The Catholic world has been in an uproar since February, when the Society of Saint Pius X, a Catholic order of traditionalist priests, announced its intention to consecrate bishops with or without papal approbation, for the second time since 1988. On May 26, the identities of their four candidates were revealed: one American, one Swiss, and two Frenchmen.
The Society acknowledges the extraordinary nature of its action, but insists that the Church is in a serious crisis. Without their own bishops, it says, no one will ordain priests trained exclusively in traditional Catholic doctrine and liturgy, and the faithful who rely on them will be left without recourse.
The Church has found time for one last condemnation: that of its own tradition
The Society says they have requested Pope Leo’s approval, and have asked him to grant an audience so that they can explain their unique situation – so far in vain. Instead the Vatican, through Cardinal Fernandez, has threatened excommunication.
While to outsiders this might seem a minor disciplinary matter, it is in fact a battle over the identity of the Church, fought between what is on one side, an uneasy conglomerate of cynics and idealists; and on the other, a tiny band of realists: the Society of Saint Pius X.
Dedicated to the preservation of traditional Catholic liturgy and doctrine, as they existed up until the Second Vatican Council, the Society is the most important opponent of modernization in the Church. It was founded in 1970 by then-retired Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, at the request of young men who wanted a pre-conciliar seminary formation. The priests he trained soon became in high demand around the world, as the faithful discovered that they would offer the same Mass and teaching as the Church had in former times.
Believing that the Society had no legal right to reject the changes instituted by the Second Vatican Council, Rome ordered the closure of its seminary and suspended its founder. However, the Archbishop held that they were doing no more than what the whole Church had done for centuries. Therefore, he insisted, these penalties were abusive. He filed an official appeal, which went unaddressed.
In 1988, sensing the approach of death, he decided – after vainly seeking papal permission – to consecrate four bishops. They would continue the work of ordaining the priests trained in his now multiple seminaries. Excommunication came swiftly. (It would eventually be lifted by Benedict XVI). But despite decades spent in the shadow of that sanction, the Society continued to grow.
Today, the Church is reliving the crisis of 1988: again the Society intends to ordain four bishops to ensure the continuity of Catholic tradition, and again Rome has threatened excommunication.
Amid the uproar, one thing is becoming plain: in a Church filled with idealists and cynics, the Society of Saint Pius X are the only realists. Unlike the cynics, the Society has a vision of the future; unlike the idealists, they are prepared to do something about it.
Who are the cynics? The Catholic Church is full of them: they believe that the Church as the world knew it for two millennia, must change. They carried the day at the Second Vatican Council, planting seeds in Church documents and in ecclesiastical minds that, once grown to fruition, could be used to bring the Church into line with the modern world.
For these cynics – and they are still with us – there was no future for a missionary Church that believed itself the only Church founded by Christ, and therefore duty-bound to convert the world. There was no future for a Church that insisted publicly on difficult doctrines like the social kingship of Christ, or transubstantiation. There was no future for a Church that insisted on saying Mass in a dead language, with the priest’s back turned to the people, using rubrics and gestures that were even older than the Dark Ages. Instead, the Church should age gracefully into a kind of NGO, with an increasingly decentralized authority, a deliberately generic liturgy, and a focus on humanitarianism rather than eternal salvation.
Opposed to the cynics are the idealists: devout Catholics who know their religion and practice it, but who have been trained to idealize obedience. They see the failures of the Church all around them – empty churches; lack of catechesis; financial scandals; clerical immorality. But they quickly realize that the system is rigged. It is impossible to make any significant change, because the strangling bureaucracy at work in the Church will use its authority to choke off anything calculated to improve those issues on a widespread scale.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a priest, a bishop or a cardinal. Try to improve matters, and watch how fast you’re sidelined. Even Pope Benedict XVI felt powerless; in a private audience granted to the then-leader of the Society of Saint Pius X, he is said to have gestured towards his office door, complaining: “My authority ends at that door.” He would eventually abdicate.
Ultimately, the idealists are forced to accept or at least tolerate what is manifestly bad for the Church. Fortitude, wisdom, magnanimity, prudence, and charity might urge them on, but obedience can be relied on to stop them in their tracks; and they expect this virtue alone, as if it were Dosteovsky’s beauty, to save the world.
Between the cynics and the idealists stand the realists: the Society of Saint Pius X. Unlike the cynics, the Society has confidence in the Church’s supernatural mission. And unlike the idealists, the Society can act. It is not paralyzed by obedience, for it understands that authority can be abused.
Even the ancient Greeks understood that. Sophocles’ Antigone told the tyrannical Creon: “Nor did I think your edict had such force that you, a mere mortal, could override the gods, the great unwritten, unshakable traditions. They are alive not just today or yesterday: they live forever…” Even a papal edict cannot justify fundamentally changing the Catholic Church after 2000 years: it belongs to Christ, and the Pope is only his vicar.
For that is exactly what some recent popes have sought to do. In 1976, the Society’s founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, was suspended by Pope Paul VI for his efforts “to train priests in the unreformed theology and traditional rites which he, in common with every other priest in the Catholic Church, had sworn to defend at the time of his ordination,” as Auberon Waugh wrote in The Spectator at the time.
This is the crux of the problem. If the Vatican threatens excommunication, it is because it hopes for the extinction of the Society’s unreformed theology and traditional rites. But the Society believes the Church cannot delegitimize what Catholics have always and everywhere believed. As Antigone said, no mere mortal’s edict can override God, or His great and unshakeable traditions. “They are alive, not just today or yesterday: they live forever…”
Antigone was not spared. And perhaps the Society will be excommunicated (again) if it proceeds. But this time little moral force can adhere to the penalty. Benedict XVI undid the last excommunications. Today informed observers will simply deplore the Vatican’s hardline tactics, and marvel to behold that in a world of ecumenism, pastoral accompaniment and dialogue, the Church has found time for one last condemnation: that of its own tradition.
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