MORE REASONS FOR WRITING THE RECTOR: Part the Sixth

Another one of the old poets (whose name escapes me at the moment) said that truth is the daughter of time. Aulus Gellius

On close analysis, the weakest argument for one-handed conferral of priestly orders is what the Blunderer misdescribes as a "decision" of the Holy Office. The word "decision" connotes a judgment or, more precisely, a conclusion based on a careful consideration of all the arguments and solemnly delivered by a competent body after consultation with disciplinary experts. Moreover, we would expect a decision of the Holy-Office to be in the form of a written decree.

There's no such animal in Tony's wild menagerie of misleading enlargement, irrelevancy, and linguistic error. What the Blunderer tries to pass off as a "decision" is in actuality hearsay.  Here are the naked facts: A theologian (Regatillo) passed along an unidentified bishop's anecdote about (1) making an inquiry somewhere at the Holy Office regarding one-handed conferral of priestly orders and (2) receiving a reply affirming the validity of orders so conferred. The theologian did not personally hear the reply. He merely reported this bishop got an answer.* Regatillo did not use the word "decision."

Let us pause, at this juncture, to make an all-too-obvious observation: 

An unidentified bishop's avowal that he received a presumably oral answer from an unnamed source in the Holy Office is definitely not a formal decision of  the Holy Office.

Note particularly that, beyond the sparely narrated account, the theologian supplied no concrete details: no name of the bishop, no date of the visitation to the Holy Office, no description of the attendant circumstances of the encounter, no name or title of the official(s) who gave the answer, no date of the defective ordination, etc. All we have is a minimalist account akin to a log entry .

Mind you, now, we're not saying the theologian or this certain bishop lied. As it stands, the anecdote is a piece of information that belongs to our investigation. However, it cannot, by any strectch of the imagination, be raised to the dignity of a decision of the Holy Office, with all the coercive force that such pronouncements carry.

After all, the reply may have come from one of the lesser officers of the Congregation, one who may have been speaking off the record to a private individual. He may not even have had a brief to offer an opinion on the subject, but perhaps informally ventured one anyway on that occasion. We will never know. But one thing's for certain: without concrete collateral details and a knowledge of the identity of the declarant as well as of the functionary who answered the query, we cannot assess the weight of the reply: It certainly isn't irrelevant, but neither is it confirmatory. It's just, say... thought-provoking.

In any case, the report is secondhand and hence must be considered hearsay, which is inherently weak: we cannot form a judgment of the directly involved parties' competence, trustworthiness, veracity, or accuracy.**  For the credulous, the meager anecdote may be persuasive, but for deeper thinkers without an agenda or vested interests, it fails to overcome a prudent man's positive doubt. The teaching of Pope Pius XII is simply too specific: imposition of hands is the matter of priestly orders. There's no getting around it.

In time, a restored Church may confirm or disconfirm the truth of the answer given to Regatillo's anonymous bishop (whoever he was). Only then will we know for certain that one-handed conferral of priestly orders is or is not valid. But that time, if it is to come at all, may lie far away in the future. Meanwhile, to safeguard the integrity of holy orders here and now, we must deeply discount the grossly inflated evidentiary value the Blunderer assigns this hearsay account, which he erroneously characterizes as a "decision of the Holy Office." Let's just say it's a story that merits notice, and let us, at the same time, conscientiously mark the absence of official confirmatory documentation. 

The bottom line is that today no one can be certain the conferral of priestly orders with one-hand is valid. There is not enough evidence to exclude the possibility of error. Accordingly, to put an end to all disputation (including ours), "One-Hand Dan" must be persuaded to undergo painless and quick conditional ordination and consecration. Call or email the rector today and tell him to get Dannie fixed. Then Dannie can fix all those poor slobs he's ordained. After that, he'll be free as a bird to ordain the Rev. Mr. Nkamuke at the cult center in November so the zombies still can believe he serves a purpose in Traddielandia. Then everybody will be happy (except, perhaps, the Blunderer. Dannie will be very displeased with the shoddy effort that resulted in his surrender).

Next week, in view of the approaching 37th anniversary of the infamous 1976 ordinations, Pistrina will share its reasons for believing the nine Roman Catholic priests who, in 1990, admonished Dannie about one-handed conferral of priestly orders.


*The Latin text , as Tony prints it, reads "eique responsum fuit validam fuisse ordinationem presbyteralem in qua Episcopus unicam manum imposuit," which he translates as "Its response was that a priestly ordination in which the bishop imposed one hand was valid...." [Blunderer's emphasis.] In this rendering, the noun "response" certainly sounds very official, and we grant that there is in Latin a noun responsum that denotes an official reply (as, for instance, in Denzinger, when we read Resp[onsum]. Commissionis de re Biblica ("Reply of the Biblical Commission").

We further allow that, as a serviceable translation into plain English for informal purposes, Tony's version is acceptable, although it is not entirely accurate, for the underlying Latin construction is the impersonal passive (with fuit for est, a not uncommon substitution). Literally, ...eique responsum fuit... means,"..and it was answered to him...," or even more literally, "...and an answering to [or for] him took place...." The semantic difference is subtle but not insignificant:  the passive voice, in addition to avoiding naming an agent, emphasizes the action as a whole and highlights the notion that an action was produced or effected. In other words, we have before our minds an activity, not a product (i.e., a formal or semi-formal ruling), as the word "response" would lead us to assume. A more accurate, yet still idiomatic, rendering would have been "...and they answered him [or said in reply to him]...."

Less charitable souls might say the slippery ol' Blunderer was being deceptive, as in his grossly erroneous mistranslation of the papal teaching of Sacramentum Ordinis. We'd rather say that, owing to his insurmountable educational deficits, he just couldn't fathom the Latin (as his translation "its response was that..." [emphasis ours] strongly seems to suggest).


** In anticipation of the hysterical reaction of some CLODs ("close loyalists of Dannie"), we hasten to observe that to question competence, trustworthiness, veracity, and accuracy does not necessarily imply the declarant is a liar. There are many elements beyond mendacity, which could impeach a declarant's testimony: advanced age, memory, misinterpretation, language impediments,environmental, emotional, social, and psychological factors, etc. The imprimatur issued for the Regatillo's manual offered no warrant against the intrusion of errors of fact (purposeful or inadvertent), or else why do we find the following printer's error on p. 744 (1.277) of the 2nd edition of Ius Sacramentarium: firmo onere caelibatus..?