One who has never had occasion to govern any dicastery nor had a priest hold the mitre for him while kneeling has learned to distrust men who solve other people’s problems from the comfort of never having to suffer them. It is an old occupational hazard of theology—and, before that, of courtiership: Versailles was full of people sincerely convinced that the French ate wonderfully, and the lady who supposedly recommended cake to those who had no bread was not speaking out of cruelty, but from a heartfelt, almost touching inability to imagine an empty kitchen. Qu’ils mangent de la brioche. There is no bad faith in the phrase. There is a partition.
This brings us to the recent statements by Cardinal Raymond Burke on the episcopal consecrations of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X and on the famous “state of necessity” the Lefebvrians invoke to justify them. His Eminence dismisses it without blinking: the present situation, he says, does not constitute a state of necessity. And one who knows just enough canon law not to get into lawsuits nevertheless recalls the axiom canonists have repeated for centuries and which the cardinal, former prefect of the Signatura, masters infinitely better than the writer of these lines: necessitas non habet legem, necessity knows no law. A formidable and extremely dangerous maxim, because before declaring it nonexistent one ought to answer a question His Eminence elegantly sidesteps: necessity, whose?
One thing is the faith that subsists iure in the Church—that Christ remains with her until the end of the ages, that the means of grace are there, intact, guaranteed, indefectible—and quite another is the faith that actually reaches the ordinary Christian on any given Sunday in a suburban parish. The former is dogma, and one has no intention of disputing it with the cardinal: heaven forbid. When Burke affirms that the Lord promised not to abandon us and that no circumstance, however harsh, authorizes an intrinsically evil act, he is entirely right, and it is worth saying so plainly so that no one mistakes these lines for an apology for schism, which they are not. The objection is different, and considerably more awkward: the indefectibility of the Church answers a question no one was asking her.
For whoever invokes the state of necessity—rightly or wrongly, that is another matter—does not deny that Christ remains in His Church. He says something more earthly and verifiable: that concrete access to the integral faith, to a liturgy that does not embarrass him, to preaching that does not leave him worse off than when he arrived, has become an uphill climb. And to that objection, which is one of fact, the cardinal replies with a truth of law. It is like answering someone who complains there is no bakery in his neighborhood by reciting the chemical composition of bread. The bread exists, indeed. The question was whether it reaches him.
It is at this point that biography, which one would prefer not to air but which the argument itself demands, becomes relevant. His Eminence has the problem of access solved in a way that is simply unattainable for the ordinary faithful. He lives—when he is not in his native Wisconsin, radiating doctrinal clarity from the magnificent shrine he himself promoted—in a spacious apartment a few steps from Bernini’s colonnade; the same one, as a curiosity, from which Francis wished to evict him in 2023 and from which, in time, no one evicted him: he kept the view of St. Peter’s after an audience with Bergoglio and several months of silence. He has his own chapel. He has well-formed priests at his service, who prepare the altar with the devout neatness of a Flemish goldsmith. And he has nuns who, with the quiet selflessness of so many good souls, see to it that the cardinal’s clothing returns to the drawer impeccably folded, underwear included.
There is no sin in this: princes of the Church have always lived this way. What there is, I insist, is a partition. Whoever is guaranteed every morning an immaculate liturgy and doctrine without lumps can, with the clearest conscience in the world, fail to perceive the necessity, because for him it simply does not exist. Iure and de facto coincide in his person with a felicity not granted to the rest of the baptized. And it is from that fortunate coincidence—from that glass tower with its built-in sacristy—that His Eminence certifies that access to the faith is not in question, just as the lady of Versailles settled the hunger of France between two bites.
But the ordinary faithful have neither chapel nor goldsmith. They have Paco. Paco is the parish priest of their neighborhood, probably well-intentioned and surely exhausted, who celebrates the twelve o’clock Mass as it comes out of him—let us be polite—like the seat of his pants: with his out-of-tune guitar, his homily on inclusion and recycling, his sign of peace turned into a neighborhood meeting, and his distribution of Communion with the nonchalance of someone handing out flyers at a traffic light.
To that faithful person, who leaves Mass somewhat lonelier than when he entered, the state of necessity does not need to be explained with jurisprudence from the Signatura. He suffers it every Sunday at twelve, and he suffers it precisely because for him iure and de facto do not coincide: he knows the Church guards the treasure, but it does not quite reach his parish.
Let it be noted that one draws from all this no license for anyone to consecrate bishops on their own account and at their own risk: I have no opinion of my own on the matter, as on so many other controversies. But one thing I do have clear: a prince of the Church to whom the crisis arrives filtered, pressed, and served at the right temperature is not, with all due respect, the most reliable expert to issue the certificate that the crisis is not pressing. It is understandable, moreover, that he does not see it: the same College of Cardinals that, invited last year to set a new course, dispatched the matter by elevating in the fourth ballot a man of the previous pontificate, seems to share with His Eminence a congenital difficulty in looking out the window.
It must be something about Vatican windows, all of which overlook a beautiful courtyard.
So yes, Your Eminence: you are right, there is no state of necessity. There is none in your chapel. Come down any Sunday to Paco’s without prior notice, sit in the last pew, between the lady with the shopping cart and the teenager who arrived early to confess the excesses of the night before and found no light in the confessional, and endure the entire Mass, from beginning to end. Then, if you still have the strength, come back and sign for us that necessity is an invention of four.