Null Hypothesis
Once in grad school I was having lunch with a group of priests. Several of them were sharing stories about ordination mishaps they’d seen, and one guy who worked at the nuncio’s office talked about a particularly messy case he’d come across.
The case involved a priest who, a couple of years after his ordination, announced that he wanted to leave the priesthood. Being liberated from the clerical state is ordinarily a difficult canonical process that involves a formal request to the Vatican, etc. But when the matter of initiating the laicization process was raised, the young priest informed the bishop’s office that, in fact, he had never been ordained, that at the ordination mass for his seminary class the bishop had accidentally passed him over, and that he had video evidence to prove it. He was not in need of laicization, because he had never been a priest.
Lo and behold, when they reviewed the video footage of the ordination it was quite clear that the bishop had laid hands on the fellow next to our young priest, then paused, gotten distracted, and skipped over to the person after him. This man had been living and working as a priest, administering sacraments, etc. for a couple of years, and no one but he himself knew that he had never been validly ordained.
Now, to a catholic this situation is simply appalling. One thinks of all the sacraments invalidly administered, of all the people seeking grace from a false minister, etc. In the face of this scandal, one then appeals to a loophole doctrine: Deus non alligatur sacramentis, which is to say that God is not limited by the sacraments but can administer grace outside of them. Or perhaps the Church itself invisibly supplies the grace of these invalid sacraments on account of the good faith of those who receive them. All very hand-wavy—in a way that seems to seriously undercut the importance of the sacraments, the catholic priesthood, etc.
At the time, I thought the story was shocking, but I mostly forgot about it. Recently, there have been other similar stories. A year or two ago there was the case of a priest who had baptizing babies with an invalid formula for decades, including at least one child who went on to be ordained himself—invalidly, it turns out. Now everyone who was baptized by the first priest needed to be re-baptized, and everyone who had received the eucharist, or gone to confession, or been married by the second priest had done so invalidly.
Today I read yet another such story, as a Kansas City bishop has informed the diocese that several parishes had used invalid wine in their masses for years. Someone took a liberty that they thought was inconsequential but apparently invalidates the entire mass. This subtle error continued unnoticed for ages. All the masses celebrated were invalid. Jesus wasn’t actually “really present” in their wine. Oops.
Again, one can appeal to theological loopholes to make it all seem less awful, but to an outsider these cases are amusing in that they offer us a sort of low-level proxy for a grand experiment in the “reality” of the sacraments. How so?
Well, while the sacraments are “visible signs of invisible grace”, the Catholic Church is emphatic about their effects in one’s life. This is to say that, while the theological hedges are quite thick to ensure that no particular individual’s experience or particular instance of receiving this or that sacrament is strictly guaranteed to have any particular visible effect, overall the sacraments ought to have some visible effect among a large group of people over a long period of time. If this were not the case, then one could simply and truthfully assert that the sacraments have no visible effect in people’s lives, and are therefore not effective for the spiritual transformation of those who receive them. (One might call this the “null hypothesis” of sacramental efficacy, the supposition that in fact the sacraments do nothing.)
Much as with double-blind clinical trials, we can think of these parishes with cumulative decades of invalid masses, fake confessions, and simulated baptisms as the “placebo arm” of a massive experiment in sacramental efficacy. Among those receiving placebo sacraments, was there any noticeable difference in the moral rectitude of their lives? Was there any basis on which the people receiving a true or false sacrament could have determined that their sacrament was true or false? Overall, on a population level, was there any noticeable difference between the parishes with invalid masses and fake Jesus, and those that had the “real deal”? Apparently not. If there had been, someone would have noticed and called out the invalidity of the sacraments ages ago, and it wouldn’t have taken a dubium submitted to the Vatican, a confession of the fake priest himself, or an intervention from the local bishop to determine that things weren’t right.
Which is to say, for those struggling to understand why the sacraments don’t seem to “work” for them personally, or why Jesus never really seems to be present, or why a baptism or confirmation didn’t make any difference in their own or their kid’s life—that, quite simply, none of it is real. The supernatural offerings of the Catholic Church never make any difference in their own right, and that whatever mystical experiences, personal transformations, etc., people attribute to it all are probably due to independent causes, the imagination, or something else.
I’ll close with a link to the news story about the invalid wine, so readers can bask for themselves in the unbelievable fickleness of Catholic rules about what constitutes “true wine” that can be valid matter for the purpose of being mystically annihilated (except for the accidents!) and replaced with Jesus.