Roman Catholic OR Catholic?

[Aramis]

Why is it that a ton of these schismatic and heretic groups today who claim valid ordinations and apostolic succession seem to trace it back to the Old Catholics? Isn’t offering ordinations like candy during Halloween a sacrilege and thus render the ordinations invalid? At some point, someone should put an end to this madness and declare their ordinations invalid.

It’s not that they “ordain anyone”… it’s that these groups adhere to a 4th century model of the episcopacy. Under which every city (keeping in mind that City begins at about 8000 residents) should have a bishop, and the primary celebrant at most parishes is the bishop.

They also don’t see any major issue of schism over disagreements of form, have the weak bishop & weak synod models, and have lots of leeway within each communion, and generally don’t consider schism to cause excommunication.

Some of the groups of the Old Catholic lineage, like the PNCC, have maintained a pretty strict theological and disciplinary tradition, as well as the Trent Missal translated to the vernacular.

Others, like the Mariavites, have lost their apostolic succession, and their priesthood, by virtue of their bishops being ordained by a female bishop and having
female priests.

The other problem is that a lot of vagante became bishops while part of one or another Old Catholic jurisdictions, and were chased out when they got too far afield for their then current group. Some, like Rene Villate, seem to have ordained as a bishop any independent priest with a stable parish. And there were quite a few vagante priests, most suspended for heresy or disobedience… and without communications, and in remote areas, they got small groups going and no one really had any way of checking on them.

Thing is, the Old Catholics got their start in a manner very much like the SSPX. A group of dissident priests, with a bishop*, and a rejection of changes from a council (Vatican I), decided that they would “preserve the real faith of the Church.”

Problem is, the first schism is the hardest… after that, it only gets easier to say, “No, Group B is wrong, and group A is wrong, so let’s break from A & B and form C”… couple that, a belief that schism doesn’t equal excommunication, and the lack of a strong central authority, and you get denomination after denomination, most of whom are nominally in communion with the rest, but there’s no UNION, and eventually, most have gone to open communion.

A few haven’t… the PNCC, the Mariavites**, and a couple others are pretty much orthopraxic and orthodoxic…

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

• They got some of their priests ordained as bishops by the see of Utrecht, which was at that point nominally still in communion with Rome, but not actually subject to the Pope due to some really wacky political issues.

**excluding, of course, the invalidity of their orders due to women hierarchs.