The post below this one from Silieri non possum describes the same situation but in a different context.
Rorate Caeli includes what that astounding theologian Andrea Grillo, who criticized a young saint for his traditional and orthodox Eucharistic theology, thinks about Pope Leo’s Ordinary Magisterial teaching concerning the priesthood.
Thank God that we are once again seeing the true nature of the heterodox left as they acted toward Pope Benedict XVI, but found favor with Pope Francis and did not act that way toward His Holiness, but now they are acting like they did to Pope Benedict toward Pope Leo XIV. This unmasking of the heterodox left is good news indeed and must be of the Holy Spirit.
Here is Rorate Caeli’s quote:
There is no doubt that many of Pope Leo's speeches were frequently inspired by Augustine's thinking. From the outset, the motto so typical of Augustine's understanding of the minister's task appeared in all its authority: “With you Christian, for you bishop.”
It is no coincidence that Augustine comes from the African Church in which Tertullian and Cyprian largely identified the Christian as an “alter Christus,” even if the expression does not seem to occur literally in their works. However, the “title of salvation” is not ordination, but baptism. It is baptism that makes every man (and every woman) an “alter Christus.”
Only much later, in modern or even contemporary times, did we see the emergence of a limited and partial use of the expression “alter Christus,” whose earliest source seems to be a definition referring to St. Francis of Assisi. The association not with a friar, but with a priest, spread in the 1800s, became a “commonplace” in the 1900s (in Pius X, Pius XI, Benedict XV, and Pius XII), and then reappeared at the end of the 1900s, with John Paul II and Benedict XVI, in the priestly year 2009-2010. But the expression has no ancient tradition; it appears to be a late-modern invention, in which terminology for Christians and saints is applied exclusively to “priests.”
This is the context in which Pope Leo sent his letter to the priests of Madrid. It is surprising that the content is split in two and that reasonable premises lead to conclusions that have no connection with those premises. I would like to highlight the tension that runs through the text. ...
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That the core of the priesthood is “being alter Christus” is a rather bold hypothesis, without a long tradition, with a strong apologetic component, typical of a theological style of the early 1900s, superseded by the Second Vatican Council and the new vision of ministry, which finds its foundations in ancient theology. When Augustine heard that the bishop was being called “spouse,” he was opposed. If anything, he said, he is the friend of the Bridegroom. That the “priest” is “alter Christus” is the result of a sacred theory of ministry, which Augustine would have rejected. The pastor is not primarily sacralized in a difference from the Christian, but is unified in his Body.
This unilateral discourse in the Letter is followed by a description of the “priest” along the lines of the “cathedral”: it is a strange text, which appears forced and reductive both for the figure of the priest and for the function of the cathedral. A “self-referential” interpretation of the cathedral is a way of not doing justice to either the cathedral or the ordained minister (who is ordained not to himself but to the people of God). However, the fact that the cathedral is a place “open to all” is interpreted as referring only to ‘priests’: here too, the meaning of the cathedral church is seriously misunderstood, as it is not “for priests” or for the bishop, but for Christians.
It is no coincidence that Augustine comes from the African Church in which Tertullian and Cyprian largely identified the Christian as an “alter Christus,” even if the expression does not seem to occur literally in their works. However, the “title of salvation” is not ordination, but baptism. It is baptism that makes every man (and every woman) an “alter Christus.”
Only much later, in modern or even contemporary times, did we see the emergence of a limited and partial use of the expression “alter Christus,” whose earliest source seems to be a definition referring to St. Francis of Assisi. The association not with a friar, but with a priest, spread in the 1800s, became a “commonplace” in the 1900s (in Pius X, Pius XI, Benedict XV, and Pius XII), and then reappeared at the end of the 1900s, with John Paul II and Benedict XVI, in the priestly year 2009-2010. But the expression has no ancient tradition; it appears to be a late-modern invention, in which terminology for Christians and saints is applied exclusively to “priests.”
This is the context in which Pope Leo sent his letter to the priests of Madrid. It is surprising that the content is split in two and that reasonable premises lead to conclusions that have no connection with those premises. I would like to highlight the tension that runs through the text. ...
...
That the core of the priesthood is “being alter Christus” is a rather bold hypothesis, without a long tradition, with a strong apologetic component, typical of a theological style of the early 1900s, superseded by the Second Vatican Council and the new vision of ministry, which finds its foundations in ancient theology. When Augustine heard that the bishop was being called “spouse,” he was opposed. If anything, he said, he is the friend of the Bridegroom. That the “priest” is “alter Christus” is the result of a sacred theory of ministry, which Augustine would have rejected. The pastor is not primarily sacralized in a difference from the Christian, but is unified in his Body.
This unilateral discourse in the Letter is followed by a description of the “priest” along the lines of the “cathedral”: it is a strange text, which appears forced and reductive both for the figure of the priest and for the function of the cathedral. A “self-referential” interpretation of the cathedral is a way of not doing justice to either the cathedral or the ordained minister (who is ordained not to himself but to the people of God). However, the fact that the cathedral is a place “open to all” is interpreted as referring only to ‘priests’: here too, the meaning of the cathedral church is seriously misunderstood, as it is not “for priests” or for the bishop, but for Christians.
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