LOOKING MORTIFIED UPON A MONKEY

[T]he same thing seems different and conflicting to different people: it is "transposed" by a small additional ingredient, and appears utterly other by the "transposition" of a single constituent. For Tragedy and Comedy are both composed of the same letters. Aristotle (Joachim's translation)

The letter we posted last week from a follower certainly created a buzz around here (and generated an avalanche of e-mail). For our correspondents, his suggestion that the Thuc line is defective through Carmona seems to explain why there are so many problems with those bishops and the priests ordained through that secondary lineage.

Is it possible that all the evils traditionalists have experienced in the chapels served by Carmonite clergy might just be attributable to the absence of the charism of orders?

We don't like to say it, but the Blunderer (appearing under the nom emprunté "Peregrinus" in 1983) may have for once been right when he wrote of the Thuc line:

Can we really take all this seriously and suppose that the “bishops” involved in such goings-on are the future of the Church? Impossible. Even to refer to them as “traditional bishops” lends too much respectability to the whole business, which is, in this writer’s opinion, very disrespectable indeed.

One theme which dominates the affair from beginning to end is a gross and dangerous lack of prudence regarding the transmission of Apostolic Succession – a matter in which the slightest lack of imprudence is inadmissible. St. Paul reminds us: “Lay not hands lightly on any man” – he does not say: “Lay hands quickly on anyone.”

From our understanding of that now-embarrassing monograph, Two Bishops in Every Garage, the judgment seems to have been principally directed to the Carmona sub-lineage. If there's even the minutest probability of success in the infinite monkey theorem, then surely this erring pseudo-scholar could have made one correct assertion in some 40 or so years of banging randomly (and erroneously) away at a keyboard.

We Readers are not well versed in the Thuc controversy, but we invite anyone out there who is to contact us with any information they might have about the interesting thesis that only the Carmona line my be vitiated. That would go a long way to explain how one of these Carmonite priests failed to consecrate, why so many others can behave as badly as they do, and why the Carmonite "bishops" are the laughing stock of the traditional world.