THE MARRIED CATHOLIC BISHOP WHO ATTENDED VATICAN II.

Salomão Barbosa Ferraz (18 February 1880 – 11 May 1969) was a Brazilian Roman Catholic priest and Bishop whose career took him through membership of several Christian denominations from the Presbyterian Church to the Roman Catholic Church.

Biography

Ferraz was born in Jaú, Brazil on February 18, 1880. Originally a Presbyterian Minister, Barbosa Ferraz was ordained an Anglican Priest in 1917. He founded an ecumenical society, the “Order of Saint Andrew”, in 1928, and was instrumental in organising a ‘Free Catholic Congress’ in 1936. At the close of this event he established a “Free Catholic Church” and was elected as the church’s first Bishop. The Second World War halted his plans to be consecrated Bishop by European Old Catholics, but Salomão Barbosa Ferraz was eventually consecrated Bishop by Carlos Duarte Costa following this Bishop’s excommunication by the Vatican in 1945. Barbosa Ferraz was also a member of Freemasonry

Salomão Barbosa Ferraz in turn consecrated Manoel Ceia Laranjeira for the Free Catholic Church of Brazil in 1951, but sought reception into the Roman Catholic Church, which he achieved under Pope John XXIII, leaving Manoel Ceia Laranjeira at the head of the Free Catholic Church, then renamed the Independent Catholic Apostolic Church in Brazil.

In 1959, Ferraz was received into the Roman Catholic Church. His reception met with some resistance and confusion in Rome, where it had been assumed that he was widowed or chaste. He was eventually named Titular Bishop of Eleutherna in 1963 and took part in the Second Vatican Council. Bishop Ferraz died in 1969, leaving a wife and seven children.

Ferraz was a rare example of a legally accepted married bishop in the modern Roman Catholic history.

PAT SAYS

Truth is stranger than fiction.

Here was a Vatican II bishop who was both a husband and the father of seven children.

He may not have been the only one.

I’m sure there have been many secret ordinations and consecrations down the ages.

THE DAVIDEK ORDINATIONS

In the 40s and 50s, in Czechoslovakia married men were ordained bishops and women ordained priests to keep them hidden from the communist regime who had placed the Ordinary bishops and priests in prison.

Interest in Davídek greatly increased when it was disclosed after his death that, by the account of Ludmila Javorová and others, he had administered the sacrament of holy orders to Javorová and about four other women. Bishop Blaha declared any such ordinations would have been invalid. Pope John Paul II, in his 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis, wrote that “In order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance … I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”

Other priestly ordinations, even of men, during the period of persecution were possibly invalid, illicit, or irregular, according to church teaching.

The irregular situation of priests in the Czech Republic in active ministry, but the validity of whose ordination was in doubt, was largely resolved by 2000 through discussions with the Vatican. In February 2000, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a declaration on the subject, announcing (a) that with regard to celibate priests, a great part (some 50 in all) had accepted the decision of the Pope that they should be conditionally re-ordained, and (b) that a further 22 priests who were married should also be conditionally re-ordained and transferred to the Byzantine-Slav rite as members, for all purposes, of the exarchate of the Czech Republic. There remained the status of some of the bishops and priests secretly ordained who had not accepted the norms (for conditional re-ordination) approved by the Pope, specifically because they were convinced they had already been validly ordained. While the Vatican confirmed that “conditional re-ordination” did not exclude the possibility that the men had previously been validly ordained, it held to the view that the doubts over validity were genuine: