Originally Posted by numealinesimpet
Do you accept that [Athanasius, Eusebius of Samosata] and others went around ordaining other priests outside their territory? Would you call that obedience? They most certainly did this, and it was grave disobedience, if you accept the validity of his excommunications. Athanasius was excommunicated several times, once with the endorsement of Pope Liberius, and he simply ignored it.
[the case of Athanasius is] something irrelevant …] All this is over me thinking Athanasius being a poor analogy.
Actually, the case of Athanasius is very important in establishing precedents (it’s a precedent, not an analogy). It proves that you can’t take the simplistic route of saying: “Lefebvre was told not to consecrate. He did consecrate. Therefore he was disobedient, proud, schismatic …. and that goes for his supporters too” … As I have argued before, the Arian episode does not
prove straight away that Lefebvre et al. were in the right (which is why we are not ‘begging the question’); but it
does prove the possibility that a bishop can set aside the expressed mandate of the pope and still be in the right –*depending on the circumstances. The SSPX case then needs to be studied on its merits, instead of simply being dismissed out of hand, as so many have done (no doubt with the best intentions in most cases).
Is this the legacy of the SSPX?
Yes indeed. Clear thinking has been under attack all through the 20th century, with the abandonment of the Scholastic method, which is really only a development of Aristotle’s analysis of thought. He made probably the greatest contribution to human thought since The Beginning up to his own time, but going into details might be too much of a red herring on this thread.
Yet he showed how you can systematically increase your knowledge, using the methods he details in the
Prior and the
Posterior Analytics. Aquinas ‘baptised’ this by adding the dimension of Revelation.
The most basic mental tool explicated by Aristotle was the ‘Syllogism’. He gives as the first example: –
“All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore Socrates is mortal”.
Most “Modern Philosophies” abandon all this. Instead of defining words and then applying the rules of logic, they teach a variety of different routes of thought; one of the most destructive – part of the Modernist “Synthesis of all heresies” – is the idea that the meaning of a word becomes ever more defined as you actually ‘do’ the action denoted. For example,”Faith” becomes known, not by defining it beforehand, but by “living it”. What these ‘philosophers do not seem to notice is that, using this method, you never actually know what ‘it’ is. That is why the pre-1960 popes strenuously opposed this corrosive philosophy, enforced the “Oath Against Modernism” (you can google it) and why Mgr Lefebvre stated, “You do not need an heretical pope. A Modernist pope will do the same work”.
I regret to say that this Modernist thinking was dominant throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s within the Catholic Church (precisely because its proponents succeeded in getting the upper hand during the Council). One of the few bastions of Scholastic thinking was the SSPX seminaries and schools.
Immediately after Vatican II, the oath against Modernism was quietly dropped.
Just as the 2500-year-old Hippocratic Oath was dropped, at about the same time, when doctors began committing abortions.
I hope this will help newcomers to the controversy to realise that there are much more fundamental questions at stake than whether or not the Mass is to be in Latin.