It is irrelevant because they don;t use the name calling in their arguments to justify their position. JR is using an argument based on name calling. This is wrong, and the insult is for him to use this type of argumentation the first place.
Yes, you (and the other parishoners) could have done that. The problem was that there was no hint of how long the state of emergency - in this case, the insanity of the Bishop’s actions - would last, whereas your children would be growing. This was the very dilemma my wife & is faced in the early 80s. We already knew of families whose teen children were lapsing in droves, and they didn’t know why. I still remember saying to her, “The Future is not an abstraction – the Future is upstairs crying in her cot!” The first action we took was to get out Fr Flannery’s Edition of the Documents of Vatican II (which I’d bought in 1975 but had never read with any thoroughness) and read it through together, with a highlighter, taking notes. Suffice it to say we were very disturbed at the equivocal language and the huge loopholes.
If you can see nothing wrong with the rest of that episode, God help you.
Yes I, too, am aware of that.
An incredible argument. A Black Mass is valid (otherwise they wouldn’t bother to carry it out).
Canons 1321 - 4 specifically exempt them from any penalty. Thus the Holy Spirit is protecting them. Your fallacy (which is the fallacy of the age, that all but wrecked the Church in the past 4 decades) is to detach the virtue of obedience from its natural place in the hierarchy of Providence and place it over everything else. The purpose of obedience is to safeguard the Faith. Paul ‘withstood Peter to his face, because he was to be blamed’.
But you can’t have it both ways. If the excommunication is an objective fact (" It means that one has committed an act that has placed one outside of the physical Church") then how can it be remitted, seeing that the bishops have stuck firmly to their position? If, on the other hand, it is a personal act of the pope ("The lifting of the excommunication is as Pope Benedict said in his letter, “an act of compassion on the part of the Pope”) it leaves completely open the question whether it was licit or valid in the first place.
That’s not the point. The point of the reprimand is to test the pertinacity, which being a mortal sin may merit the sanction of excommunication. It is not a punishment as such for the refusal to accept the reprimand.
No, he was not lying. He was dropping the previous Vatican line with the compassionate aim of healing this preposterous situation in the Church, where apparently the only heinous crime is to adhere to the immemorial Faith. It was making a laughing stock of the Church’s Ecumenical endeavours. This glaring anomaly was not lost on outsiders, even if it was apparently lost on many in the Vatican.
Et cum spiritu tuo.JR
If the Church were functioning better this would be a correct statement. But Canons 1321 - 4 give their opinions legal force. Their correct invoking of the protection of the law was never contradicted by any pope. All that happened was that Cdl Gantin’s decree (which, being without a protocol number, was invalid) was never publicly repudiated. The only action taken so far was that of Pope Benedict, when he remitted what he identified as the decree of Cdl Gantin. I often heard it urged against the SSPX that they had been excommunicated by the pope. We always replied that it was by Cdl Gantin, not the pope. It is good to see Pope Benedict clear this up.
This post does nothing but beg the question. I have heard at least two canon lawyers disagree. In fact, I have never heard anyone but the SSPX say anything but the fact that these excommunications were valid. We also have Ecclesia Dei. We now have Pope Benedict lifting these excommunications. Yet I realize that the SSPX is built on circular logic. That is why the example of St. Athanasius always turns up in their defense. Yet the example only holds as evidence if one pre-supposes the SSPX is right.
No, it begs no question. Many Canon Lawyers do agree. I posted a selction of them some while back on this thread.
No, many Canon Lawyers did agree. See above.
Look more carefully. The pope does not issue the excommunication. he refers to is as a fact that has already happened. That is why Pope Benedict calls it the decree of Cdl Gantin. A decree without a protocol number is invalid, otherwise every shopping list would be an infallible document.
No, the wreckage of the Faith in the past decades is an objective fact. It is not an invention of the SSPX. The point of S. Athanasius is to show that, at least, the principle of denying compliance to an apparently legal sanction can be upheld. One can then safely move to the next step, which is to discuss the merits of the SSPX position on this basis. it is not possible to dismiss them out of hand for disobedience given the example of the Arian Crisis. It is begging no question.
They do need to tidy up Canons 1321-4 though, don’t they?
(… you mean … full seminaries,schools teaching the catechism, large families keeping the Faith, 2000 processing to the feet of John Paul II in the Holy Year, organised by the SSPX, etc etc.)
This is a good point, pnewton. I grew up in the pre-Vatican II era and so loved the old Mass etc that, when first I heard about Mgr Lefebvre in the newspapers, I kept away from the SSPX for many years. I accepted the assertion that he was dicobedient and culpable, and I judged that any attractiveness in his Masses would be precisely a temptation to be resisted. Later, for various reasons - notably the ever-deepening crisis - I studeid his work and realised that he was in the right. I therefore took apropriate action.
(… you mean … full seminaries, schools teaching the catechism, large families keeping the Faith, 2000 processing to the feet of John Paul II in the Holy Year, organised by the SSPX, etc etc?)
Charity prevents my responding to that statement.
Because they are not illicit.
Like I said, illicit. I understand the attraction to the SSPX, but that does not change their status.
Yes, there is also a lot of good that could have been made even better. The damage I refered to was the fracturing of Catholic fellowship and the breaking of sacred vows. Honestly, I do not think St. Athanasius would have violated his oath. There is almost always another solution. Impatience promote imprudence. Now we have the existence of Sacramental confusion, the spin-off of the SSPV from the SSPX, the Williamson fiasco.
But is the authority of the Church being abused and misused? For example, in the granting of marriage annulments. According to Monsignor Hettinger there have been too many marriage annulments. Should Catholics just go along with these easy to get marriage annulments given by the Church authorities, or should Catholics go against the authority and stand up for the preVatican teaching on the indissolubility of marriage?
I view such a question as being outside my postition as a Catholic in the pews. Protestant Churches operate with everyone being their own chief and no one is an indian. It is a mess. No, we do not have preVatican II authority, unless one has access to time travel. We must all live in the time God has put us.
You might want to read the book by Sheila Rauch Kennedy to see how she was victimised by the marriage annulment process.
One bad experience doesn’t make or break an entire institution.
Deja vu all over again. We did this once. It is hard to understand another’s pain and how devistating divorce is. That is why God hates divorce, as should we all. Even though I do not think it relevant to the issue at hand, I always can see the pain when this issue comes up. It is a pain I too know first hand.
The statement in a previous post was that for a Catholic marriage is until death. I submit that this statement is misleading because it does not take into account the loophole of easy Catholic annulments.
The pope is here presupposing that the ‘Emergency clauses’ do not apply. The SSPX have learned to live with this, and it is not pride. it is a love of the truth. However, it is possible that this will now be rectified. But it will still take some time.
But any attempt within the structures was always being blocked, and enforced in the name of obedience. In school, we were simply not allowed to teach the catechism. We had to follow the diocesan syllabus, which was patently deficient.
But he did step outside the normal rules, because the situation was abnormal. Every system of rules and laws does include ‘emergency provisions’.
True, and this is a particular things to guard against. it is a very distressful situation. Nonetheless, it is not the case that all the blame must be heaped on the SSPX. I believe they were prudent, corageous, and faithful to their vows.
Sorry, what do you mean here?
Take this in the context of the shambles within the institutional church. We are all in a fix.
I still maintain that what the SSPX have done is resist abuse of authority, not it use. They were acting within the provsions of canon law in doing so. and they have steadily gined strength over the years, because their case has credibility. I do realise that not every good Catholic is convinced by their case - of the few that have ever heard it out. since the holy year 2000 the popes have realised anew that these are potentially among the pope’s staunchest defenders. Just exactly what did they do wrong, except refuse to pull dwn what was good and fruitful in the church? Pope benedict will, I believe, and if he is spared us, with Bp Fellay, put a speedy end to this deplorable situation.
Yes, he is, as did his predecessor.
Lefebvre ordained four bishops in disobedience to the Holy See and in violation of his vow of obedience. The four bishops joined in this disobedience and reaped the consequences.
This is one thing I totally agree with you on. I am not anti-SSPX, only against where the SSPX are now. My opinion, though is truly irrelevant. That is why I posted our Holy Father’s.
Not even the pope can make the present crisis in the Church go away by ignoring it. If the Church is truly in a State of Emergency, then Mgr Lefebvre was correct to invoke the canons 1321-4. If the Church is not in a state of emergency, then Mgr Lefebvre was wrong. The traditional Liturgy, in its prayers for the pope, presupposes that he needs our prayers to maintain his vigilance and fidelity to his vocation as Vicar of Christ. Sooner or later, the Worst Case Scenario will happen.
Let it not be denied that Mgr Lefebvre disregarded a very clear direction from the reigning pope. He did this because of the ‘agonising crisis of conscience’ mentioned in the Ottaviani intervention. As I have urged, the case of S. Athanasius does not prove automatically that Mgr Lefebvre was in the right, but it does prove that, if one is faced with a stark choice between fidelity to the episcopal mandate to maintain the Faith and a contrary command of the pope, ‘One must choose God before man’. No command to dismantle the Church can be binding. I am not, I repeat, at this point of the debate pre-supposing that Mgr Lefebvre was right in his action. I put it to you that there is a precedent that shows that one cannot stop the argument there. The Pope has always been the custodian of the Church, he does not own the Church. In this generation, the limits of legitimte obedience are being tested and defined. The SSPX have forced the Church to face up to this.
The consequences, for Ireland at least, have been a 400-fold increase in the rate of vocations for those maintaining Tradition over those following the novelties.
Bp Fellay has always said, Only the Holy Father can resolve the crisis in the Church. The minute the excommunications were lifted, Bp Fellay has been standing up for the Pope & the Church against the pope’s attackers. NB the recent response of Bp Fellay to the outrageous comments of the German Bishop’s Conference (demanding the resignation of The Pope because of 20-year-old comments by Bp Williamson)… The Pope is getting a demonstration of who his real friends are.
The principle of going to the words of the Holy Father is a sound one in general. When a pope is pronouncing ex cathedra, we are bound to obey. When he makes a prudential judgment, he might be wrong. “Normally”, however, we must pay the gravest attention to his words. Yet he still might be wrong. In the Old Code of Canon Law there were 50 offences that merited excommunication. In the New Code there are only 5. The appointing of a bishop without papal mandate was introduced only in 1955, in response to the Communist-inspired schismatic church in China. Yet after Vatican II the Chinese schismatics were never told they were excommunicated, in fact they were treated with great respect by visiting prelates from Rome, while the law was invoked exclusively against Mgr Lefebvre et al. It was used to attempt to force compliance with a direction that had been specifically condemned by popes for over two hundred years: of allying with the World.
As you might be, or I, or anyone. The exception is in matters of discipline and Canon Law. In this he is the final word. He might be imprudent, contradictory or even mean, but right or wrong do not apply. He can no more be wrong that he could pick out the wrong carpet, although this matter is surely more serious.