Validity of SSPX Confessions & Marriages in light of Canon Law

Drawing upon the first two paragraph's of Father Paul L. Kramer's "The Suicide of Altering the Faith in the Liturgy," Chapter II, Part II.  The book is a work of outstanding scholarship and many of the following sentences and throughout the book are footnoted extensively.  This book is highly recommended.

The faithful have the right to receive sacraments that are certainly valid.  The Canon Law Society Commentary elaborates, "This right is rooted in baptism; it is not a privilege granted by Church authorities but a claim rooted in the action of Christ."  The Church may not impose new rites on the faithful, because Catholics have the "right to worship God according to the prescriptions of their own right."  This right establishes on the part of the faithful an inviolable moral faculty according to which they can and must demand to be provided the goods and services of the Church according to their own custom and rite.

Since the Divine Law establishes the right and duty which constitutes an inviolable claim on the part of the faithful to receive the sacraments according to their own custom and rite, that claim may not be legitimately denied.  It is in virtue of this inviolable claim, and that if the faithful are unlawfully denied their traditional rites, then, in accord with the principle of equity, they may not be punished for availing themselves of services of priests and bishops whose adherence to Tradition has earned for them the withdrawal or deprivation of their priestly faculties.  Such withdrawal of faculties is unlawful, while the penal deprivation of faculties under such circumstances is certainly invalid, since such priests are guilty of nothing other than exercising  their divinely commissioned ministry.

Continued...

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