Nope.
First off, your “theoretical” situation has been experienced by the Church many times, in many countries! Every really nasty government kills off the priests and bishops, first thing. The Vatican and neighboring Catholic bishops try to send in help, but it doesn’t always work and there are always many people left without most of the Sacraments for years, or even centuries.
So what do you do without bishops or priests?
- Even non-Christians can baptize validly. You might not get all the goodies and anointings and exorcisms, but you’ll be a Catholic.
- In the absence of a priest for over six months, a Catholic man and woman can validly marry each other sacramentally before two witnesses.
- In the absence of a priest, Catholics can still lean on Jesus’ promise that prayers prayed together will be granted, and that if two or more are gathered together, He will be in their midst. That doesn’t mean you have Communion or a Mass, but it does mean that you can serve God faithfully as Catholics and be nourished spiritually in His own way.
- If you have the Bible, you keep copying it and passing it on. If people know prayers, they keep passing them on. Catechists usually become the leaders of Catholic communities under these conditions.
The biggest success story among priestless Catholics were the incredibly faithful Korean Catholics. They first encountered Christianity on visits to China, loved it, and brought back as many Chinese Catholic books as they could, evangelized other Koreans entirely as laypeople, and finally were able to send some Korean men to become priests. The kings of Korea freaked out and killed every Catholic they could find who didn’t apostatize, including all the priests. But some of the books survived and were found by the next generation, and again the Koreans self-evangelized and then sent their guys out to become priests!
Japanese Catholics went over 200 years without priests, with some of the underground communities remaining pretty knowledgeable about the Faith (like in Nagasaki) and others becoming pretty ignorant. As soon as Catholic priests first arrived in Japan in the 1800’s, these “hidden Christians” made contact without caring that the deadly persecution laws were still in effect. Some community members ultimately decided to maintain a schism, but most of them rejoined the main fold very happily.
During Communist rule of Eastern Europe, there were several countries left without bishops or with bishops that were inaccessible. A few priests did take it on themselves to “ordain” people (even though they didn’t actually have that power), including some women. (Or so rumor has it.) Once Communism fell, people were pretty torqued off when they found out they’d been risking their lives to receive invalid sacraments from people who really weren’t priests. (Although my understanding is that a lot of people had realized that there was absolutely no way these women were priests, and there is some speculation that the guy who did it was actually working for the Communists to create dissension and uncertainty among Catholics. Although he could have just been an idiot.) So you have to “redo” thousands of Sacraments that people never received, and trust that the poor saps who already died will not be suffering for having their real Sacraments replaced by fake ones.
So the basic principle is that if you want new priests, you need at least one real bishop. If you want new bishops, you usually need three bishops; but there is an emergency format that just has one real bishop doing it. Without this apostolic handing-on of the power given by Jesus, you can’t have valid priests or bishops.
(There has been such a thing as towns electing bishops; but that was just the choice of guy. The towns didn’t lay hands on their bishops and give them the heavenly power of binding and loosing. They always had to find some bishops from other towns to lay hands on their chosen candidate, and thus pass along the apostolic powers. And nobody but a bishop, or an abbot who’s also a bishop, can ordain priests; they derive all their powers from bishops. Heck, Catholic priests only exist because bishops can’t be everywhere; the original format was for everybody to go to Mass with the bishop.)
well played 