I think you folks have a few things going on here that are different from each other. Correct me if I’m wrong.
I was just responding to the idea that AL needed to do what he did “for the good of the Church”. I was pointing out that he overstepped his responsibility.
The term “for the good of the Church” has different meanings. We must all do what is good for the Church. It’s our moral obligation. That’s one meaning.
The other meaning that it can take is that we feel responsible for solving problems that either we cannot solve, because they’re too big to go at it alone or they’re not in our jurisdiction to solve.
if you want to be a society then you’re removing yourself from the diocesan structure, and that means you’re removing yourself from the laity.
This has to be qualified. If one enters a society one is no longer part of the diocese. Only the laity and the diocesan clergy are part of the diocese. Members of society are incardinated into their society. The diocese is not their responsibility, UNLESS they work for the diocese, such as pastor, school principle, diocesan official, etc. There are members of societies and of religious orders that work for the diocese. They are responsible for their part. The pastor of St. X is not responsible for St. Y school, because it’s not his school. The religious who runs St. Y school is not responsible for St. X parish.
There is a human tendency, which has nothing to do with being Trad or Lib to try to fix the world. We’re all guilty of it at least once in our lives.
The bishop is responsible for the laity, and you are then only responsible for your own men. If the laity come, you refer them to their ordinary because they’re not your responsibility.
The diocesan bishop is responsible for the laity in his diocese. Any member of a society or an order can send the person with the concern back to the diocesan bishop or the appropriate pastor. There are times, when this is a legal requirement.
Again, if you are a society priest or a regular priest assigned to a parish in the diocese, then your duty is to work with the diocesan bishop. If you’re assigned to your order’s house of formation, then you don’t have an obligation to resolve the problems that people may have in their parishes. Your first duty is to your house of formation. You certainly want to be kind, sympathetic and helpful by giving some good suggestions and pointing people in the right direction. Sometimes, people don’t know where to go. Recently, someone asked me where they had to go to get a certain permission. I told them that they had to write the bishop. The first reaction was to question if that was appropriate. Considering that only he can give an answer to that question, it sounds pretty appropriate to me.
Could you imagine if a bunch of people from your diocese went up to some Franciscans and asked them to intervene in something? The Franciscans would send them off to their bishop because it’s not their responsibility.
This is very touchy area. People will often go to a person or a group because they feel comfortable. They expect you to intervene on their behalf. Many times, it would be inappropriate to do so. The most appropriate thing is to encourage them and to help them dispel their fear of the person in authority.
If this is what AL thought, then I truly worry for his soul. He does not sound like a man trying to follow the will of the Holy Spirit; he sounds like a man who’s afraid of loosing his pet project.
I think the way that people report him often distorts the man. I do not agree with the ordinations. However, I do not see him as a villain either. My take, without ever having met the man, is that he lost his patience. That can be dangerous. He was in the debate with the Vatican over these ordinations. There was the whole back and forth thing. Those things are unnerving for both sides. If you lose your patience and you drop out of the debate, you run the risk of making mistakes. I think it was a mistake to ordain those bishops, but it was not a malicious act. Reading some of his letters, I get the impression that the man had quite a temper.
When the Pope has said that there is no “emergency situation”, then they can no longer use that as an excuse (I believe Br. JR has pointed this out somewhere in this or another thread).
What happened here was a conflict of perceptions. The Archbishop saw an emergency. The Holy Father did not. That’s first.
Second, the was always the possibility that the Holy Father was thinking, “What’s the rush?” We don’t know, because he’s dead. The Archbishop could have been thinking, “I’m old.” I’m just speculating what could have been going through their respective minds, which would put them on totally different pages.
So when the Holy Father said that state of emergency does not apply here, because there is no emergency, there is definitely a difference in perception, between the two men.
The difference between the Archbishop and a St. Dominic who was also facing a Church in crisis, is that St. Dominic always took the other approach. If Dominic said, “It’s red,” and the pope said, “It’s orange,” Dominic’s response was always to give the pope the benefit of the doubt out of humility. He would say to himself, “It looks red to me, but maybe it’s the light.”
I know it’s a silly example. I’m just trying to show how someone else in situation of crisis handled his differences with the popes. St. Dominic will always be my hero in this regard. The man had a way of dealing with crisis and the papacy that no one has ever been able to duplicate.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, FFV
Not to mention that Fr. Bernard Fellay was not even “bishopric age”. He had not been a priest very long and was only at the time.