AD MULTOS ANNOS!

Ed. Note: This week Pistrina got wind of the probable consecration of a brand-spankin'-new wandering bishop. Details are a bit unsettled (perhaps by design), but the rumor won't go away. We, therefore, interrupt our 12-part series to bring you at an earlier hour than customary this special post.

In the earnest hope that the news of his recent consecration is reliable, we hasten to congratulate the young Most Reverend Markus Ramolla, who was once, and perhaps secretly still is, an enthusiastic supporter of this blog, contributing along the way much invaluable material and encouragement.* If, then, we may adapt a line from W.S. Gilbert, we find His Excellency to be the very model of a post-modern prelate.

As you know, Pistrina holds that, in the Sede Vacante, every priest should receive the episcopacy. Insofar as wandering bishops cannot teach or rule, there is very, very little difference nowadays between them and a simple priest. Moreover, since possessing episcopal character is not really necessary to confirm or to consecrate/bless churches, ciboria, patens, chalices, altar stones etc., outside of his own chapel about the only practical uses for an episcopus vagans are (1) the conferral of holy orders and (2) the blessing of sacred oils.**

This fledgling bishop, accordingly, represents our ideal of the sedevacantist prelate. Unlike "One-Hand Dan" and the rector, His Excellency makes no pretense to being someone he definitely is not. He's doesn't resent his modest origins, and he's painfully aware of the substandard formation he received at the MHT pesthouse. (His painful memories of that place will also spare the bishop's seminarians from having to sign perpetual agreements of cultish indenture, of which he alone would be the "authentic interpreter.") Knowing perfectly well his own limitations, he'll never invent theological or liturgical barbarities. In His Excellency's Mass center, you won't be stretched on the "una-cum" rack or be told he enjoys universal jurisdiction as a "missionary bishop." Happily, you'll recite along with Bishop Ramolla the Leonine prayers after Mass, and he'll never ridiculously claim to be an expert in pontifical ceremony. The youthful prelate's chief virtues are those of a conscientious sacristan blessed with the taste of a trained horticulturist, who loves the liturgy but doesn't make his starring role in a big show the central focus of a patently diminished episcopate.

Never will you hear him brag about obscenely expensive, fine-dining jaunts to shi-shi restaurants or resorts. He'll never represent himself as an exquisite gourmet or aesthete, like a couple mitered mannerists we know. He just likes to eat -- except for Mexican fare, so you'll never find him making a "run for the border," as one well-known prelatic mediocrity often does).  Furthermore, he certainly won't ever strive to pass himself off as quietly refined or reservedly elegant. Having closely observed over time the rector and "One-Hand Dan," His Excellency understands that amaranthine piping and shimmering choir vesture can't conceal permanently rough edges. 

No, indeed. His is a boisterous Gemütlichkeit, and, well, if a few food stains decorate his untidy cassock or if the soles of his unshined shoes have worn through, so what! All that wandering has got to wear out shoe leather, right? By nature he's unprepossessing. Why, we'd wager he probably doesn't have -- and likely never will acquire -- a full kit of pontificals. There will be few, if any, mad spending sprees at Gammarelli's, the papal tailor in Rome. You can also be sure he won't waste his time vainly studying the niceties of long-gone-never-to-return Roman court etiquette and costume: Dolly-dress-up is frankly not his style. So, while you won't be dazzled by over-the-top sartorial finery, neither will you have to witness the gauche buffoonery of a wandering bishop pulling a train.

We nominate this jolly, unpolished clerical Everyman as the bishop for our times, provided that he followed sound advice to seek conditional ordination prior to episcopal consecration. (Unfortunately, he was, as you may know, ordained to the priesthood by the dubious "One-Hand Dan.") Our fondest desire is that His Newly Minted Excellency ordain and consecrate often -- and soon, too -- without quibbling about imposing hands lightly. Almost from the moment the Thuc lineage was transplanted to the New World, we've experienced an application of Gresham's law: Bad Traddie clergy have driven out good, so there's no sense now in looking for quality candidates.*** What's really important is that an ever increasing tribe of wandering bishops break the stranglehold that a tiny cabal of brazen, self-promoting, episcopal pirates thinks it has on traditional Catholicism.

Once again, we fervently hope the report of a young, new bishop is authentic. (The sources are varied and very good.) As a token of our joy -- and in meaningful reference to another line in the same Gilbert ditty from which we borrowed above -- Pistrina commissioned, in the best humanistic and ecclesiastical tradition, an elegiac distich to commemorate what we pray was a valid consecration. Doubtless, the following lines are uncouth doggerel,**** but do the times merit anything better?

Pontifices --en!-- errabundi multiplicantur;

   vae tibi, «Mance Dan-y»: omnia haec opera. 

* He actually helped get Pistrina started by his generous gift of the Blunderer's sophomoric patchwork of errors, Work of Human Hands, which the young bishop acquired for us on the very day of its release in SW Ohio. His Excellency also furnished sensational documents and assembled eye-witness reporters of the unedifying shenanigans at the Swampland clerical vocational program.

** We understand that people may prefer a mitered clergyman at confirmation or, say, at the  consecration of a church; however, a bishop is not strictly necessary. As to the oils, they're not that crucial, for a priest can renew his supply with ease for quite a long time. Furthermore, additional research on the blessing of holy oils may prove very useful to clergy yearning for a bishop-free zone.

***In the Traddies' continuing race to the bottom, we advise all wandering bishops, when consecrating, to roundly ignore the qualities of legitimate birth, thirty years of age, and five years in the priesthood.  It's obvious from the record of the Thuc-Carmona lineage in the U.S. that the utter absence of the other requirements of c. 331 (viz., good moral character, piety, zeal for souls, prudence, leadership/management skills, valid credential in theology from an approved institution of higher learning, etc.) has certainly not stopped anyone from getting the miter in Traddielandia. A fortiori, as we have written, the demands of canon law do not obtain in the Sede Vacante.

**** We are certain our learned followers will appreciate the intentionally artless cæsura in line 1 (to register moral trauma); likewise we expect they will see the fun in the false quantity of the English diminutive suffix in line 2 (to reflect  the sing-song-jingle-jangle of the sobriquet "One-Hand Danny.").