Dear Louie,
Having just read the Archbishop of Canterbury's good response to the recent Singapore service, I am emboldened, through your good offices, to share a bit wider a reaction to the service I have made in response to questions in private corresondence:
One of the requirements for a sacrament to work ex opere operato is that the minister of the sacrament intend what the church intends. The church is a visible community deriving from the visibility of its source, the Word made flesh, who (called) calls those who hear him into a visible, on-going community of reconciliation/redemption in his Spirit.
Because the church is a visible community, the intention of the church is expressed in a visible, communal manner: a) in visible, ritually expressed sacramental acts in community, and, b) in the case of ordination, also in the process of selecting and presenting the persons to receive the sacramental grace of ordination that enables them to serve the church (in the Spirit of the One who came to serve rather than be served).
Granting the existence of intentional acts of free will by individuals within the church who, by their acts, express differing views of the nature of God's revelation and of the witness of the church to that revelation, ambiguities--if not contradictions--arise from time to time within the life of the church. When that is the case and appeal is made by differing parties to the same mysterious and unseen God, the best that can be done for the good and unity of the visible church is to "settle" by discipline what cannot be solved by faith. Thus it is that, in the case of ordained ministry, canonical "faculties" or "licenses" to function sacramentally are granted by ecclesial bodies for the orderly exercise of ministry within their communities. Such a "solution" of good order may be the best the Episcopal Church can do at the moment until the Community, in its fullness, can manifest its will in its properly constituted manner as a community.
The problem in the present instance, as I see it, is that the Singapore action is intrinsically schismatic. Ordinations can only be done within a church for a church (otherwise it must be held that the church comes from bishops instead of bishops being but a constitutive element of the church and themselves only within the church): the "ordinations" in question were not authorized by the Episcopal Church for that Church, so the only way they could be valid is if they were done for another Church or a subcommunity within the Episcopal Church, which, by the action of the ordinations, declared itself separated from the Episcopal Church.
The sacramental structure of the church does not lend itself to subversion for personal purposes, whether the intention of the individuals involved is good or bad, right or wrong.
+Arthur A. Vogel
[Retired Bishop of West Missouri -- LC]
Please sign my guestbook and
view it.
Statistics courtesy of WebCounter.