Ecclesia Supplet
Father Devlin has asked me for an account of the sacraments at Pilar, to go home with his report. He asked for it plain, and said the diocese would want dates and numbers rather than feeling. That suits me. I have kept the registers for thirty-one years, and feeling is the one thing I have never had to record.
For those reading at the far end: Pilar was founded two hundred and thirty-six years ago, in the last decade of the beam corridors. The founders numbered two thousand one hundred, and one of them was a priest — Father Bartolomeu Reis, sixty years old at landfall. The corridors closed behind us when the funding went, the second wave never launched, and no ship came until Father Devlin’s, two hundred and fourteen years after we buried Father Reis. What follows is what happened to the seven sacraments in between.
1. Baptism
Anyone can baptise. That is not our improvisation; it is the Church’s own law, and it was the first thing Father Reis taught when his heart began to fail. Water, the words, the intention of doing what the Church does. Validity does not run through the man. Ex opere operato, he made us say: by the work worked. The grace is in the deed and not the doer, or none of us was ever safe.
He created an office to carry it — the Water-keeper, which I now hold, eleventh in the line — and he was open about having stolen it. He told us about Japan: two hundred and fifty years of hidden Christians without a single priest, and when the missionaries came back to Nagasaki they found baptism had come through intact, because baptism was the one sacrament the laity could carry, and the hidden villages had appointed a water-person to carry it. He said: we are not the first, we are the second, and the second gets to plan.
The register holds nineteen thousand, two hundred and six baptisms since his death. Father Devlin sampled three hundred, checking the formula as recorded and questioning the retired keepers besides. Every one valid. He closed the book and said, “Two centuries and you never dropped a word.” I told him what every Water-keeper is told at induction: we treat the formula the way the airlock crews treat the checklist, and for the same reason. It is not ours to improve.
2. Confirmation
Father Reis held the mission faculty and spent his last year confirming everyone he could reach, down to the infants. After him, nothing. Confirmation needs a priest at the least, and no reading of the law hands it to the laity. So for two hundred years, everyone born here has been baptised and nothing further — a whole colony stopped at its first sacrament, like a sentence held at the comma.
Father Devlin has been confirming since his second week. He does two hundred a day and his wrist has gone. He says it is the best injury of his life.
3. Eucharist
Father Reis said Mass daily while he could stand and weekly after. On his last Sunday he consumed the whole of the reserve himself, because the rubric does not permit the species to be left to corrupt, and then he had us put out the sanctuary lamp. The lamp burns only when the Sacrament is present, and he said an honest lamp was worth more to us than a comforting one.
For two hundred and fourteen years the tabernacle stood open and empty and the lamp stood filled and unlit. What the law left us was desire. Spiritual communion is not a colonial coping method; it is old doctrine — an act of longing for the Sacrament that obtains grace by the longing. So every Sunday the settlement kept the full liturgy of the Word, walked to the rail, and knelt at nothing. Visitors would have found it strange, if there had been visitors.
Father Devlin said Mass the morning after landing, on the founders’ altar stone. When he placed the Sacrament in the tabernacle I lit the lamp. The children stared at it. The old people did not look at it at all.
4. Penance
Absolution needs a priest, and there we had none. But the doctrine ships with its own fallback, and Father Reis installed it like a man wiring an emergency circuit: perfect contrition. Sorrow arising from the love of God, joined to the firm resolve to confess as soon as confession can be had, forgives — the Council of Trent says so — before any confession takes place. The whole mechanism turns on the clause as soon as possible.
So every act of contrition said on Pilar for two hundred years has ended the same way: and I will confess when a priest comes. Children asked their mothers what the words meant. It means there’s a queue, the mothers said, and you’re in it.
When Father Devlin understood the clause he went grey, because the resolve binds the moment it becomes possible, and he had just made it possible for nine thousand people at once. He heard confessions for eleven days. People brought chairs, and food for the people ahead of them. The queue was orderly. We have had two hundred years of practice at being in it.
5. Anointing
Anointing of the sick needs a priest outright; there is no lay path and no desire-form written anywhere. Here is what we did, and I set it down plainly because Father Devlin says the register makes the case better than I will.
We kept the rite. Oil from our own presses, the prayers entire, a hand on the head of the dying. And in the register of the dying, against every name, in the column headed valid, we wrote no. Not the sacrament. Two hundred and fourteen years of no, in eleven keepers’ hands, so that nobody would ever mistake what we had for what we lacked.
What we had instead was the Church’s own provision for exactly our case: the plenary indulgence at the point of death, granted where no priest can come, to anyone rightly disposed who kept the habit of prayer in life — and the text says the Church herself supplies the conditions ordinarily required. Ecclesia supplet. Father Reis made us learn the Latin. He said: one day a man will arrive with authority to check your working, and you will want to cite your sources.
Father Devlin read that column for a long time. Then he left the room, and came back when he could.
6. Orders
Ordination is the one we could do nothing with. Only a bishop ordains validly; we never had one; a priest cannot make a priest. In the hard years people begged Father Reis to try regardless — lay hands on some good man and let God sort the paperwork. He refused, and the refusal is minuted, because he asked for it to be. An invalid ordination is not a lesser sacrament but a false one, he said, and a false priest is not a lie told once: every Mass after it is theatre, every absolution is empty air, and the people trusting them have no way to know. He would rather leave us certainly without than uncertainly with. It was the hardest thing he did. We know, because he wept doing it, and he was not a man who wept.
So: Father Devlin offers to stay. He means it, and we are grateful, and the answer is no. He is one man with one heart — the same design that failed here in year twenty-two. Stay five years, we told him. Confirm the children, marry those who want the nuptial Mass. Then go home and send us a bishop, with Rome’s mandate in his luggage, because a bishop can make priests and a mandated bishop can make bishops. We are not asking for a chaplain. We are asking for the thing that reproduces.
He laughed and said we sounded like engineers. We are engineers. That is how we know the difference between a spare part and a repair.
7. Matrimony
Marriage never stopped, and this too is law, not licence. The ministers of marriage are the couple themselves; the priest stands as the Church’s witness. And canon 1116 provides that where nobody competent can be had without grave inconvenience, and this looks set to last a month, a couple marry validly before witnesses alone. Father Reis, dying, gave us the canon number and said: memorise it — the month clause is about to have a long run.
Six thousand and twelve marriages under that canon. Father Devlin has convalidated nothing, because there is nothing to convalidate; he checked. A clause drafted against a missing month carried us two hundred and fourteen years without deforming. Whoever wrote it was pricing a short absence, and the law held anyway. I should like that reported to whatever office in Rome now holds his file, if the Church keeps files that long. I am told it does. It is the one institution I would believe it of.
Last week Father Devlin anointed old Teresa Vaz, ninety-one, who had kept the habit of prayer for sixty years and would have qualified under the indulgence in any case. Afterwards I fetched the register of the dying and filled in the column myself, as the office requires. Under valid, for the first time in eleven keeperships, I wrote yes.
The ink is the same.