I’m not SSPX. Never been to one of their Masses, though I have been invited to do so. I know a fair number of them and have talked to them at length.
It’s hard to understand SSPX if one wasn’t aware of some of the dislocations of the post-VII era. One day the Church was one way, then all of a sudden it was another way, in many respects. Abuses abounded, and it was hard for a lot of people to trust some priests, nuns, bishops even. Some segments of the Church became essentially political.
I was young then, and perhaps more flexible. My father, though, was older, and the Church to which he had been devoted for so long suddenly became almost bizarre at times. Dissidents were everywhere, preaching dissent as if it was Catholicism. Sometimes one really had to wonder whether some of the stranger masses were even valid, they were so idiosyncratic.
You almost had to be there. My father never did join the SSPX. But he was mortified to see orders of sisters “go secular” and decline. He was upset to see openly heretical “theologians” treated as if they somehow were the Church of the future. He had worked awfully hard to get Jesuit educations for his children, only to see the Jesuits leave in droves and become apologists for the likes of Teddy Kennedy when Kennedy supported abortion. He saw Catholic education decline so much that he and my mother felt it absolutely necessary to teach us the Catechism at home because it was certainly not taught in the local Catholic school. It was hard for him and people like him.
Well, some people, mostly older, were drawn to the SSPX because it was what they were used to. SSPX never did condemn the Pope. Their priests had apostolic succession and everybody knew that. Their sacraments were valid. It wasn’t as if they weren’t. The SSPX, in my opinion, was almost an expression of a failure on their part to realize that the Church, as represented by dissidents and experimenters, would not stay that way forever. The abuses would die down and the abusers would eventually just leave, which a lot of them did. But SSPX people couldn’t bring themselves to think so.
So, now the SSPX people have raised two entire generations, and taught them what they, themselves were taught, not by some crazy dissident, but by the Church itself. They’re not heretics. They do accept the Pope. They teach straight from the Catechism. But they are, perhaps understandably, reluctant to place themselves under the authority of bishops who might split them up, forbid them to say the Tridentine Mass or even force them to say “rainbow masses”.
You just have to say they’re Catholics…real ones. They just got themselves out on a limb a long time ago and are still leery of what would happen to them if they agreed to come under the authority of some bishop who might not be all that orthodox. After all, how would it have been to be under Weakland? Under Mahoney?
In speaking to SSPXers, I find a lot of respect for, and hope in, Pope Benedict. And rightly so. He has taken a lot of steps to reform liturgical practice, to reform seminaries, to select truly orthodox and faithful bishops. You can’t understand the SSPX, early on or now, without understanding the history.
One day, they will be fully within the bosom of the Church. Of that, I am convinced.
:byzsoc: