THE
SCHISMATIC POPE
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There
is an irony in the expression beloved of those who embraced the
ethos of Vatican II of ‘being on one’s faith journey’.
It provided an
excuse for many to give away their Catholic faith and wander in
the religious wilderness after the Council’s effective
abandonment of the teaching that the only certain way to heaven
is as a member of the Catholic Church.
We, all of us who have survived the
ravaging effects of that Council and the disruption of the
Church’s liturgy it led to, have found ourselves on ‘a faith
journey’. The
Pseudo-Dionysius taught that God launches us into reality at the
beginning of life and that we must return to Him at its end. When, with the corruption
of the Sacred Liturgy in 1969, we were set awry from the course
of truth, Almighty God saw to it that we should have an avenue
of return.
This ‘journey’ began with our submission
to the directives of Paul VI, consistent with what we regarded
as our duty to heed the words of the successor of Peter, to
accept the new liturgy he had published.
We embraced enthusiastically his order of Mass.
We welcomed the vernacular.
If we were concerned with the lack of theological content
in the new Eucharistic prayers, or with the way priests added
their own input, we treated these as aberrations to be ignored. We were more concerned over
sermons featuring language expressing a new and bizarre view of
Catholic things. In time
we came to recognise these as reflections of the heresy of
modernism. Yet we
resisted those who would reject the novus
ordo; we thought them extreme.
We were concerned then over the disobedience of
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and his followers to the wishes of
Pope Paul and his successor, Pope John Paul II.
When in June 1988 the Archbishop and
Bishop Antonio de Castro-Mayer consecrated four bishops without
a papal mandate we approved John Paul’s reaction in Ecclesia
Dei, as we accepted without question his assertion that
the Archbishop and his followers had committed a schismatic act. We
were scandalised at what John Paul had done with his
‘ecumenical’ prayer meeting at Assisi in October 1986, as
scandalised as members of the SSPX, but felt this could not
justify Archbishop Lefebvre’s refusal to acknowledge the
validity of Vatican II.
But with the passage of time came the
realisation that the Council, and Pope Paul’s new rite of Mass,
were much more problematic than had been thought.
We listened to those who condemned the aberrations in the
new liturgy and hoped our concerns might be met by remedies such
as ‘the reform of the reform’, or Cardinal Ratzinger’s
‘hermeneutic of continuity’. In the meantime, there had
occurred a great resurgence of the old rite assisted by the
association Pope John Paul had fostered to circumvent the
attractions of the SSPX, the Priestly
Fraternity
of St Peter.
Competent philosophers and theologians
appeared who exposed the shortcomings of the Council and
condemned the novus ordo as in breach of a specific prohibition by Pope Pius V of
any alteration to the Roman rite of Mass he had canonised in the
Bull Quo primum of
July 1570 as directed by the Council of Trent.
Theologian and canon lawyer, the late Fr Gregory Hesse,
went so far as to condemn the novus
ordo as schismatic as he exposed the heresies taught by
Vatican II, in particular the Council’s misstatement of what is
meant by tradition, and detailed the theological flaws
underlying the condemnation in Ecclesia
Dei.
Meanwhile, John Paul’s successor, Pope
Benedict XVI, removed the declaration of excommunication from
the four SSPX bishops effectively abandoning his predecessor’s
judgement. Fr Hesse
exposed the truth that refusing to obey one
directive of a pope does not amount to rejection of his
authority generally. One might be entirely
justified in refusing a papal direction.
Accordingly, the claim that Archbishop Lefebvre and
Bishop de Castro Mayer and the bishops they had consecrated were
‘in schism’ was false. What
was implied in Quo primum
entitled them to refuse obedience to Pope John Paul.
Pope Benedict seemed to endorse this view
in July 2007 with his motu
proprio Summorum
Pontificum when he asserted that the Mass published by
Pope John XXIII in 1962, the Mass of Pius V, had never been
abrogated. He was not
introducing new teaching; simply reiterating the teaching in Quo primum. Yet he was
selective in the task; he omitted to endorse Pius V’s
condemnation there of anyone who should presume to alter the
rite of Mass he had ordained.
Enter Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò,
former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States.
In a letter he penned in June 2020, he plotted the course
of our ‘faith journey’:
“I confess it with serenity and without
controversy: I was one of the many people who, despite many
perplexities and fears which today have proven to be absolutely
legitimate, trusted the authority of the Hierarchy with
unconditional obedience. In
reality, I think that many people, including myself, did not
initially consider the possibility that there could be a
conflict between obedience to an order of the Hierarchy and
fidelity to the Church herself…
He went on to argue that the defects in the Council
and in the teaching conveyed by the unruly liturgy of Pope
Paul’s new Mass could be ignored no longer.
“There comes a moment in our life when, through the
disposition of Providence, we are faced with a decisive choice
for the future of the Church and for our eternal salvation. I speak of the choice
between understanding the error into which practically all of us
have fallen, almost always without evil intentions, and wanting
to continue to look the other way or justify ourselves…
This
operation of intellectual honesty requires great humility, first
of all in recognising that for decades we have been led into
error in good faith by people who, established in authority,
have not known how to watch over and guard the flock of Christ:
some for the sake of living quietly, some because of having too
many commitments, some out of convenience, and finally some in
bad faith or even malicious intent.”
The Archbishop expressed what great
numbers of the faithful had come to realise:
“It is no accident—it is undeniable—that what these
men affirm with impunity… [is] that despite all the efforts of
the hermeneutic of continuity (which suffered miserable
shipwreck at its first confrontation with the reality of the
present crisis), from Vatican II onwards a parallel church has
been built, superimposed over and diametrically opposed to the
true Church of Christ.”
The reality of this ‘parallel church’ had
become clear through the conduct of Benedict’s successor, Pope
Francis, who claimed with justification that he was simply
teasing out the consequences of the Council.
To the members of this parallel church the sticking
point, as the Archbishop averred, was Summorum Pontificum:
“[T]he greatest affront of [Benedict’s] Pontificate
had been the liberal permission of the celebration of the
venerated Tridentine Liturgy, the legitimacy of which was
finally recognised, disproving the illegitimacy of its
ostracisation over fifty years.
It is no accident that Bergoglio’s supporters are the
same people who saw the Council as the first event of a new
church, prior to which there was an old religion
with an old liturgy.”
In turning their backs on the rite of Mass
imposed by Paul VI, those who offered (and those who attended)
the Mass of Pius V not only cast doubts on the novus
ordo, but on the Council which had given birth to it. It was inevitable, then,
that Pope Francis would endeavour to suppress it.
As we have argued elsewhere, the
‘traditio’ to which Pope Francis appeals in Traditionis
Custodes is not the sacred tradition of the Catholic
Church delineated by the Council of Trent and confirmed by the
First Vatican Council, but the ersatz, heretical, version
vaunted by Vatican II. Pope John Paul had
committed the same error in Ecclesia
Dei. When he had
condemned Archbishop Lefebvre’s action of consecrating bishops
without a papal mandate he appealed not to the
Church’s understanding of tradition, but to Vatican II’s
understanding. Accordingly,
when he asserted that the Archbishop’s act was “an act of disobedience to the Roman Pontiff in a
very grave matter and of supreme importance for the unity of the
church” it was not the unity of the Catholic Church to which he was referring,
but that of the parallel church identified by Archbishop
Viganò—‘the church of Vatican II’.
This issue, the unity of the Church
founded by God, is what is at stake in Traditionis
Custodes.
St Thomas Aquinas teaches:
“Schism takes its name, as Isidore says (Etym. viii, 3), from
being a scission of minds, and scission is opposed to unity. Wherefore the sin of schism
is one that is directly and essentially opposed to unity… the
schismatic intends to sever himself from that unity which is the
effect of charity: because charity unites not only one person to
another with the bond of spiritual love, but also the whole
Church in unity of spirit…” (Summa Theologiae II-II,
q. 39, a. 1)… [T]he sin of unbelief is generically more grievous
than the sin of schism, although it may happen that a particular
schismatic sins more grievously than a particular unbeliever,
either because his contempt is greater, or because his sin is a
source of greater danger…” (II-II,
q. 39, a. 2)
What greater danger to the unity of the
Church could there be than an attack mounted by the Pope
himself?
In all the 2,000 year history of the
Catholic Church, no papal document has told so fundamentally
against the unity of the Church as this motu
proprio; no papal document has failed so abysmally in
charity. In his
memorable comment of August 2nd following its
publication, Archbishop Viganò cited the words of Our Lord:
“What father among you, if his son asks him for
bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will
give him a serpent…? (Lk 11:11-12). Now we can understand the meaning
of these words, considering with pain and torment of heart the
cynicism of a father who gives us the stones of a soulless
liturgy, the serpents of a corrupted doctrine, and the scorpions
of an adulterated morality. And
who reaches the point of dividing the flock of the Lord between
those who accept the Novus
Ordo and those who want to remain faithful to
the Mass of our fathers...”
Nothing could be plainer. Traditionis Custodes is a
schismatic document and its author is a schismatic.
Michael Baker
August 15th, 2021—The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
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