Ok child safety aside, is this article saying that currently the only thing you need to provide to show you have the proper faculties / orders to perform a sacrament is a letter from the diocese? Is no one at least a little uncomfortable with the idea that it would be harder for a teenager to buy alcohol than for any random person to pos…
Ok child safety aside, is this article saying that currently the only thing you need to provide to show you have the proper faculties / orders to perform a sacrament is a letter from the diocese? Is no one at least a little uncomfortable with the idea that it would be harder for a teenager to buy alcohol than for any random person to pose as a priest?
There are plenty of scanned images of diocesan letterhead out there, probably with the Bishop's signature and whatever stamps you'd expect to see on an official document. If it's an embossed seal, what are the chances that someone's going to know what the seal of <random midwest diocese> ought to look like? I can literally buy a custom seal-embosser-thing on Amazon for not a whole lot of money.
Ok child safety aside, is this article saying that currently the only thing you need to provide to show you have the proper faculties / orders to perform a sacrament is a letter from the diocese? Is no one at least a little uncomfortable with the idea that it would be harder for a teenager to buy alcohol than for any random person to pose as a priest?
There are plenty of scanned images of diocesan letterhead out there, probably with the Bishop's signature and whatever stamps you'd expect to see on an official document. If it's an embossed seal, what are the chances that someone's going to know what the seal of <random midwest diocese> ought to look like? I can literally buy a custom seal-embosser-thing on Amazon for not a whole lot of money.
Because vanishingly few people try to pose as a priest whereas half of teenagers try to buy alcohol….
You're not wrong. Our Archdiocesan celebret looks like exactly what you would expect if someone wanted to forge one poorly.
Of course, it is written in Latin, so that is slightly harder to forge.
Ours come with a seal, as I recall, though I haven't looked at an actual letter in years.