Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices. Emerson.
One of
PL's more-than-passing interests lies in studying Tradistani
primate behavior. Close observation often explains so much of the irrationality in the
sede cults, such as forcing your kids
to do without so that malformed, lowbred cult-master
deadbeats can have
(e.g., luxury trips abroad, new organs, spa vacations, restaurant splurges, expensive organic goodies from Whole Foods etc.).
To our mind, the most curious (and entertaining) activity occurs as beer-bellied
male cultlings, stuffed into fraying and yellowed wife-beater A-shirts, obsess over the honorific styles
Your Excellency and
His Excellency. From the frequency of utterance, it's their preferred means of showing
submission to the
counterfeit "bishops" who so amorally take advantage of them. (The self-demeaning etiquette enforced upon Nature's losers, we suppose.) Typically, you don't much hear the trench-mouthed hags of Tradistan cackling those phrases, since the
considerably larger females generally prefer to use
Bishop (vocalized "BEE-uh-ship," with a distinct Appalachian glide).
Plainly it's a guy thing. The baseborn menfolk yearn to display their exquisite sense of propriety. When gathered together in their usual, sordid habitat, all the
macho sede swells outdo themselves with variations of these decorous niceties. They sound like a gaggle of jailbirds on parole, one-upping each other with prison-shop terminology like "cantilever," "e
spagnolette bolt," or "band and gudgeon hinges" in the thrilling,
frisson-drenched minutes preceding a fistfight. If they're particularly impressed with their abject servitude to some half-witted, mitered charlatan, the larval "prelate" then metamorphoses into
His Excellency the Most Reverend Bishop of the Roman Catholic Church First, Middle, and
Last Name.
For the males of the species,
Your and
His Excellency function like the secret passwords they made up as
urchin trash for admission to the rag-tag gangs they vainly formed to attract the attention of aloof girls from upper-class families, who despised them. After entrance into unstable adulthood following a touch-and-go puberty, twanging
"Your Excellency" signals to the opposite sex that the males continue to
belong to a
Lost-Boys' Club. As you study these hominids
in situ, you'll marvel at how they simper with unmanned pride, running a coated tongue over lesion-cratered lips, as they brace themselves to articulate the magical eight syllables, "
Yaw-ur EGGS-ul-LUH-un-SEE-ee" — the Open-Sesame to membership in the underworld we know as Tradistan.
Once the incantation has been breathlessly enunciated, for the briefest of instants, the creatures lay aside their customary
hang-dog posture. They hold their
misshapen noggins high above the innumerable, tiny cairns of rodent scat steaming under their splayed feet. Their
booger-clogged snouts huff the cult center's rancid air like a tubercular mongrel circling an overflowing latrine. With their newly acquired
savoir-faire, their characteristic
hunchback's stoop straightens, though imperceptibly to the naked eye. Transfigured for a nanosecond, the "men" of Tradistan of a sudden feel worthy to be picked clean by the grinning impostor in shabby pontificals salivating to relieve them of their families' meager income.
A sight for any researcher to behold! (Just don't breathe too deeply.)
Well, now.
PL doesn't want to rain on this odoriferous parade of
sede masculine politesse, but we're afraid we must inform the
Beta males they're
wrong. Mind you, the error doesn't arise from improper usage. By no means. To be pedantic, the oppressed womenfolk, crushed under a low-status mate's malign "authority," are wrong too: From the standpoint of strict protocol, well-mannered and properly schooled Catholics never address a
real bishop as
"Bishop So-and-so." The word isn't a title; it's an office. For American Catholics, Your Excellency is the mannerly way to address directly a legitimate member of the college of bishops, and His Excellency is the proper third-person honorific.
HOWEVER... sede "bishops" are decidedly NOT entitled to that style of office!
The truth is, it's not only a question of etiquette (or an example of antonomasia), but it's also a fundamental matter of ecclesiastical law. On December 31, 1930, in a decree issued by the Sacra Congregatio Caeremonialis, Pius XI conceded "the title of Most Reverend Excellency ... to archbishops and bishops too, whether residential or only titular."* Inasmuch as sede wandering bishops, flaming phonies without jurisdiction or a see, are neither residential nor titular, they have no legal right to the style. No one, Catholic or non-Catholic, may address or refer to them in this way. Additionally, since sede prelatasters do not exercise the episcopal office, they may never be addressed (even gauchely) as "Bishop X." It's like calling a quack "Physician Y."
As the rightful successor to the Roman Empire, the Church inherited the honorary title Excellentia (as well as Eminentia) to bestow on her loyal sons in accordance with her lights. (In imperial times, both honorifics were addressed to the powerful office of the praefectus praetorio [Berger's Encyc. Dict. of Roman Law]). But sede "bishops," who don't belong to the Church and have no commission from her, are barred from its use. In fact, properly speaking, they're laymen, a few of whom who may (illicitly) possess valid priestly and episcopal orders from a Catholic line. Also worthy of note is that even if the S. Congregatio Caeremonialis, the curial department that exercised jurisdiction over matters of rank and precedence, were still sitting, the sedes would have no standing to bring suit for the title since they're outside the Roman Catholic Church.
By now, it should be beyond discussion: Styling a sede "bishop" as Your or His Excellency isn't simply a buck-toothed, web-footed hick's social gaffe, like addressing the "judge" at a county-fair pie-eating contest as Your Honor. It's a serious transgression of propriety that exposes the offender for both the boor and the scofflaw he is.
Still, though, the practical question of good manners remains: How, exactly, does a servile cultie dude address one of these implausible canonical absurdities? In other words, what does a redneck Gertie guy or his bogtrotting Swampland wingman do if he's not allowed to grovel by means of Your Excellency or if usage rules and ecclesial reality forbid BEE-uh-ship?
We thought long and hard about that question. PL, in fact, solicited the input of blogger colleagues. To give these sede "bishops" their propers, the Readers weren't willing to sacrifice any of the positive laws of the Church or the canons of good form, large or small. No, not on your life! Not one whit. Our socially refined mothers and executive-level fathers reared us better. We wanted to get it right, by golly. So everybody had to put on his thinking cap. Finally, an inspired soul hit upon the perfect style for all Tradistan's grubbily striving episcopi vagantes:
YOUR EXCREMENCY
Use it often. You can't go wrong.
* Excellentiae Reverendissimae titulum...tribuendum quoque esse Archiepiscopis atque Episcopis, sive residentialibus sive titularibus tantum. For the full list of those entitled to the style, click here for the Latin-language decree published in the 1931 Acta Apostolicae Sedis, p. 22 . (N.B. In the link's OCR text, the page header reads "28.")
