Many people wonder what will happen with the Society of Saint Pius X. With the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite more available (and enjoying Papal support) will the SSPX be brought into full communion with the Catholic Church? It’s not clear. It’s more than a liturgical issue that divides the society from Rome.
The Pope recently appointed His Excellency, Archbishop J. Augustine DiNoia, O.P., as vice president of the Ecclesia Dei Commission, which works chiefly to reconcile the SSPX and other separated traditionalists. The National Catholic Register has an informative and theologically rich interview with the Archbishop. He discusses interpretations (good and bad) of the Second Vatican Council, the contributions a reconciled SSPX would make, and what is nonnegotiable theologically. What it all boils down to, as the Archbishop makes clear, is real, living continuity with tradition. “The only thing I’m telling them is: Vatican II is not a departure from Tradition,” DiNoia said.
The Holy Spirit is the real preserver of tradition, he pointed out:
. . . if you cease to believe that the Holy Spirit is preserving the Church from error, you cut your moorings.
The councils cannot — whatever their interpretations may be by the left or right, or whatever the intentions of the authors were of the council documents — be led into error. All of the documents stand. Schism is not the answer. So I’m sympathetic to the society, but the solution is not breaking off from the Church.
In other words, there is only one society that has God’s own guarantee, the society of St. Peter and his successors. However much one might lament certain changes in practice, cutting oneself off from the Pope to preserve tradition is a contradiction in terms.
“Traditionalists have to be converted from seeing the Council as rupture and discontinuity.” Reconciliation will be “an act of grace,” His Excellency said.
Conversion. Grace. That’s the rub. And a good reminder that all of our efforts to do and be good begin and end with the Source of all good.
July 2nd, 2012 | 5:46 pm
Why all the rush to some kind of reconciliation? Is SSPX doing something different then what the Church has been doing for ages past? Let’s just wait another 40 years or so and see how the springtime of Vatican II turns out for Rome.
July 3rd, 2012 | 9:50 am
It is very good to see a clear explication of the core issues. Abp DiNoia is striking just the right chord of sympathy combined with firmness and clarity on “non-negotiables.” Praise God.
July 3rd, 2012 | 10:34 am
cybro,
Considering the present leadership of both the Catholic Church and the SSPX, this may be the “last best chance” for rapprochement. My personal fear is that the SSPX turns, over time, into a sedevacantist version of the Old Catholics permanently (in human terms; Mark 10:27) beyond reconciliation.
July 3rd, 2012 | 10:35 am
An acquaintance explained this to me:
“Newly appointed Ecclesia DeiPrelate, US Archbishop J. Augustine DiNoia, is charged with trying to achieve an accord between the SSPX and Rome. Yet again, there is the insistence that nothing in Vatican II is contrary to Tradition.
In a July 1 interview with the National Catholic Register, DiNola said of the SSPX, “What I’ve tried to argue is that all they have to do is to say there’s nothing in the Council that is contrary to Tradition and that every text, or every part of it that is controversial, should be read in context of the Council, and read it in light of the Tradition. It seems to me, despite their difficulties, they should be able to do that.”
Yet As Archbishop Lefebvre pointed out at the time of the Council, the Document on Religious Liberty does contain text that is contrary to Tradition.
Archbishop Lefebvre furthernoted that the progressive Fr. Yves Congar openly admitted Vatican II’s new doctrine of religious liberty is a rupture with the past. Congar said: “What is new in this teaching in relation to the doctrine of Leo XIII and even of Pius XII…is the determination of the basis peculiar to this liberty, which is sought not in the objective truth of moral or religious good, but in the ontological quality of the human person.”
Congar further stated, “”It cannot be denied that a text like this [the conciliar declaration on Religious Liberty] says materially something different from the Syllabus of 1864, and even almost the opposite of propositions 15, and 77 to 79 of that document.”
The SSPX thus cannot agree with Archbishop DiNoia’s that “there’s nothing in the Council that is contrary to Tradition”.”
So…who is telling the truth?
July 3rd, 2012 | 10:54 am
“In other words, there is only one society that has God’s own guarantee, the society of St. Peter and his successors. However much one might lament certain changes in practice, cutting oneself off from the Pope to preserve tradition is a contradiction in terms.”
I have never seen a more succinct and precise statement of exactly what is wrong with the SSPX. Excellent!
July 3rd, 2012 | 11:09 am
I always feel that the SSPX is rather like those Anglican Ritualists described by Cardinal Manning: “Ritualism is private judgment in gorgeous raiment, wrought about with divers colours.” He declared that “every fringe in an elaborate cope worn without authority is only a distinct and separate act of private judgment; the more elaborate, the less Catholic; the nearer the imitation, the further from the submission of faith.”
July 3rd, 2012 | 5:29 pm
To respond to the idea that Dignitas Humanae contradicts the Syllabus of Errors, I say okay fine. I have read both, and it does seem like they are in some tension. However, I don’t think this is fatal to Dignitas Humanae or the Second Vatican Council. When I was taught Catechism, I was taught that there was Tradition and tradition. Tradition was the unalterable Truth that the Church had received from the Son of God passed down throughout the ages. This includes things like the incarnation, the Trinity, and the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Then there was tradition, like that tradition that priests should remain celebate. It did not have to be that way, but that was the current position of the church. I would think that the Church’s stance toward whether the civil authorities should allow other religions the same rights as the Church would fall into the latter category. Members of SSPX seem to be arguing that if the Church took a position on religious liberty, which is in most relevant ways a political and not theological position, in 1864 that it is binding forever. How so? It was not an infallible declaration. Papal infallibility had not even been promulgated by the First Vatican Council yet. The idea that the Church had never changed its position on anything like this before seems historically ignorant to me. The Church’s teaching on usury radically changed between the middle ages and the 18th century, and that issue would seem to go much further to the core issues of faith and morals.
July 4th, 2012 | 3:54 am
Blessed John Henry Newman dealt with the Syllabus in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, in a way reminiscent of his treatment of the 39 Articles in Tract 90.
http://www.newmanreader.org/works/anglicans/volume2/gladstone/section7.html
I would particularly call attention to his words, “the Syllabus then has no dogmatic force; it addresses us, not in its separate portions, but as a whole, and is to be received from the Pope by an act of obedience, not of faith, that obedience being shown by having recourse to the original and authoritative documents, (Allocutions and the like,) to which it pointedly refers.”
July 4th, 2012 | 12:55 pm
Shouldn’t it be noted that Lefebvre was an apologist for Vichy France while one of the bishops he ordained, Richard Williamson, is a Holocaust denier and 9/11 Truther? For all I know, the other 3 bishops aren’t as creepy but to have two out of five high officials be associated with such extremism suggests it is not a healthy religious movement at all.
July 5th, 2012 | 4:05 am
Mark
It is easy enough to see why “work, family, fatherland” would appeal more to a certain type of Catholic that “liberty, equality, fraternity.”
They were well described by Blondel, when Catholics were flocking to the banner of Charles Maurras’s l’action française. He accused them of desiring, “a Catholicism without Christianity, submissiveness without thought, an authority without love, a Church that would rejoice at the insulting tributes paid to the virtuosity of her interpretative and repressive system… To accept all from God except God, all from Christ except His Spirit, to preserve in Catholicism only a residue that is aristocratic and soothing for the privileged and beguiling or threatening for the lower classes”
One can see why even an atheist of fascist tendencies like Charles Maurras would relish that sort of religion, with its stress on hierarchy and corporatism, not only in the Church, but in society.
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