Ben Harnwell

as the formula for ordination is pronounced, that hands putting on heads goes back, all the way back, to Christ's ordination of the apostles in an unbroken chain.

That is what the Catholic Church teaches.

Because, of course, the bishop who's putting his hands on an ordinand's head, he himself, when he was an ordinand, he will have had

the hands of a bishop placed on his head when he was ordained as a priest.

And then you have the consecration of bishops further along the line.

But the sacrament is ordination.

That's what the Catholic Church teaches.

And of course, amongst the sacraments that there are, two of them require jurisdiction.

That is to say, official legal sanction from a pope to be performed, matrimony and confession.

You can be a valid priest and celebrate a valid mass, but you need to have the legal permission of a pope to conduct or the bishop that's delegated, the diocesan bishop.

That's how it works.

That's why the pope is important in the Catholic Church, because it's not only the full authority of the teaching office, but also the full nature of the church.

of what's called jurisdiction.

Yep, he did that yesterday.

That's exactly what he did.

As you said in your introduction, he may not be as up in your face as Bert Gorgio, his predecessor, inverted commas, Pope Francis, but he is.

As we said on the war room in the first 24 hours, he's more intelligent, and the sign of that greater intelligence, Steve, is that he's more subtle, and that is how he's confronting the democratic mandate of the present administration.

What is taking place is that Leo, as well as like Francis beforehand, is turning the institution of the Catholic Church, especially in America, as effectively an enemy of the state, a subversive.

institution confronting the democratic and legal will of the state.

I draw back from calling it an insurrection, but effectively that is what the instruction to the US bishops is.