Even if he can prove that he is an ordained Catholic priest. How does one know if he is in full communion with the Church? Does every Catholic priest have standing authority to administer all seven Sacraments, anytime, anywhere in the world? Are there limits?
The sacrament of (1) Baptism can be validly administered by even non-Christians if they intend to do what Baptism does and use the correct form and matter. (This is only licit if there is a danger of death, I believe, but would be valid regardless.)
The ordinary minister of the sacraments of (2) Confirmation, (3) Penance, and (4) Holy Orders is a bishop, not a priest, so one should probably assume that an unknown priest would NOT have the faculty to perform those sacraments. (It is true that most priests have received from their bishops the faculty to hear confession, but I don’t know how that works if they are not in their own diocese.)
(5) Matrimony is tricky, since technically the parties to be married administer the sacrament to each other. But the priest is a required witness. Again, I’m not sure whether or not a priest would be a valid witness outside his own diocese without special permission. Maybe so, maybe not–I just don’t know. However, since you are required to go through lengthy pre-cana training before being married, I can’t see how that would ever be happening with some priest whose status you didn’t know.
My understanding for the the (6) Eucharist and the (7) Annointing of the Sick is that if you are talking about a non-laicized priest who is not under sentence of excommunication, yes he could validly administer these sacraments, any time, anywhere in the world. That is not to to say it would always be licit.
But the question of validity is what really concerns a person encountering an unknown priest. (Just in case anyone is wondering, a valid sacrament is one that “worked” e.g. the priest said Mass, and and transubstantiation really took place. A licit sacrament is one that is according to all of the rules of the church. If a priest didn’t have permission to say Mass somewhere and he said it anyway, the burden of sin would be on the priest himself, not on the others who attended Mass, and the consecration of the host would have been valid but not licit. All sacraments that are licit are also valid, but not vice versa.)
Now when you are talking about being “in full communion with the Church” you either mean “not excommunicated” or you mean “agreeing with all of the teachings of the Church.” In either case, how would an ID help you to know that? I mean, unless the thing expires on a weekly basis or something there would always be a margin of error. And how would priests in, say, central Africa deal with an ID that expired even anually? And a worldwide system of photo IDs for hundreds of thousands of people would be exceedingly expensive. Would that be the best use of the money?
As for the second case above (“not agreeing with all of the teachings of the Church”), that only matters to the priest’s soul. it doesn’t affect the validity of any sacraments he may administer.
I think any doubtful cases could be left to God’s love and mercy. I do understand what prompts the question about the IDs, but on consideration I am not convinced it would be a benefit.
Would anyone want to risk the possibility of a SSPX priests offering OF masses?
Chance would be a fine thing, since one of the points of SSPX is that they don’t believe the OF is valid.
–Jen
