“May my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth if I forget you, if I do not make you the beginning of my joy, O Jerusalem!” (Psalm 136:6, Septuagint)
(El Abejorro) — The announcement of episcopal ordinations by the Society of St. Pius X without a papal mandate has sparked a storm of debate within the Church. I wish to offer some preliminary observations for perplexed Catholics.
The Church is undergoing a harsh Babylonian captivity. External enemies have breached the walls of the Beloved City and are striving to subject it to harsh servitude. Under the guise of “the development of doctrine,” they seek to imperceptibly alter elements of the Revelation that culminated in Christ, with the death of the last Apostle, in order to sow confusion in souls and to make them accept the tyranny of the devil and the antichrist. They also seek to deprive souls of the precious treasures of grace contained chiefly in the sacraments, and in the Holy Mass above all. Let us now mention some examples.
Regarding the law of God, which Christ came not to abolish but to bring to fulfillment, the internal enemies allied with external enemies invoke the Acts of the Apostles, chapters 10–15, and seek to reject the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount. Conforming to the world, they want Christians to accept gender ideology under the guise of charity and catholicity; to replace the commandment of love with the “care of our common home,” which entails the destruction of the very principles of chastity and the worship of Moloch.
Regarding the sacraments, they wish to ignore the power to govern and teach, and the power to sanctify granted by the sacrament of Holy Orders, in order to reduce everything to “human dignity” and equality. They do not wish to view the sacrament of Holy Orders as a participation in the priesthood of Christ that is essentially distinct from Baptism. And, since the Second Vatican Council settled this matter, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Synod of Bishops have no qualms about declaring that the Council’s teachings are reduced “to the same level as the opinions of theological schools.” Let this be clear: the subversive discourse of the internal enemies, who present themselves as the “post-conciliar Church” and who command us to forget all tradition in favor of the supposed conciliar teachings, has reached the point of subverting its own foundation.
If it is true that there are accidental aspects in the canon of the Mass, it is also true that Bugnini’s liturgical reform was not content with changing those accidental aspects. In the Offertory, it compelled the faithful to declare that the bread and wine will become or will be “for us” the Body and Blood of the Lord (not really, then?), and it declared the same in Eucharistic Prayer number two. But, more clearly, those who hate the Tridentine and John XXIII liturgies, and want to eradicate them from the face of the earth, are driven by a hatred that clearly goes beyond merely seeking to affirm the pope’s authority. In fact, many have written that clinging to the ancient liturgy amounts to rejecting the new ecclesiology and, therefore, betrays a schismatic attitude. But this latter opinion (that the traditional liturgy violates Christian ecclesiology) is a heresy, explicitly condemned by the canons of Trent.
Something similar can be said of the divorced who pretend to be remarried and show no intention of repenting and doing penance: to claim that such people may receive the sacraments of confession or communion is a flagrant violation of the canons of the Council of Trent.
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The rejection of the death penalty, in the terms in which it has recently been formulated—“the death penalty is inadmissible, because it offends the inviolability and dignity of the person”—is, without a doubt, a material heresy. God established the death penalty in the Old Testament, and God cannot command anything unjust. Furthermore, John Paul II recently stated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 575, that “the traditional teaching of the Church has recognized the just foundation of the right and duty of legitimate public authority to apply penalties proportionate to the gravity of the crime, without excluding, in cases of extreme gravity, recourse to the death penalty.” The said innovation intends to pass off as a “development of doctrine” a flagrant contradiction with a revealed truth.
Similarly, denying the Virgin Mary’s role as mediatrix of all graces implies contradicting numerous documents of the Church’s ancient and recent magisterium, including the Magisterium of the Second Vatican Council.
Now, the anti-Catholic activity of the so-called shepherds of the Church has extended to many other areas, more directly murderous. Examples include the secret agreement with the Chinese Communist Party, the promotion of the so called Peace Agreement in Colombia, the calls for dialogue in Venezuela in 2014 and 2017, and many other similar, though perhaps less serious, activities. There has also been attempt of drying the fountains that yield ministers of the Sacrifice of the Mass and witnesses of the Gospel who are faithful to Revelation. Some examples are the removal of Bishop Livieres, closing many seminaries in Argentina and elsewhere, attacking religious orders, corrupting the founding spirit of contemplative nuns, removing bishops for the sole reason of their fidelity to the Tradition of the Church, and a long list of other such actions.
It cannot be denied that the Church is held captive. Faced with this situation, the faithful bishops are the only human hope for an effective response that will ensure apostolic succession for the Church. How and why? Because Lumen Gentium made it clear that bishops receive their authority from Christ, and not from the pope, and that their authority is to teach, govern, and sanctify. Therefore, while, on the one hand, they are subject to the Pope in matters of universal faith and discipline, on the other hand, they are the competent judges in their own dioceses, and no one, not even the Pope, may intervene in their governance without just cause and due process. This is what Cyprian understood well, in accordance with the Apostolic Canons, and what we have failed to understand since the sixteenth century. It is, however, what Francisco de Vitoria taught, and what has been providentially declared by the Second Vatican Council. Faithful bishops must resist any attempt to corrupt the faith and the sacraments within their jurisdiction, and must reject any removal contrary to divine law.
Moreover, every bishop is a successor of the Apostles. If the universal Faith is in danger, they must also watch over the universal Faith. At first the Apostles had no dioceses, although they soon defined territorial jurisdictions. When Peter Judaized, Paul corrected him in Antioch, which certainly was not his diocese.
This is the kind of reasoning one would like to see in the Society of St. Pius X. Unfortunately, however, what one often hears is a nonsensical discourse that rejects all magisterial teaching after Vatican II. One frequently observes that they completely ignore the essentially canonical nature of the Church. If there are aspects of the teachings of Vatican II that are difficult to reconcile with other traditional teachings, this is a matter that must be seriously discussed. But one must not adopt a schismatic attitude. When it is said that Archbishop Lefebvre acted out of a state of necessity, and then one sees that Benedict XVI affirmed that in France and Germany Lefebvre’s claim was grounded, one can see a crack through which rational discussion could be rescued. Even today, of course, one could invoke a state of necessity in many cases. But it must be done with competence and restraint.
It is true that in Rome one sees no small amount of excess. Let us give an example. We see that it is asserted with a worrying laxity that “the Church embraces the entire human family,” and that “the truth of the Gospel is not imposed from above, but grows over time, in the concrete fabric of lives, communities, and cultures. It is a truth that does not fear diversity, but welcomes and orders it; that does not eliminate conflicts, but transfigures them; that recomposes what history tends to scatter. Hence also the image of the polyhedron, a figure with many faces where the same truth of the Gospel is reflected from different angles.” But at the same time, the SSPX is threatened with excommunication, as if, in reality, the Church encompassed the entire human family except for those Christians who cling to tradition, and as if the doctrine of the polyhedron, after all, had its own limits.
With these lines, I wish to call all true Catholics to reflection. I want everyone to recognize the profound problems we face. We must not condemn one another, but rather take responsibility for the complexity of the situation. We must not forget that one of the greatest difficulties lies in the canonical nature of the Church. On the one hand, one cannot declare Francis or Leo to be non-popes through a private judgment. On the other hand, bishops have public authority to judge matters of the Faith within their own jurisdiction and, in exceptional situations (salus animarum suprema lex), beyond ordinary limits.
Reprinted with permission from El Abejorro.