How the World Is Marking the 500th Birthday of Protestantism

[Elok]

You didn't say it wiped out the entire Apostolic Succession on Planet, which is what it would have to come down to.  But fair enough.

[Buster's Uncle]

Did I get temporal and secular mixed?  I would have thought "there being no one else" said exactly "wiped out the entire Apostolic Succession on Planet".

-If I wrote more Prudence (and I started once but -got bogged down in/with how as a girl stuck running the house, she brought her brothers to heel- was running long) I'd need to deal with that; my own people would probably muddle through until a promising minister candidate emerged and not worry excessively about ordination - but they'd have been changed by migration to a place where you don't have a lot of choices when the preacher wasn't working out, and hard to say.  -Not that big a deal to go Methodist -or poach one of their preachers- even on Planet, I think...

-That ought to be different for RCs, much more invested in tradition and undoubtedly well-prepared before they ever boarded the ship -and who would take the break in the chain VERY seriously- but I suppose they'd either have to reason that a lose single COE priest had better succession than nothing, or surely they also ordain the deacons as SBs do, and I'd think promoting the best of them is also a lot closer to heir of the anointment of St. Peter than nothing.

-Anyone from EO would work, too, better than COE in one way, but there's slightly more explicitly cut off from Peter, and for a lot longer.  -Also, awkward to insert them and not have had Manny lumping in with the Catholics, or voting for Prudence, though all that could be handwaved easily enough.  -I think in the end, and I'm working this out as I type this post, they simply borrow clergy from a couple of the less heretical traditions like Anglican and Eastern for the ordination ceremony, and ordain-up their own most promising RC deacon to the priesthood, reasoning that there's good-enough succession in the combinations of descent...

(Prudence would stay in actual charge, though, even though technically subordinate to the new priest, because a number of fairly obvious reasons -she's better at it, mostly, and the new guy is young and not pragmatic enough and doesn't want to lead outside spiritual things; she wasn't abbess in the first place because she was pretty- but propriety would be preserved and everybody ought to be happy as long as the 't's have been dotted and the RC trains run on time...)

[Elok]

The correct option would be to borrow a valid priest from another faction to restart the chain.  Unless there are no Catholic priests, even of a moderate, hippy-dippy, or Jesuit persuasion, among the Peacekeepers or Gaians, even as the tradition survived intact among the Believers.  Corrupt ones from the Morganites would also be technically valid, or weirdo survivalists from Santy's camp.  I assume Yang and Zak would have disposed of what few they had to begin with.

[Buster's Uncle]

-Or more briefly, to make a military analogy, a naval ship's doctor is explicitly outside the chain if command; but if the rest of the officers got killed, he'd be derelict in his duty to not take over and try to get the ship home, whatever his competence and whatever that of the senior enlisted man, undoubtedly an actual sailor - and Prudence is in a boat where there's no admirality -or even anther ship- to return to and stand down, unless they figure out how to make one...



[ninja] -You know, I think every RC priest on Planet HAD to be at the dedication blessing incident, or Prudence wouldn't be acting openly as leader, or be the one nominated for LB Sister on behalf of the Catholics.  -Hard to imagine a priest w/ any other faction so rooted and partisan that he wouldn't minimally visit and ordain someone.

-So you think a heretic priest from a tradition schismed off precisely BECAUSE they rejected the Pope's authority, and therefore St. Peter's anointment w/ Holy Spirit at Pentecost, direct descent from and all that, would be more acceptable than promoting a Catholic deacon?  I suppose he'd have to explicitly recant the heresy, and then at least a COE priest has a clear chain of custody/descent of the Holy whatsis of Peter, albeit passed down through some soiled hands.  -I still think the deacon option is better for cobbling together legitimacy -Prudence in on the ordination, too, for that bit of it- but you'd be closer to an insider perspective, so I'm really asking.

(One would think that NO faction would have zero Christians, but you could easily imagine any with Uni and Hive, if there are many at all, might be under deep cover - I suppose that could turn up a legit unknown priest, too, if it served the needs of the story.)

[Buster's Uncle]

To be clear, Prudence IS ordained, and has actual spiritual authority, but I'm assuming the nature of her vows make that not entirely adequate to simply ordain a priest on her own, and declare him to hold legitimate diocesan authority...

Not sure that assumption is correct, though.  For all I know, her legit authority makes it a non-issue... 

-But I would think if the priest-candidate was an ordained deacon, he's already GOT legitimate diocesan authority enough to call it a wash?  Surely the future-people wouldn't deem the gender deal a problem?  Holy Mother Church has always been more flexible than that in the face of pragmatic need...

[Buster's Uncle]

...You know, I've got an ordained priest brother with a Doctorate of Divinity, and I perceive he knows less about RC stuff than I do (when he was most of the way through his studies, he indicated Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine weren't considered important thinkers) but he might surprise me and/or has taken better classes in history of theology since then.  He's certainly read the scriptures in the original languages, which punks both of us as far as that goes.  Let's fire off a terse email and see what he has to contribute...

[Elok]

I don't know the nitty-gritty of RCC doctrine, but in ours, monks are simply not clergy proper, full stop.  They're tonsured by priests, but lack the authority to do so [EDIT: tonsure other monks] themselves.  When our monastics hold liturgy at the monastery, they need a priest present to actually celebrate, even if there are a thousand deeply pious monks available.  This is usually done by having hieromonks, monks who are also priests.  But the two are totally parallel orders; the most distinguished abbot in Russia has no authority whatever outside his monastery walls, while the hieromonk is bound to obey his abbot on internal matters as a monk.  I'd imagine something similar obtains in the West.

The RCC officially classifies us, last I heard, as schismatics, ie essentially correct in doctrine but refusing to recognize Roman authority.  We view them as actual heretics.  In the event that the RCC hierarchy on Planet was actually stupid enough to put its entire administrative apparatus in one spot like that, and subsequently lose it, I would expect Catholicism to basically disintegrate unless one of ours, or an Episcopalian, decided shortly after to become a Catholic.  I believe the Episcopalians are also treated as having a valid succession, but am not sure.  You might get into some feuding over the chain of succession and whether any of the Episcopalian priest's predecessors were women, really bonkers heretical, or otherwise invalid.  Anyway, barring the unlikely event of a sudden conversion like that, the RCC would effectively not exist--bad enough being Catholic on another planet with no hope of communicating with the Pope--and I'd expect the former Catholics to either come over to us or the CoE, or start a new religion entirely based on a purported new dispensation.

Don't know about a deacon.  In our tradition, the line between priest and deacon is fairly hard, but under the circumstances I imagine they'd practice oikonomia and have the deacon abuse AS to ordain himself up two levels for lack of a better option.  It's our practice that you need a priest to make another priest and a bishop (or several) to make another bishop.  I imagine boosting a deacon would be closer to canonical than moving a monastic sideways.  Whatever they did, the transition would be extremely traumatic and occasion a great deal of schism and bad feelings.

[Buster's Uncle]

Oh yes - nothing but horrible long-term implications every time forever an RC got discontented w/ status quo and/or wanted to implement a new idea/reform, or just didn't see eye-to-eye/personally get along with the Cardinal or Bishop.

But the Catholic Church doesn't DO disintegration - they schism, individuals fall away, they might get supplanted entirely by heretics locally, but the core institution cobbles something together, calls it legit and soldiers on - they, frankly, in actual contemporary RL have a horrible who-was-an-antipope problem with the Apostolic Succession of the Throne of St. Peter, and more than anything, they appear to choose to not even think of the handwaves, logical rationalizations, and so-on in place, and just don't worry about it too hard.

After all, if no priest is handy, Last Rites administered by any baptized church member in good standing is somewhat more than just better than nothing - and they'll squint about the good standing if they have to...

Believe me, when I say that Cardinal had a special commission and Papal Bull in hand authorizing him to act mostly-autonomously as effective Space Pope -subordinate to any four year-old orders that arrived from Rome, of course- THAT'S no handwave.  That's how RC operates, not least when it knows the Cardinal may end up all the actual Pope there is, of all the Holy Mother Church -which MUST survive, of course- there is left in the universe.

Apparently, the RC monastic orders don't necessarily do ordination, but I think it's eminently reasonable to assume the head of an order -one not too strange/new/tiny/obscure, anyway- would have been granted that personal spiritual authority even on Earth, and most certainly all eligible upper echelons of the proposed Space Church would have been properly ordained and run through all that just in case.  -And the Cardinal must have been stupid and/or senile and/or that's why the Abbess wasn't there to get killed...

The more I dig into it, the more I think it being that big a legitimacy problem would be the handwave - the Catholics would have planned carefully, by the nature of the thing, against that sort of contingency coming up before they got established and bred-up in numbers and spread out to make such a crisis impossible.  -And I might would choose to do the handwave or not, because the theology dilemma could well be a suitable background plot element - or not.  -The Cardinal's commission papers most likely explicitly spell out that if it was to get down to one baptized Catholic left in the entire universe  -even if only a freshly-christened infant, though that would be setting the difficulty level WAY too high- that parishioner's duty would be to assume the papacy and make more Catholics to preserve the True Church as best as was possible.

Deacons, we S. Baptists treat as secular leaders and workers in the church w/o spiritual authority, and whether the Preacher reports to the Deacon Board or they actually report to HIM, is a matter of the personalities, not the doctrine and structure/tradition, we being one of those American flavors of Protestant that unabashedly runs things in each individual church as a democracy, with the preacher as hired -and voted-on- president to the deacon's elected legislature.  HowEVER - there IS an ordination ceremony when a first-time deacon is elected, and every ordained man in the room, priest or deacon, is supposed to take part and lay on hands and bless.

-In fact, because of that group blessing element common to ordinations, I'd venture that it's probable -if unprovable, especially given many likely jumped-up backwoods itinerant preachers never properly ordained in the chain- that Buster's Daddy's Protestant ordination actually has legit Apostolic Succession coming down through any number of actual RC priests way back in the chain.

I see that the deacon thing is a little dicey for RC, though -they just didn't seem to do deacons for a long time until reviving fairly recently- but if they had any to hand, it's officially a junior priesthood step, so it wouldn't do violence to the premise or internal logic to have it how I wanted for story purposes to have Diaz one, and endless options for how that was proceeding at the time of Prophet -including him not being actual priest material, and no HUGE hurry with Prudence empowered to conduct legit Mass and baptize, etc. while they trained a several priests - including that Prudence may have become Officially The Cardinal automatically - that's nothing to do with Manny's story after all, except for the leadership challenge being in her own person and thus taken as a personal betrayal by a friend...

[Buster's Uncle]

Rev. Dr. BD now pinged - some dude slowed me down over an hour posting at me, but sent now...

Unlikely to be even as informed/logical as what-all I've come up with, honestly, not least because he won't put much into it if he even bothers to answer -and he went to goon/fascist seminaries who taught him wrong even if they CAN read Greek- but worth a few minutes trying...

[Elok]

Quick answer before I head off to work: if all the clergy above the diaconate are dead, there's no core institution left to cobble something together.  The RCC in that case would be eviscerated, as it never has been before.  Gone.  I've no idea how they'd set up the rules beforehand, but it'd be at least comparable to the Jews' loss of the Temple in the first century.  They'd have to essentially reinvent the religion in a similar manner to adjust.

[Buster's Uncle]

I think a non-trivial portion -the same ones who go to mass every time the doors open in the here-and-now, and incidentally vote bigoted hate politics on the side,- would INSIST on soldiering on in the best form they could come up with...

That's exactly want the Jews did...

[Buster's Uncle]

You are aware that the occasional COE/Episcopalian priest converting is allowed to keep any wife he may have had at conversion?  No idea often it happens or if that applies same to EO, but one assumes the latter would come up more often, if not in the English-speaking world where I'd have heard about it, but ought to be the same deal - though again, I doubt the proper-succession assumption would be as strong, but stronger than what my brother could argue...

[Buster's Uncle]

[Elok]

Well, I'm trying my best here.  If you'd engage more with my arguments instead of one-line criticisms, I'd have a better idea where you're coming from, and they might be less repetitive.  As it is, my POV isn't going to change because you call it "groupthink" or accuse me of bad faith.

[Unorthodox]

Say, Elok.  I thought of a question a couple days ago and can't be bothered to go find the other religion thread.

I often enjoy simply exploring interesting church building. 

This one catholic church near me is brand new (~5 years), and just got it's first stained glass wall finished so I wanted to go see.  However, they are locked up tight outside of service times.  This runs contrary to most catholic churches I've been to where the chapel is open for sanctuary/worship nigh 24/7, generally staffed as well.  So, I often visit a chapel, get approached by clergy, and am thus free to ask about it's history, patron saint, and various other tidbits.  Occasionally even religion. 

I'm sure one of the other buildings at the local grounds to this catholic church is open for after hours worship (there's 5 buildings on the complex with various functions (family center, education, etc), but are more utilitarian in design thus not interesting to me. 

ANYHOW.  Does the EO church have this same kind of open door policy most catholic chapels do, or is it a more closed/open for services only style thing?  And would clergy be available during 'off' times?  I know of the EO building in SLC and wouldn't mind swinging by when I have a time, but don't want that to be wasted.