Réponse (en anglais) de l'abbé Cekada à l'abbé Celier !

— 1 —
New Bishops,
Empty Tabernacle
(2007)
by Rev.Anthony Cekada
SSPX’s French District publishes an editorial
defending the 1968 Rite of Episcopal Consecration.
THE DEBATE over the validity of the 1968 Rite of Episcopal Consecration
continues in Catholic traditionalist circles, particularly
in France.
Because most of the clergy operating under the 1984 “Tridentine
Mass” Indult and the aegis of various Vatican-approved
“traditional” priestly organizations (FSSP, ICK, etc.) were ordained
by bishops consecrated with the new rite, the outcome of
this debate will eventually affect the number of traditionalists
willing to receive sacraments from these priests, as well as from
any priests who will function under the anticipated Motu Proprio
“liberating” the pre-Vatican II Latin Mass. If these priests were
ordained by invalidly consecrated bishops, then the sacraments
they confer that depend upon the priestly character (Penance,
the Eucharist, and Extreme Unction) are invalid as well.
The issue has also heated up in chapels of the Society of St.
Pius X (SSPX). In the U.S., for instance, SSPX installed one such
priest as a pastor in Richmond, Virginia. The SSPX District Superior,
moreover, allows priests ordained by new rite bishops to
offer Sunday Mass at St. Vincent’s in Kansas City after they have
“graduated” from an SSPX course on how to say the traditional
Mass. Conditional ordination beforehand in the traditional rite is
not a requirement — an injustice not only to the laity, but to the
priest as well, who probably is unaware of any problem and acting
in good faith.1 It appears that some laymen have protested or
left the Kansas City chapel over this issue.
In France, the Rev. Grégoire Celier SSPX recently published
an article defending the validity of the new rite of episcopal consecration,
and attacking those traditionalists who had called it
into question — notably the Rore Sanctifica committee (a European
research group) and myself. Because it appeared both in
the Society’s flagship publication2 and as an editorial on the web
site for the SSPX French District,3 one can be sure that Fr. Celier’s
article was approved by the SSPX Superior General, the Most
1. SSPX officials claim that they conduct an “investigation” about validity in
each case. This, I submit, is public-relations hogwash that is unconnected to any
objective principles of sacramental theology, and boils down to nothing more
than the question of whether the priest himself is willing to submit to conditional
ordination. If he’s not willing, nothing will be done. This was the case in the early
1980s with Fr. Philip Stark SJ, an episode that eventually led to the expulsion of
“The Nine” in 1983.
2. “De la Validité du Sacre,” Fideliter 177 (May-June 2007).
3. La Porte Latine, editorial, May 2007.

— 2 —
Rev. Bernard Fellay, and that it therefore expresses what is now
the official SSPX party line on the new rite.
I presented my own case against the validity of the new rite
in two articles, “Absolutely Null and Utterly Void” (March 2006)
and “Still Null and Still Void” (January 2007), a reply to objections
subsequently made to the first article. Both are available on
www.traditionalmass.org.
The dispute hinges on the essential sacramental form for
the episcopacy — the one sentence in the rite that contains what
is necessary and sufficient to consecrate a true bishop. Put very
simply, my argument was this:
• In his Apostolic Constitution Sacramentum Ordinis, Pius XII
taught that a form for conferring Holy Orders must univocally
(unambiguously) signify the sacramental effects: the power of
the Order received (deacon, priest or bishop) and the grace of
the Holy Ghost.
• In 1968 the post-Vatican II reformers completely changed
the essential sacramental form for episcopal consecration. In the
process, they removed one of these essential ideas: the power of
Holy Orders (potestas Ordinis) that a bishop receives.
• According to the general principles of Catholic sacramental
theology, if a sacramental form is changed in such a way as to
remove an essential idea, the form becomes invalid.
• The new form, I therefore concluded, is invalid. Consequently,
those consecrated with this rite are not true bishops.
A key point of dispute in the debate concerned the meaning
in the new form of the Latin phrase Spiritus principalis — rendered
into English as “governing Spirit” and into French as
“l’Esprit qui fait les chefs.”
Those who defended the validity of the new rite maintained
that this expression unambiguously signified the episcopacy. I
demonstrated that it did not — I unearthed at least a dozen different
meanings for it — and that in the new form itself, the expression
means nothing more than the Holy Ghost, merely one of
the required elements for a valid sacramental form for Holy Orders.
In my articles I had presented all this in a systematic fashion
and cited various treatises to support each point of my argument.
In his editorial, however, Fr. Celier did not respond with a
systematic theological argument of his own. Rather, he launched
a personal attack against the members of Rore Sanctifica and
myself4 — and then recycled the objections of a modernist Benedictine
that I had already answered.
Since Fr. Celier’s editorial will be translated and widely circulated,
I will answer these objections once again. I will conclude
by pointing out how the use of these arguments by Fr. Celier and
others indicates a larger problem within SSPX.
1. Eastern Rite? Fr. Celier states that the essential sacramental
form prescribed by Paul VI “is nothing more than a re-use of a
formula used for consecrating bishops in the Coptic and Syrian
4. Fr. Cekada left SSPX “in a manner that was morally questionable.”

— 3 —
Eastern Rite Catholic Churches… The new rite contains the substance
of the two Coptic and Syrian rites.”
Did Fr. Celier even bother to read my two articles? By comparing
the texts mentioned, I have demonstrated twice that this is
false.
The essential form promulgated by Paul VI: (a) is not a “reuse”
of the form for episcopal consecration prescribed by the
Coptic synod and approved by Leo XIII, and (b) appears in the
Syrian rite as a non-sacramental prayer for the enthronement of a
Patriarch, who has already been consecrated a bishop.
2. “Ambiguous” Formulas in the Old Rite? Fr. Celier argues
by analogy as follows: If we apply to the pre-Vatican II form for
priestly ordination the understanding of “univocal” that Fr.
Cekada applies to the Paul VI form for episcopal consecration,
we would have to conclude that the old form for priestly ordination
was invalid, because it uses the term presbyter, which is derived
from the Greek word for “elder” rather than “priest.”
Again, did Fr. Celier read what I wrote? In my second article,
I pointed out that this analogy fails for two reasons:
(a) The Greek etymology of the term presebyter in the old
form is irrelevant. The old form is written in Christian ecclesiastical
Latin, where the term presbyter signifies the second rank of
the Christian priesthood.
(b) Fr. Hürth, one of the theologians who wrote Sacramentum
Ordinis for Pius XII, pointed out that the form further specifies
this by also explicitly mentioning “’the office of the second
rank,’ (as opposed to the office of the first rank, which is the
episcopacy).” (Periodica 37 [1948], 26)
3. Meaning Derived from Context? Fr. Celier enunciates the
following principle: “In reality, the words of the sacramental
formula should be referred to a three-fold field of meaning. For
it is erroneous to require that a text express a sense in a comprehensible
way outside of any other context.”
Here Fr. Celier takes up the nebulous double-talk of modernist
sacramental theology, which dismisses pre-Vatican II
teaching on essential sacramental forms as a theology of “magic
words.”
Like Fr. Celier, the modernists propose instead a “broader
context” that effects a sacrament. In my days in a modernist
seminary, many was the time I heard priests and fellow seminarians
say that pronouncing the Words of Consecration at Mass
was not important because “the whole Eucharistic Prayer was
consecratory.”
This is also the same theology that allowed Ratzinger and
John Paul II to declare in 2001 that when the Nestorian schismatics
use the Anaphora (Canon) of Addai and Marai for their Mass,
it is valid, even though it does not contain the Words of Consecration
— or even mention the Body and Blood of Christ.5
5. See the Most Rev. Donald J. Sanborn, “O Sacrament Unholy,” at www.traditionalmass.
org

— 4 —
But according to traditional Catholic sacramental theology,
“context” cannot supply validity when an essential element is
omitted from the sacramental form.
Thus for example, although the “context” of the traditional
baptismal rite contains prayers that explicitly mention baptism,
cleansing and the life of grace, this context cannot render the
sacrament valid if the priest substantially changes or omits an
essential word (e.g., “baptize,” “I,” “you,” “Father,” etc.) in the
essential sacramental formula. The rite is invalid, period.
Nor would the “implicit” signification that Fr. Celier proposes
for an essential sacramental form produce a valid baptism.
If a priest says “I baptize you in the name of God,” the baptism
will still be invalid, even though the surrounding context “implies”
the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
4. Associated with the Episcopal Office? As regards the disputed
phrase “governing Spirit,” Fr. Celier maintains “The dictionaries
for Patristic Greek and Latin thus associate hegemonikon
and principalis with the episcopal office.”
This is not even a half-truth. I demonstrated that in Greek
and Latin the term has at least a dozen different meanings.
Among them, we find one that connotes a bishop’s jurisdictional
power (power to rule) but none that connotes a bishop’s sacramental
power (potestas Ordinis). It is the latter that a valid sacramental
form for conferring Holy Orders must unambiguously
signify.
5. Establish the Church = Sacramental Power? On this point,
Fr. Celier recycles an argument made by Fr. Pierre-Marie: “With
reference as much to reality — to the tradition of Christian vocabulary
— as to the context of the rite as a whole, this petition
for an outpouring of the Spiritus principalis upon the ordinand —
the Spirit of Jesus Christ which He Himself transmitted to the
Apostles to establish the Church in all places — perfectly signifies
the meaning of the grace of the episcopacy.6
More gobbledygook.
And again, did Fr. Celier read my article? I pointed out in
“Still Null and Still Void” that such a claim is false for at least
two reasons:
(a) The Apostles founded churches only because they enjoyed
an extraordinary jurisdiction to do so. The theologian
Dorsch says specifically that this power is not communicated to
bishops: “not all those functions proper to the apostles are also
proper to bishops — for example, to establish new churches.”7
(b) To establish “churches” (dioceses, in modern terminology)
is an exercise of the power of jurisdiction, not one of orders,
6. “En référence, tant à la réalité, à la tradition du vocabulaire chrétien qu'au
contexte de l'ensemble du rite, cette demande d'une effusion du Spiritus principalis
sur l'ordinand, Esprit de Jésus-Christ qu'il a lui-même transmis aux Apôtres
pour établir l'Église en tous les lieux, est parfaitement significative de la grâce
épiscopale.”
7. De Ecclesia Christi (Innsbrück: Rauch 1928), 290.

— 5 —
such as ordaining priests. This jurisdictional power is proper to
the Roman Pontiff alone.8
6. An “Interesting Insight”? Fr. Celier uses this phrase to describe
Fr. Alvaro Calderon’s argument for the validity of the new
form, which he sums up as follows: “Thus it follows that the imposition
of hands is a sufficient matter for Holy Orders because
they are the hands of a bishop, and that a formula even a bit
vague suffices because it is a mouth of a bishop, a will of a bishop
who expresses his determination to transmit the power that he
possesses in its fullness, to beget from his own full priesthood a
priest or a bishop.”9
A layman who reads such a passage may think it contains
something truly “profound” or some inspired but ineffable flash
of theological insight.
In fact, it’s just more mumbo-jumbo. Fr. Calderon, if you
judge from his article in the November 2007 Angelus, seems incapable
of fashioning a clear argument or, for that matter, even
writing a clear sentence. The essence of good theological writing
is clarity. Fr. Calderon writes like a modernist.
But the problem is not just style. Fr. Calderon’s “insight,”
quoted above and taken up by Fr. Celier, entirely overthrows
what Catholic theology teaches about the essential sacramental
forms — a form must univocally signify the sacramental effect —
and substitutes a modernist, near-Gnostic “sacramental contextualism.”
His statement, once again, could have come straight from
one of my modernist professors in the late 1960s — or, for that
matter, even from some bizarre Theosophist tract, just before it
describes how a Catholic bishop’s words produce “purple bubbles”
on the “astral plane.”
Taken to its logical conclusion, moreover, this principle
overthrows Pope Leo XIII’s condemnation of Anglican orders in
the Bull Apostolicae Curae. Are the Anglican formulas that were
“a bit vague” now to be considered retroactively revalidated due
to Bishop Barlow’s “mouth” in 1559?
Do Fr. Celier and Fr. Calderon really believe that as regards a
sacrament, “that a formula even a bit vague suffices because it is
a mouth of a bishop”? Or are they channeling Tyrell, Teilhard de
Chardin and Madame Blavatsky?
* * * * *
THIS LAST point brings us to a larger problem that exists in the
Society of St. Pius X. For SSPX priests involved in controversies
like this, it seems that research in the library and St. Paul’s dictum
“I handed down to you first what I also received” (1 Cor
8. See Canon 215.1.
9. “De là vient que l'imposition des mains est une matière suffisante pour
l'ordre, parce que ce sont des mains d'évêque; qu'une formule même un peu
vague suffit, parce que c'est une bouche d'évêque, une volonté d'évêque qui exprime
sa détermination de transmettre le pouvoir qu'il possède en plénitude,
d'engendrer de son propre sacerdoce plénier un prêtre ou un évêque.”

— 6 —
15:3) never suffice. One must always play the great “intellectual”
who dreams up an “original” theological idea.10
So, Fr. Celier does not — as you would expect — draw his
arguments for the validity of the new rite from pre-Vatican II
manuals of sacramental theology. Rather, he bases them on the
novel theories of Br. Ansgar Santogrossi, who (though “conservative”)
adheres to the Novus Ordo and the errors of Vatican II,
and is a fully paid-up member of the new religion.
Fr. Calderon, similarly, does not rely on the clear principles
enunciated by the older authors. Rather, he feels compelled to
invent an “insight” which he attributes to St. Thomas, but which
in fact overthrows the standard Catholic doctrine on sacramental
form.
For priests who hold themselves and their organization out
as defenders of tradition, this is deeply, deeply weird. Why not
just argue from principles of traditional Catholic theology?
Apart from the desire for “originality,” the answer, I think, is
that the general praxis and “positions” that the Society has developed
since its foundation cannot be reconciled with standard,
pre-Vatican II theology.
Thus the superiors of the Society and the would-be “intellectuals”
in its ranks were obliged to invent an array of tenuous
theories that would allow the organization to refuse submission
to the Roman pontiff (the pope is like a bad dad!), spurn his universal
laws as evil (the New Mass is poison, but invalidly promulgated!),
“sift” teachings of the universal ordinary magisterium
(we can judge and reject what conflicts with “tradition”!), pronounce
excommunications invalid (Fr. Murray’s canon law thesis
trumps a papal declaration!), advocate resistance to the Successor
of St. Peter (justified by “Bellarmine,” and “Vitoria”!), operate
an apostolate parallel to Ordinaries appointed by the Pope
(state of necessity!), and consecrate bishops in 1988 against the
Pope’s express will (Operation Survival, and — my personal favorite
— “The tents are rented.”).
If you can invent new theological principles for all these,
why not for sacramental theology too? Thus “three-fold fields of
signification,” “implicit but unequivocal” forms, new “insights”
for the Summa and vague formulas transfigured by episcopal lips
can be adduced to defend a sacramental form that, according to
all the principles of the old theology, does not univocally signify
the potestas Ordinis, and is therefore invalid.
I am sure that there are priests in the Society — and indeed,
laity in the Society’s chapels — who reject or are highly skeptical
of the “original” arguments that Fr. Celier and Fr. Calderon have
made for the validity of the 1968 Rite of Episcopal Consecration.
They should not think this is a “sedevacantist” affair. Those
who still consider Paul VI and his successors to be true popes
should remember that even a true pope lacks the power to
change the substance of a sacrament.
10. The quote from St. Paul, ironically, is inscribed on Archbishop Lefebvre’s
tombstone at the Ecône seminary: “Tradidi enim vobis in primis quod et accepi.”
Apparently the sentiment never filtered through to the theology classrooms
nearby…

— 7 —
In 1975, moreover, Mgr. Lefebvre personally told me that the
new rite was invalid. My research and articles more than three
decades later confirm that conclusion, and I cite documentation
which readers can verify for themselves.
If the new bishops are indeed not true bishops, then the
most pressing problem that such traditionalists face — despite
the urgings of Fr. Celier and other purveyors of “original” theology
— is not the vacant see. It is the empty tabernacle.
(Internet, May 2007)

Et en français :
http://www.rore-sanctifica.org/bibilotheque_rore_sanctifica/04-rite_de_paul_6-invalidite_du_rite_episcopal/2007-05-01-Refutation_de_l_abbe_Celier_par_l_abbe_Cekada/RORE_Communique-2007-05-01_Abbe_Cekada_replique_a_Celier.pdf

Merci bien!
Ca évitera à Repellam Umbras un long travail de traduction pour les usagers du forum.

Merci Martial, je suis effectivement très occupé jusqu'à la fin du mois