[Question]{.underline}: What is supplied jurisdiction, and what makes the Society’s bishops think that they have it?
[Answer]{.underline}: We must first understand what jurisdiction itself really is. It is the power to feed a portion of the flock of the Catholic Church, an authorization that ultimately comes down from the Sovereign Pontiff to teach, govern, and sanctify souls for their eternal salvation. It is usually related to a territory, such as a diocese or parish. It is required for licitness for every exercise of authority of a priest or member of the hierarchy, including every sermon, every Mass, and every administration of a sacrament. In addition, it is required for the validity of the two sacraments whose administration the Church has traditionally limited to certain priests only---penance and matrimony. However, it is always to protect souls, for the good of the Church, that jurisdiction is required for every priest to function.
Supplied jurisdiction is an extraordinary and unusual thing. It is not the ordinary jurisdiction that is given by the pope to the bishops or by a bishop to his priests. It is provided immediately and directly by the Church when the salvation of souls and the good of the Church itself is at stake, and in particular to protect the faithful from the danger of invalid sacraments. Cases indicated in the Code of Canon Law, in which the Church supplies jurisdiction, include when there is a common error of the faithful or possibility thereof, on whether a priest has jurisdiction, or whenever there is a probable and positive doubt, or whenever there is danger of death, or whenever a person requests a sacrament, even of an excommunicated priest.
Of course, the particular case of the crisis in the Church is not one that could have been foreseen by the Code of Canon Law, such as the gravity of the crisis, and the great danger for the salvation of souls that follows from the errors of Vatican II. These errors concerning the teaching of the Faith as well as the administration of the sacraments oblige the faithful Catholic to apply the principles of juridical analogy and canonical equity, through which the Church supplies jurisdiction whenever the salvation of souls requires it, for “the salvation of souls is the highest law” (Can. 1752 of the 1983 Code).
The salvation of our souls and the good of the mystical body of the Church require that we have bishops, successors of the apostles, who teach us the integrality of the Faith, who condemn the modern errors against the Faith, who refuse to cooperate in the new adulterous rites, who can guarantee the validity of the holy oils they consecrate, who administer confirmation worthily and with the certitude of validity, who ordain only priests truly well formed in their priestly knowledge and duties, who can guarantee the validity of priestly ordinations, who direct religious to a life of perfection according to the mind of the Church, who resolve marriage cases according to traditional principles. All these acts, performed all over the world, would be illicit if there were no crisis in the Church. However, in this crisis, the Church supplies the jurisdiction that is necessary for their licitness.
Answered by Father Peter Scott, SSPX.