a. About Order Taken Generally

16. One needs to understand, then, that order is in one way taken as Augustine describes it in City of God 19.13 n.1, that “order is the fitting disposition of equal and unequal things bestowing on each of them their place.” We commonly take order in this way when we say that there is an order of beings in the universe; and thus does Aristotle speak, Metaphysics 12.10.1075a16, “all things are in some ordered,” and he explains how. Also in this way is order in well-disposed polities taken, where the fitting disposition of equal and unequal persons in the polity is called the order of that polity, by which it is said to be ordered.

17. But in another way is the preeminent rank in such polity called order. And thus is a person in an eminent rank said to have order, in the way that ‘having a rank’ is said quasi-antonomastically, because those who are in a lower rank are not said to have a rank thus.

18. In this way there is fittingly in the Church, which is an ordered polity, an order according to this double acceptation. For according to the first acceptation is the whole Church ordered with the fitting disposition of equal and unequal persons each in their place. In the second way is a person who has an eminent rank in the Church said to have order. And although these two significations posit each other mutually (because when there is order in the first way in a polity there is eminent rank there and so order in the second way), yet this signification and that are not the same, as is plain enough. The way, then, that we are speaking here of order, order is taken here for the second signification, not for the first.

19. Further, an eminent rank in the Church is said to be in order to an eminent ecclesiastical act; not, to be sure, in this way, that rank is a power for carrying out the act (as the earlier rejected opinion said [n.12]), but that it be a rank disposing one fittingly or simply to carrying out that act in due way, so that order thus could, as we are here speaking of order, be called a preeminent rank in the Church disposing one to some preeminent act. And because the acts especially preeminent in the Church are acts respecting the sacraments, therefore can it more especially be said that order is a rank disposing one to some sacramental act.