Bishop Fellay: Vatican moving toward personal prelature for the SSPX

[Tim]

This is just my imagination;

Perhaps Pope Benedict has more up his sleeve. When the SSPX comes in, he suspends all the Cardinals and Bishops until they are vetted by him or a successor for Modernism, and then in union with the last few Bishops consecrates Russia to the Immaculate Heart.
tim

[spasiisochrani]

Hmmm.. a personal prelature for the SSPX and a personal ordinariate for the Anglicans. I wish I understood what it all means.

Personal prelature means an organization independent from the diocesan system, having full jurisdiction immediately under Rome. They can act everywhere in the world, without diocesan limits. At this time only the Opus Dei has this independence, but it is clear that as soon as the SSPX wants to release the suspension they could get it, and they (as the largest and most viable group of the tradition) would be a new center for all the traditional groups who want unity and not their own truth and power

Personal ordinariate is limited independence under the diocesan system. They keep their tradition, have their own clerics, and those clerics are in some limited way incardinated to that ordinariate and under the head of the ordinariate; but they can operate only in the diocese where they belong. This seems to be an intermediate step, to create different Anglican-Catholic groups as a preparation to unite them (At this moment there are great differences inside the Traditional Anglican Community, which make their personal prelature   impossible or at least unadvised.

I think you have it backwards.  An ordinariate is essentially a diocese.  A personal prelature has to work with the permission of the local bishop.

[AntoniusMaximus]

It could be that Pope Benedict views the diocesan system as hopelessly corrupt.  It could be he is setting up a new structure around the diocesan system so when the big schism finally manifests itself officially, the Catholic Church will go on in its universality. 

With enough time and growth of liturgically correct rites like that of the Latin Tradition and the influx of  the Easterns after Our Lady converts them, the incoming Anglicans, and even possibly a lot of Muslim conversions to Eastern or the Latin rites.  It could be apparant that the Novus Ordo is a rite undo itself and the Latin Rite will carry on while the Novus Ordo rite fades away, people, bishops, cardinals, priests and liturgy into the dustbin.

I think you have a point, in some ways I think the pope realizes that the bishops are in the way right now toward his goal of unity, and while the biological solution is happening before our eyes, it is still going to take time.  The pope has appointed some very good bishops in the US and elsewhere but not enough and I think he realizes that if Christiandom is to be saved he needs to work faster.  I find it odd that the one of the results of VII was supposed to be a more of first among equals papacy, but it is becoming increasing consolidated once again, and that's a good thing.   I just hope that BXVI has many more years left (by 2014 the majority of the College of Cardinals would have been selected by him and so we can be sure we will be more than likely moving in the right direction with his successor), I think we are going to have a lot more surprises coming up. 

[glgas]

I think you have it backwards.  An ordinariate is essentially a diocese.  A personal prelature has to work with the permission of the local bishop.

Here is the definition of the personal prelature

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/__P10.HTM

Can. 295 §1. The statutes established by the Apostolic See govern a personal prelature, and a prelate presides offer it as the proper ordinary; he has the right to erect a national or international seminary and even to incardinate students and promote them to orders under title of service to the prelature.

Their approved statutes control the relationship to the local ordinaries

The ordinariate as previously used term meant the 'organization' of the ordinary. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11284a.htm This concept certainly does not apply to this case the bishops will keep their our organizations.

This ordinariates represent a new concept, with the closest analogy of the military ordinariates,  which had some independence, but also strict subordination of the local ordinaries. This is only analogy, because the clerics of the military ordinariates were incardinated to individual dioceses and appointed from there to the military service, so they had personal dependence on the dioceses.

When the Easter Catholics united with the Roman Church they kept their independence, but for centuries belonged to certain Catholic dioceses as separate organizations, and their groups get the rank of diocese only after 300 years later.  The reason mainly was the (national) differences between the Easter Catholic units (Hungarian, Polish, later Romanian, Ukrainian) 

For the Anglicans now also the legal problem for making them one independent unit lays in their internal differences, first they should agree between themselves.