Great! Does the same go for my confirmation?
Thank you cam for addressing my questions. I need not to worry about my confirmation then either, right?
Unlike baptism, confirmation must be administered by a bishop or by a priest designated by the bishop. A person with an invalid ordination cannot administer the sacrament. However, as I pointed out earlier, even if the Siri thesis were true, you could not assume that your bishop was invalid.
The Church instructs us to always assume that sacraments are valid unless we have a good reason to suspect them. This is partly because sacraments depend upon the intention of the one who confers them, and we can never know for sure what a person was thinking. So, you could get suspicious about ANY particular administration of a sacrament, but that would not be beneficial. We are supposed to trust in Divine Providence because God does not try to trick us into damnation.
The variation I am referring to is the one in which Siri picked a successor before he died. The Apostolic Succession can never be broken, right?
There are several variations of this supposed scenario. I think you are referring to the one in which Cardinal Siri was supposedly elected to the papacy, but prevented from pubicaly announcing it. Instead, Cardinal Roncalli was presented as Pope John XXIII. The story then goes on to say that Siri kept this secret all his life and chose his own successor who is also a secret pope.
The problem is that the Church was constituted by Christ as a visible society, and this cannot be changed. Thus, the Church cannot have a “secret pope”. Such a pope would not be able to fulfill his office, since he couldn’t be leading a Church that didn’t know him. It is for this reason that a Pope is considered valid if he is acknowledged as such by the Church as a whole.
There are many rules that must be followed to elect a pope, and throughout history, these rules have been broken. The Church, however, has always considered the elected men as valid once they are accepted because universal acceptance is evidence of a valid pope.
Thus, Pope John XXIII must be considered the valid pope, because it is not permitted to go back after the fact (especially since he is now dead) and declare his papacy invalid. You can understand why this is so if you consider this example: Suppose you decided that Pope Pius IX was not a valid pope. (Yes, some have claimed this). If this type of thinking was permitted, you could then dismiss the First Vatican Council, because he called that council. You could also deny the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, because he proclaimed that doctrine. Now, the Church says that you must accept this doctrine or you are a heretic. But, if you denied the validity of the pope who proclaimed it, you could deny the doctrine.
You can see how you end up removing yourself from the Church by taking this path. That is why the Church says that the matter of a particular papacy being valid is not a matter of debate once that pope has been accepted by the Church as a whole. Once that occurs, we have Divine Assurance that he is the vicar of Christ.
Now what of Cardinal Siri being “hushed”? Even if he had been elected (and we have no proof that he was), he failed to publicly proclaim this, allowed Pope John XXIII to be acknowledged, and also publicly supported Pope John XXIII as the Pope. Thus, even if he had been elected, he effectively resigned from the papacy.
