Jesuit On SSPX

On the 21st of this month, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops at the Holy See, issued a decree in the name of Pope Benedict XVI lifting the excommunication imposed on Bishops Bernard Fellay, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Richard Williamson and Alfonso de Galarreta, which they had incurred when, on June 30, 1988, they let themselves be ordained as schismatic bishops by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in Écône, Switzerland.

Lefebvre, although himself a voting participant at the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965, had come to believe that Vatican II had deviated so fundamentally from the received tradition of the Catholic faith as to be heretical. At first, his movement -- although often disobedient -- was only a form of protest inside the precincts of the Catholic Church. As long as he did not ordain bishops, his protest would remain an intra-Catholic affair, and it would probably have died out after his death. Fearing just such an eventuality, he finally went ahead and ordained, without permission, the four men named above, who by that act incurred automatic excommunication along, of course, with Archbishop Lefebvre himself (he died an excommunicate on March 25, 1991). At that moment, protest became schism.

From the outset of their protest, his followers refused to celebrate the Mass in its new form (called the Novus Ordo) and insisted on saying the traditional Latin Mass as approved in the wake of the 16th-century Council of Trent (called therefore the Tridentine Mass). Liturgical ritual was not, however, the gravamen of the archbishop's objections. Much more significant were the (for him) doctrinal "innovations" of Vatican II.

As John Allen noted this week in the National Catholic Reporter, three years before his excommunication, Lefebvre wrote Pope John Paul II claiming that Vatican II's promulgated "Declaration on Religious Liberty" had brought in its wake a witch's brew of ruin to the church. Its woes, the archbishop wrote, included

"all the reforms carried out over 20 years within the church to please heretics, schismatics, false religions and declared enemies of the church, such as the Jews, the Communists and the Freemasons."..........

The uproar following the lifting of the excommunications has proved deeply embarrassing to this group. In fact, the head of the Lefebvrist movement, Bishop Fellay, denounced Bishop Williamson and ordered him to keep silent. The trouble is, having himself disobeyed two popes, Bishop Fellay hardly has the authority to order anyone to do anything (such is the fate of all schismatics). If Bishop Williamson disobeys, what can his superior do about it?

What lies behind Benedict's lifting of the excommunication I cannot speculate about here, except to make the obvious point that he desires to end the schism while there is still a chance to. To claim that the pope has any sympathy with these bishops' utterly odious views would clearly be defamatory, as can be seen by remarks he made during his General Audience two days ago:

"Whilst I renew with affection the expression of my full and unquestionable solidarity with our Jewish brothers, I hope the memory of the Shoah [Holocaust] will induce humanity to reflect on the unpredictable power of hate when it conquers the heart of man,"

the Holy Father said. The Holocaust, he added, must be "a warning against oblivion, negation or reductionism because violence against even one human being is violence against all."

Needless to say, even after giving these remarks, the pope still has a huge public-relations problem on his hands, and how that will be solved will depend on a number of factors: whether the Lefebvrists admit the teaching authority of Vatican II; whether they discipline the anti-Semites in their midst (or purge them if they prove obstreperous); and whether they can divorce their liturgical traditionalism from their penchant for dictatorial political regimes.

Link (here) to Fr. Edward Oakes, S.J. full article in the Wall Street Journal

Photo is of Fr. Oakes, S.J.