Conditional sacraments

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The Council of Trent defined that baptism, confirmation, and holy orders can be received only once, and that in case of reasonable doubt about whether one of those sacraments was validly received, it can be administered conditionally. Based on some cursory web searches, it looks as if conditional baptisms have been done in some cases, probably very many. I find no similar evidence concerning confirmation or holy orders. Has anyone ever been conditionally confirmed or conditionally ordained? Does anyone have statistical data on the number or frequency of such conditional sacraments?

(If I recall correctly, in the famous case of John Henry Newman, he was unconditionally ordained a Catholic bishop (but correct me if I’m wrong) after serving as a Church-of-England bishop.)
 
Conditional baptisms have been done many times when there is a question about the validity of a baptism or whether or not a baptism ever took place. For example, improper forms or intentions can make a baptism invalid.

Conditional Confirmations aren’t needed. By the time you’re old enough to be Confirmed you’re at the age of reason (age 7 or older) and you’d remember you were Confirmed. Same with Holy Orders. The only case that might be necessary is the rare case of amnesia, but then again there would be some record of the Confirmation and Holy Orders sacraments taking place. The same cannot be said about baptisms.

John Henry Newman did not receive the sacrament of Holy Orders twice. The Anglican church does not have valid Holy Orders, and broke their apostolic succession when they stopped upholding the Mass as a sacrifice, so he wasn’t really ordained with them. But when he became a Catholic bishop he was ordained for real.
 
Yes, conditonal baptisms are relatively common.

The only conditonal ordinations I know of are performed by the SSPX on some (not all) men who go over after having been ordained RC. This would not happen in reverse since RC recognises as valid but illict SSPX ordinations.

Conditional confirmations, I would think, would be very rare. They would never be done in the case of a convert from a church with invalid orders, since they were not confirmed in the first place. When they converted, it would be an unconditional confirmation. The main reason (and I have never witnessed it) when you would conditionally confirm, would be if someone believed themselves to have been confirmed but the records had been destroyed/not kept/they couldn’t remember where. This would be unlikely since usually the church where the confirmation took place would have informed the church where the baptism took place and it would have been added to the baptismal records. Someone could have been baptised and confirmed in the same place and then the records lost, but then they would be conditionally baptised as well as confirmed. This would be more common in the churches who confirm children young, and certainly possible in the Churches which combine baptism and confirmation.
 
I can see a couple situations where conditional confirmations could happen:
  1. Out of an abundance of caution, when the orignal confirmation was done by a bishop who might have had possible valid orders such as an Old Catholic bishop or an Anglican bishop who was consecrated by an Orthodox and/or Old Catholic bishop (and thus might have valid orders). From what I have read on this forum, this seems to becoming a problem because Orthodox and Old Catholic bishops, on occasion, participate in Anglican ordinations (both episcopal and presbyteral *).
  2. When records are missing. That does happen on occasion…churches burn down, roofs collapse and water damage ensues; etc etc.*
 
While I have never heard it called a conditional Confirmation, I have seen this happen a few times locally. We have a lot of students in CCE that were baptized in Mexico. In some parts of Mexico, they sometimes Confirm at the same time as Baptism. A few times, the parents told us that the child was confirmed at the same time but it wasn’t noted on the Baptismal certificate we received. Those children went through Confirmation with their peers. It’s possible it was the second experience of the Sacramental form but would only have had the Sacramental effect if the parent’s memory was inaccurate.
 
stephe1987 said:
Conditional Confirmations aren’t needed. By the time you’re old enough to be Confirmed you’re at the age of reason (age 7 or older) and you’d remember you were Confirmed.
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So you remember getting confirmed when you were seven years old and at that age your understanding of the validity of sacraments, and how they are to be performed, was at best incomplete. And then 20 years later you learn that the bishop who confirmed you was excommunicated as a heretic six months after your confirmation and had questionable views on how to confirm. Might there be doubts?

Or say it’s the year 2025 and in the midst of a war in Africa, a group of priests of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church form a group separate from that church for political motives, and some of them have dissident politically motivated theological views. Fast-forward to the year 2050 and your aunt and uncle who raised you after your parents were killed in that war tell you that a priest of that group baptized you. Your parents were said to have been there at the baptism, but the priest was killed when a missile struck the building and destroyed the building and the records. In 2050 you decide to become a Catholic. A question arises: did that priest in 2025 validly chrismate you, in accordance with the standard practices of eastern Christianity? Might there be doubts?

Closer to home, I find it mentioned that some priests in Mexico confirm infants immediately after baptizing them. It seemed as if some people do have doubts.

Maybe with ordinations it’s more complicated. Suppose a bishop who ordained you is found to have falsified his identity in order to use someone else’s credit card, and it’s not clear whether he was really a bishop, or the person whose credit card he stole was a bishop.

Or (more realistically?) the bishop who ordained you is from a schismatic group that you formerly belonged to before you became a Catholic, and that group’s record-keeping is sloppy. Was he really a validly ordained bishop?

But some answers spoke of what would or could happen in hypothetical circumstances (as I did above). Is there hard evidence about the number of times conditional confirmations or conditional ordinations actually have happened in reality? E.g. have there actually ever been any conditional episcopal consecrations?
 
stephe1987 said:
John Henry Newman did not receive the sacrament of Holy Orders twice. The Anglican church does not have valid Holy Orders, and broke their apostolic succession when they stopped upholding the Mass as a sacrifice, so he wasn’t really ordained with them. But when he became a Catholic bishop he was ordained for real.
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Blessed John Henry Newman was a priest, not a bishop. Though he was named a cardinal, he remained a priest (at his request) and was never consecrated bishop.
 
Chatter163 said:
Blessed John Henry Newman was a priest, not a bishop. Though he was named a cardinal, he remained a priest (at his request) and was never consecrated bishop.
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I stand corrected on this point.

Am I right in thinking his ordination was not conditional? I think this was some decades before Pope Leo XIII’s statement that Anglican orders are not valid, when the question was still fairly controversial.
 
Yarb said:
I stand corrected on this point.

Am I right in thinking his ordination was not conditional? I think this was some decades before Pope Leo XIII’s statement that Anglican orders are not valid, when the question was still fairly controversial.
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Yes, you are correct. He was absolutely ordained as a Roman Catholic priest.
 
Well, as I understood it - when I was received into The Church at Easter 2010 my CofE baptism was recognised as I could provide documentary evidence that it had taken place and holy orders aren’t required for that sacrament, I was confirmed unconditionally as I hadn’t really** been confirmed previously due to invalid orders.
 
oratorymatt said:
Well, as I understood it - when I was received into The Church at Easter 2010 my CofE baptism was recognised as I could provide documentary evidence that it had taken place and holy orders aren’t required for that sacrament, I was confirmed unconditionally as I hadn’t really been confirmed previously due to invalid orders.
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Correct. Same story here, just 25 years earlier. :extrahappy:
 
Well, nobody is saying anything very concrete to the effect that they know of cases where explicitly conditional confirmations or conditional ordinations have actually happened, nor citing any published statistical data on these. Should I conclude that nobody knows of these?
 
Cant help sorry. When I converted for Anglican to Catholic i wasnt re-confirmed but ‘recieved’ as it is only administered once unless the previous religious order was dodgy or not accepted by the catholic church. ie, a hillsong convert etc. I dont believe their confirmation would be recognised as valid
 
oratorymatt said:
Well, as I understood it - when I was received into The Church at Easter 2010 my CofE baptism was recognised as I could provide documentary evidence that it had taken place and holy orders aren’t required for that sacrament, I was confirmed unconditionally as I hadn’t really** been confirmed previously due to invalid orders.
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The Baptism dome by the C of E IS recognized as being valid. Their version of Holy Orders is NOT accepted a valid by the Catholic Church (NONE of their orders, to Deacon, Priest of Bishop are considered to be valid). Therefore, they can not confirm anyone validly.

But anyone, Priest or layperson, can baptize (the lay person should only do this in a dire emergency, but it is still a valid baptism even if it isn’t an emergency.)
 
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