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All Milingo’s Men
Posted September 28, 2006 , By Joshua LeBlanc
In case any of you have been in the closet recently, Archbishop Milingo recently “ordained” some men to the episcopate at the Imani Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
Because he did not have a papal mandate, he incurred automatic excommunication as well as the men he “ordained.” The reason I put ordained in quotation marks is because there seems to be some speculation about whether the ordinations were even valid. We know that the ordinations were illicit because they were done without a papal mandate but a response from the Vatican concerning the consecrations seems to indicate that the Vatican knows something about the consecration that we don’t — maybe a defect of form during the ritual caused an invalid ordination. We know that the Vatican has accepted even LeFebvre’s illicit ordinations as valid but recent news reports about Milingo denote that:
The Vatican statement also said “the church does not recognize nor does it intend
to recognize in the future such ordinations and all the ordinations derived from them.”
It also added that the canonical status of the “four presumed bishops is the same
in which they found themselves before ordination” by Archbishop Milingo.
I’m no Canon lawyer here but it seems to me that from this statement the Vatican implies that no valid ordination took place. Just some thoughts for pondering
Topics: Church Hierarchy, Church Life |
