of succession.] In the other countries Old Catholic bishops conferred ordinations and consecrations pell-mell on hundreds of untrained candidates.

To demonstrate the problem this poses for the validity of Holy Orders conferred in the latter group, we need take as an example only one series of Old Catholic bishops in the U.S.: Mathew (consecrated 1908), de Landas Berghes (1913), Carfora (1916), Rogers (1942), Brown (1969).

While the first and third bishops in the line, Mathew and Carfora, had been properly-trained Catholic priests and presumably would have known how to confer a sacrament properly, the second and fourth, de Landas Berghes and Rogers, are identified only as, respectively, “a distinguished Austrian nobleman” and “a West Indian Negro.” But navigating through the second most complex ceremony in the Roman Rite — Episcopal Consecration — and getting the essential parts right (or even knowing what they are) is not exactly something a layman picks up in a Habsburg emperor’s court or a Caribbean sugar cane field. There is no reason then to assume that either de Landas Berghes or Rogers had any idea about how to confer this sacrament validly.

This problem is complicated by yet another: Rogers’ own priestly ordination was doubtful, which would in turn render his episcopal consecration doubtful. [He appears to have been ordained a priest in the Vilatte succession (Anson, 433), which was of uncertain validity. According to most theologians the order of priesthood is required to receive episcopal consecration validly.]

So by the time we get to Brown in 1969, there is no possible way to sort out whether his orders are valid or not. Such problems are encountered across the board with orders derived not only from the Old Catholics, but also from the Brazilian nationalist schismatics. [Apologists for the validity of Old Catholic or Old Roman Catholic orders in the United States (the terms are interchangeable) invariably try to support their case by citing the same group of published statements by various Catholic authors. With one exception, however, these statements appeared not in theological works, but in popular ones (various religious dictionaries for the laity, overviews of non-Catholic sects, etc.), or they refer to the Old Catholic bodies in Europe about whose orders there is no dispute. The one article cited from a scholarly journal (“Schismatical Movements among Catholics,” American Ecclesiastical Review 21 [July 1899], 2–3) is from a passage concerning the specific issue of the priestly ordination of René Vilatte which cannot be disputed. The passage cited proves nothing about subsequent Old Catholic episcopal consecrations in the U.S., which were a dog’s breakfast of the type already described above.] Sacraments conferred by the ignorant cannot be presumed valid.

(I have added in square brackets what was contained in footnotes.)

How does that not fit Fr. Pfeiffer's supposed "consecration" like a glove? Webster may have spent a few weeks or months in Bishop(?) Louis Vezelis's "seminary" in Rochester NY, but goodness only knows what he learned there, if anything useful at all. He quite clearly doesn't understand a word of Latin and can't even pronounce it properly. When he managed to mangle the essential form so badly, who knows whether he even realised that those words were the essential form? And what about Heneberry or Terrasson? Did they ever have any formal training anywhere? As far as I'm aware neither of them did. So how confident can anyone be that they were able to consecrate validly? What are the odds that Hennebery, when he "ordained" Webster to the priesthood didn't make a mess of it? Or Terrasson, when he "consecrated" Hennebery? And what about Clemente Dominguez Gomez (later known as "Pope Gregory XVII The Very Great")..? He, by all accounts, was as ignorant as they come. From what I can tell, Fr. PFeiffer's supposed "episcopal lineage" is about as messy and dubious as they come.

There is a not-very-amusing irony in Fr. Pfeiffer trying to run a seminary in order to train priests, only to then "ordain" them with orders which must surely be presumed invalid, or at least highly doubtful, due to having been obtained from "bishops" who themselves were scandalously ignorant and didn't go to seminary.

I doubt very much that Fr. Pfeiffer is going to listen to anyone, but if anyone is in contact with any of the seminarians, sending them this article might not be a bad idea. The last thing they need is to become dubious non-priests and be sent out into the world to offer invalid Masses and confect invalid sacraments.