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Sacrament: sign of what the Church is and does
I wish that at some time in my life I had had an opportunity to write a thesis on validity, and chase the concept through the literature. The whole matter needs the backing of a sound sacramental theology. Christ himself is the primordial sacrament, making present and visible in our history God's selfgift and conveying this to us. After his death and resurrection, the Church in which he dwells and acts by his Spirit is the basic sacrament. A weakness of the scholastic theology of the sacraments is that it separated them off from each other and from their roots in the Church. Each particular sacrament is an effective sign of what the Church is and does all the time: the ritual by itself is simply a sign. It is the Church (Christ in his Church) that produces the effect.
Valid means "recognized"
The, word "valid" has had different meanings at different times. Augustine argued that baptism by Donatists was valid and so converts to the Catholic Church from Donatism should not be rebaptised. But what he meant was that the ritual had been objectively and correctly performed the Names of the Trinity had been invoked over the immersed person and this fact stood and could not be erased. It was unrepeatable. But the ritual was ineffective, did not forgive sins and impart the life of grace, because Donatists did not possess the Holy Spirit, who dwelt only in the true Church. Their ritual was like a vaccination which had not "taken"; it took when they were reconciled to the Catholic Church by the layingon of hands. Thus he could say a ritual was valid but ineffective. His view prevailed that there is no such thing as rebaptism.
"Valid" is a canonical word and for a long time now it has been used in a sense different from Augustine's. It is of the nature of a sacrament to embody, make visible, ensure and convey God's selfgift, his grace, for example for the forgiveness of sin, for nourishment by the Lord's risen and glorious humanity. The Church can give an assurance of the effectiveness of a sacramental ritual if it is duly performed (and people need to know that their sins are forgiven, that they truly receive the risen Lord). So, to say that the ritual is valid is to say that the Church declares its effectiveness because the conditions (minister and ritual and intention) are fulfilled. Thus, to say that orders are valid is simply to say that they are recognised. There is no other way to inspect the reality of a sacrament than to examine the conditions of its performance.
No guarantee of ineffectiveness
The crucial and essential point, where many go wrong, is that, whereas the Church can guarantee effectiveness of priestly acts when the canonical conditions are fulfilled, it cannot give a guarantee of ineffectiveness. That would be to limit God's power to the Church's "usual channels". This leaves it open to you or to me to become convinced that Anglican orders are indeed effective, both because of my experience of their ministry and because I could not believe in God "holding back" in the face of such evident faith and trust, and fruitfulness, in all concerned. So in our view Anglican orders could be invalid, i.e. not recognised by the Catholic Church, but effective.
Anglican orders: a safe decision
In the later nineteenth century, Lord Halifax led an effort to get Rome to revise its attitude to Anglican orders. But hopes were dashed and the Bull of 1896, Apostolicae Curae, arguing that continuity had been broken by the Edwardine Ordinal, ruled in extreme language that these orders were "absolutely null and utterly void". The validity of orders raises the question of the reality of the eucharist and so is of concern to interchurch families.
The arguments leading to the decision of Apostolicae Curae are intricate and cannot be fully treated here. But many of the grounds on which the decision was based have since been questioned by theologians. They rest on the notion of power possessed by priests (to forgive sins, to change the bread and wine) and passed on by ordination. But theology today sees the power as the Spirit's and sees it residing in the community and not in the person of the minister. So the whole "relayrace theory" (as it has been called) of valid ordination goes by the board, and it becomes irrelevant for ministers to claim that they were ordained by an Old Catholic bishop ... (For the arguments of Apostolicae Curae, see the chapter on Ministry in my book Reconciling, SCM Press, 1985, pp. 58.)
The decision of Apostolicae Curae was a playsafe decision. It has long been a principle of moral theology that in cases involving the sacraments, the more probable or safer view must be followed as regards validity. For all its strong language, the verdict could be no more than a prudential judgment that, in the existing state of historical and theological knowledge, a guarantee of effectiveness could not be given to Anglican orders and afortiori to nonepiscopal ordinations, since "the power" was passed on by bishops.
A canonical term
One might end there, but a marriage case (real or fictitious) made me realise that one must bring in the idea of legality. A happily married couple were the mainstay of their local Catholic church somewhere in America, leading all the parish societies, and with children singing in the choir and serving on the sanctuary. Then an old dying nanny in Oklahoma revealed in confession that they were in fact halfbrother and sister, and she alone knew it. The case was referred by the confessor to the Sacred Penitentiary in Rome, which replied that they were to be left in peace. So the marriage is valid, i.e. recognised in the external forum, though not fulfilling an essential condition.
Hence I would define the word "valid" as meaning recognised by competent authority as fulfilling the conditions for legality and sacramental effectiveness.
The word is a canonical and not a theological one, and is viewed with some distaste in some other Christian traditions. But it is nevertheless a necessary one. It is necessary, for example, to be able to state firmly whether A and B are truly married and so incur the responsibilities of marriage towards each other, their children and society, which has responsibilities towards them. Before nation states and a civil law of marriage existed, the Church was the only legislator for marriage. Churches of the Reformation have been able to rely on civil law in Europe. But the Catholic Church, which already had canon law of her own, could not rely across the world on the laws and customs of any and every nation. It is legitimate to be convinced of the reality and effectiveness of Christian ministry by reasons of the heart, by experience of it. But, for coherence, the head also has to be satisfied, as it has in deciding some particular cases.
Theological renewal
The only way in which real change can take place with regard to the recognition of orders is for inadequate theology to be replaced by a fully convincing one. Ideas of transmission of power have to be replaced in the end by recognition that power lies in the Christian community, and that it is inconceivable that the community, the Body of Christ, should be unable to celebrate the eucharist because of the absence of some particularly commissioned, appointed, ordained person.
John Coventry, SJ
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Published by the Association of Interchurch Families, England
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