CONTINUED
Quote from: Survivals From The Power Of Order, pp. 504-505
"The hierarchy is indivisible. But it can, in certain regions, be broken by force so that fragments of it subsist in a mutilated state beyond the field of the Church. Thus, in lands overrun by schism or by heresy we may find not only the sacramental powers deriving from Baptism and Confirmation, but the hierarchical power of order.** The violent disjunction of the power of order from the power of jurisdiction – which latter disappears of itself whenever there is a rupture with the Sovereign Pontiff – its persistence in the uprooted state to which it is then reduced, its transmission, valid but not licit, beyond its proper and natural sphere, is always the sign of a terrible spiritual catastrophe, a partial victory of the spirit of evil over the Church of Christ**, which henceforth will move through history as though divided in herself, and become a scandal to the Gentiles. However, the Church is not in reality divided. She is indivisible like the hierarchy from which she is suspended. Peoples who have received her and belonged to her can fall away from her in consequence of schism and heresy; yet, despite failing her in this way, they can still carry away with them some of her treasures and certain relics of her royalty. What then remains of her among them may, at first glance, suggest a division; but to a wider knowledge and a deeper perception these scattered riches will themselves witness to her unicity. They are rays from one same original centre of life and activity. Those who are responsible before God for a schism or a heresy may carry away with them the valid succession of the sacrament of Holy Order. They do so in the darkness of a personal sin by which they partially rend the Church; and insofar as their own hearts are closed to the good influence of the sacraments they are like sick men taking to others medicines which they do not know how to use for their own benefit. But their followers in later times, who inherit a patrimony of schism or heresy from their birth, are not culpable on that account. They can grow in spiritual stature by remaining in good faith. The sanctifying influence of the sacraments, NO LONGER FINDING THE SAME OBSTACLES IN THE WILL, can result in graces of a high order [1048]. What they still lack in order to be fully and openly of the Church is the divinely assisted orientation of the jurisdictional power. But, from this standpoint, the uninterrupted transmission of the valid exercise of the power of order within the dissident Churches is a moving witness to the depth of the salvific will of God. By thus continuing to dispense the graces of contact by way of His sacrifice and His sacraments, and thereby closely conforming to Christ many whose spiritual situation is in itself very precarious, He reveals an astonishing design: that of beginning, in a way, to form the Church outside the Church, to collect His “other sheep” as in a flock, and to draw them to the one fold by a strangely powerful ontological desire, a “virtual act” not far removed from ‘act achieved’.
When St. Augustine declares that the sacraments do not confer grace outside the Church, he takes it for granted, as Billot rightly remarks, that they are received by those who are personally guilty of heresy or schism: “We say that those who receive Baptism outside the communion of the Church, among heretics or in any schism whatsoever, obtain no profit of it in so far as they partake in the perversity of the heretics or schismatics”
(De Baptismo Contra Donatistas lib. Ill, no. 13) Cf. Billot, De Ecclesia Christi, Rome 1921, p. 339.)
