Bishop Giuseppe Sciacca has written something on whether a bishop can be removed from the "clerical state": Note sulla dimissione del vescovo dallo stato clericale
From Magister's article
In the meantime, however, a prominent representative of the Vatican supreme court - very close to Benedict XVI but not devoid of criticism toward him - has raised very serious objections against the exclusion from the clerical state of the former cardinal archbishop of Washington, not for the reasons that led to this condemnation - which remain very grave, and this is a matter of sexual abuse committed over decades - but because of the dubious canonical and ecclesiological legitimacy, and in any case of the “overwhelming inadvisability,” of the reduction of a bishop to the lay state.
Raising the objections is the bishop Giuseppe Sciacca (in the photo), secretary of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, in the essay that opens the latest issue of “Jus - On Line,” the scholarly journal of legal studies of the faculty of jurisprudence of the Catholic University of Milan:
The fundamental objection from which Sciacca sets out is that the “clerical state” is strictly connected to the sacred order. While the former is typically used to indicate an essentially juridical condition, of belonging to a group, to a category, the latter is a sacrament which impresses on those who receive it an indelible, ontological character, like baptism and confirmation. So much so that even if a sacred minister were forbidden the exercise of sacramental acts, such as for example the celebration of Mass, such acts would still remain valid even if they were performed in contempt of the ban.
But that’s just it, Sciacca points out, especially for bishops “the discordance between ontological status and legal status induced by this situation is a manifest symptom of a pathology.”
In the Church, the awareness of this “pathology” has grown above all thanks to Vatican Council II, which powerfully brought to light the sacramentality of episcopal ordination - which confers the fullness of the sacrament of orders - and therefore also the theological and sacramental root of the bishop's power of jurisdiction. One indication of this heightened awareness is in the new postconciliar code of canon law, which in canon 290 prescribes that dismissal from the clerical state can be granted “to deacons only for grave reasons” and “to priests only for the gravest of reasons,” without mentioning bishops.
It is the relationship between the order of presbyterate and the order of episcopate that continues to interest me. Are there alternative explanations of the relationship between jurisdiction and sacramental power?
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