What Does The Prayer Really Say?
W D T P R S

On the question of whether the SSPX is schismatic or not (some say yes – that would be the late Pope) I found this on the SSPX website. It concerns whether or not people who follow the priests of the SSPX can also attend Masses under the "indult", that is, with the approval of the Catholic Church’s diocesan bishops. I find this really interesting. Emphasis and comments are mine.

UPDATE: See the useful comment below by "Somerset ‘76" which has a possible explanation of what follows.

 

CAN WE ATTEND THEIR [THEIR] MASSES?

If we have to agree to the doctrinal and juridical [This might mean that the Pope has no right/power/authority to make changes to the Mass. This might otherwise mean also that you don’t fulfill your obligation by attending the Novus Ordo.] value of the Novus Ordo Missae, then NO, for we cannot do evil that good may ensue [So, attending a Novus Ordo Mass is "evil"?].

This condition may not be presented explicitly, but by implication, such as:

• By a priest who celebrates the Novus Ordo Missae on other days of the week or at other times [Apparently a priest has to be ordained not just for people but for a book. Talk about being "people of the book", huh?],

• using Hosts consecrated at a Novus Ordo Missae [This would mean that those hosts would not be validly consecrated because they were consecrated at a Novus Ordo Mass?],

• or with communion in the hand [If the hosts are not consecrated validly anyway, what difference would it make? Otherwise, if they are validly consecrated do they stop being Jesus Truly Present if they touch a hand? I do not quibble in the least about the lack of reverence for that reality, however.];

• new lectionaries, Mass facing the people, etc., [So, if Pope Benedict celebrated the "Tridentine" Mass at the High Altar of St. Peter’s Basilica, the SSPXers could not attend?]

• by a priest who was ordained in the New Rite, [Does that mean that I am not validly ordained as far as they are concerned?]

• by sermons that are modernist in inspiration (much to be feared if the celebrant habitually says the Novus Ordo Missae); or [This is strange. "modernist in inspiration" ... how to decide? I guess this is like the phrase of the Supreme Court justice who knew pornography when he saw it. "I can’t define modernist in inspiration but I know it when I hear it."]

• by offering only the revised forms of the other sacraments, e.g., penance. [Okay… so if I absolve a penitent … ironic … since SSPX priests DON’T HAVE FACULTIES TO ABSOLVE penitents unless they are DYING - so if I absolve a penitent in using the NEW form of absolution that means that the MASS I say is defective?]

This brings up the whole context of the Indult Mass. It is:

• A ploy [MWUHA-HA HAAAAHHA… Boy! are we cunning.] to keep people away from the Society of Saint Pius X (for many Bishops allow it only where there is a Society of Saint Pius X Mass center),

• intended only for those who feel attached to the traditional Latin Mass [If it is so great in itself isn’t that enough of a reason?] but nevertheless accept the doctrinal rectitude and juridical right of the Novus Ordo Missae, Vatican II, and all official orientations corresponding to these. [So, when Pope Benedict derestricts the older form of Mass, does it sound like that move is going to be enough?]

Therefore, attending it because of the priest’s words or fellow Mass-goers’ pressure, or because of the need to pander to the local Bishop just to have it, [Heaven forbid anyone should exercise any charitable DIPLOMACY rather than simply issue demands to a successor of the apostles or to the alter Christus, but oh.. that’s right… we might not really be ordained properly. Why show us respect?] inevitably pushes one to keep quiet on “divisive issues” and, distance oneself from those who do not keep quiet i.e., it pushes one to join the ranks of those who are destroying the church. [MWUHA-HA HAAAAHHA… Boy! are we cunning.] This one cannot do.

The Indult Mass, therefore, is not for traditional Catholics.

I think we ought to apply the duck argument.

The text of the Pope’s annual address to members of the Curia is out, in Italian. I won’t do a translation, but I can let you know what is going on for the most part.

The Pope looks at the year through the lens of his travels, assigning to each a kind of "theme" (Italian tema). He starts with a general "theme" correlating the theme of "God" with "peace" taking as a starting point the angels greeting to the shepherds in Luke 2:14. "This correlation of the theme "God" with the theme "peace" was the determinative dimension of the four Apostolic Journeys this year: I would like to bring these back to mind at this time."

For his pastoral visit to Poland, he recalled the person of John Paul II and his self-giving for the Church through Mary. He addressed human weakness and examined the Apostle Peter, observing that the Petrine ministry is a unifying force of the faith and a visible sign of unity. He mentioned also the trip to Auschwitz and the appearance of a rainbow, sign of God’s fidelity to us.

For his trip to Valencia, Spain, the theme is "matrimony and family". He had very strong words about couples cohabiting without marriage and about same-sex unions and changes to law. Calling to mind the numerous families with children who turned out for the visit, he mentioned how Europe which seems not to want children seems to be "tired". The Pope goes into the reasons why people don’t seem to want children. He then goes after the problem of laws about couples who are not married especially focusing on the "relativization of the sexes". About same-sex couples:

"With this there is a tacit confirmation of those pernicious theories that eliminate all relevance of masculinity or femininity from the human person, as if one were dealing with a purely biological fact; theories according to which man – namely his intellect and will – would decide autonomously what he was or was not. There is in this a devaluation of corporeality from which it follows that man, wanting to emancipate himself from his body – from the ‘biological sphere’ – ends up destroying himself. If one says that the Church ought not insert herself into these matters, we can only respond: Perhaps man doesn’t interest us? Believers, in virtue of the great culture of their faith, maybe do not have the right to state a point of view in all this? Isn’t it, rather, their – our – duty to raise our voice to defend man, that creature who, precisely in our inseparable unity of body and soul, is the image of God? The trip to Valencia became for me a journey in search of what it means to be a human being.

For his trip to Bavaria, the Pope explores the theme of God precisely as "Kingdom of God" and God as the subject of that Kingdom, that is, that God reigns. Connected to this he explores the themes of priesthood and of dialogue. About the priesthood he returns to the Old Testament point that the Levites did not inherit land as their heredity in the promised land. Theirs was the lot of serving God and therefore living from the offerings of the people. He quotes 1 Tim 6:11 that the priest is the "man of God" and also Ps 16 (15):5 that God is "my part", "my inheritance". This theocentric view of priesthood avoids reducing the priest to a functionary. From their he talks about the value of celibacy, again citing Ps 16.

The Pope closely connected the theme of dialogue which he associated with his Bavarian trip and to the visit to Turkey.  About dialogue he returns to what he said in his now famous and pivotal Regensburg Address, bringing back to the fore that over arching theme of faith and reason. He critiques, again, "secularized" reason as not capable of entering into dialogue with religion. He repeats his "respect" for Islam as well as that it is necessary for Islamists to learn what they can from the good things gained from the Enlightenment, as the Church has tried to do.

He also speaks of the visit with Bartholomew, from who he says he received a letter "a few days ago" ("giorni fa"). 

Finally he wraps everything together with a return to the angels greeting to the shepherds in Luke as well as John 14:27: "I leave you peace, my peace I give you", the source of the liturgical formula "Peace be with you".  This he connects to the need to open our hearts to God (Greek eudokia). 

Over at Rorate, we have a report of the SSPX bishop Bernard Fellay making a speech in Argentina. You can get more of the speech at Rorate but here is something that interested me (emphasis mine).

"...it seems like that in this text, motu proprio, there isn’t only the Mass, there’s something else, there’s another thing, and this other thing is for the Society of Saint Pius X. But, I don’t know what. I ask myself if it’s the matter of the excommunications, if it’s the question of the juridical structure. I don’t know. They haven’t told me ! (laughter) and, then… (sic) but what I see is that, it’s like an expectation by Rome that, if they give us the Mass, they think that we are going to change and end the battle. And that, you can be certain, it’s not true. Not for anything!"

The battle for what?

There is a type of person who is happy only when he is unhappy. Thus, they create conflict nearly compulsively. Fellay has to deal with a lot of people like that. Therefore, his quip I quoted might just be a bit of a pep talk for the crowd, sure to please that sort of person.

On the other hand, there are going be other issues to fight through. I have contended for a long time that many in the SSPX perceive issues like that of religious liberty and the opening of the Church to the "modern world" (cf. Gaudium et spes) as being of primary importance. Indeed, the Pope can do things like derestrict the older form of Mass with the flick of a finger. He can create juridical structures for "schismatics" or various Catholic "traditionalists" with the stroke of a pen. Much more difficult is a reverse march away from documents of the Second Vatican Council. That’s is exactly what some will demand.

Here is the Collect for today’s Mass on 22 December.  The Roman Station today is the Basilica of the Twelve Apostles.

COLLECT:
Deus, qui, hominem delapsum in mortem conspiciens,
Unigeniti tui adventu redimere voluisti,
praesta, quaesumus,
ut, qui humili eius incarnationem devotione fatentur,
ipsius etiam Redemptoris consortia mereantur.

Consortium is a compound of the preposition cvm and sors, which has to do with "lot", as in casting "lots" for determining something by chance. Thus it comes to mean "community of goods" and therefore "fellowship, participation, society", according to the mighty Lewis & Short. If we look in Blaise/Dumas we find plural consortia having a meaning of "union" almost as if it were conjugal union.

LITERAL VERSION:
O God, who, gazing upon him fallen into death,
desired to redeem man in the advent of Your Only Begotten,
grant, we beseech You,
that, those who profess His incarnation in humble devotion,
may merit participation in Him also as Redeemer.

Once again we are seeing the "janus"-like backward-forward perspectives, looking back to the First Coming even as we look forward to the Second. There is a development of thought from the fall, to death, to the Nativity, to humility, to ultimate redemption.

I have been catching up on my reading after my travels across the Pond and down to Florida.  I found this wonderful piece by the ass. editor of The Wall Street Journal.  It is about how awful blogs are.  Here are some excerpts with my emphasis:

...

The ascendancy of Internet technology did bring with it innovations. Information is more conveniently disseminated, and there’s more of it, because anybody can chip in. There’s more "choice"—and in a sense, more democracy. Folks on the WWW, conservatives especially, boast about how the alternative media corrodes the "MSM," for mainstream media, a term redolent with unfairness and elitism.

The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.

More success is met in purveying opinion and comment. Some critics reproach the blogs for the coarsening and increasing volatility of political life. Blogs, they say, tend to disinhibit. Maybe so. But politics weren’t much rarefied when Andrew Jackson was president, either. The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.

Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . . .

The blogs must be timely if they are to influence politics. This element—here’s my opinion—is necessarily modified and partly determined by the right now. Instant response, with not even a day of delay, impairs rigor. It is also a coagulant for orthodoxies. We rarely encounter sustained or systematic blog thought—instead, panics and manias; endless rehearsings of arguments put forward elsewhere; and a tendency to substitute ideology for cognition. The participatory Internet, in combination with the hyperlink, which allows sites to interrelate, appears to encourage mobs and mob behavior.

This cross-referential and interactive arrangement, in theory, should allow for some resolution to divisive issues, with the market sorting out the vagaries of individual analysis. Not in practice. The Internet is very good at connecting and isolating people who are in agreement, not so good at engaging those who aren’t. The petty interpolitical feuding mainly points out that someone is a liar or an idiot or both.

...

Leftward fatuities too are easily found: The fatuity matters more than the politics. If the blogs have enthusiastically endorsed Joseph Conrad’s judgment of newspapering—"written by fools to be read by imbeciles"—they have also demonstrated a remarkable ecumenicalism in filling out that same role themselves.

Nobody wants to be an imbecile. Part of it, I think, is that everyone likes shows and entertainments. Mobs are exciting. People also like validation of what they already believe; the Internet, like all free markets, has a way of gratifying the mediocrity of the masses. ...

Of course, once a technosocial force like the blog is loosed on the world, it does not go away because some find it undesirable. So grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But democracy does not work well, so to speak, without checks and balances. And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we’ve allowed decay to pass for progress.

Mr. Rago is an assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal.

Is the SSPX in schism?

A commentor in another thread on this blog wrote:

The Holy See has never said that the SSPX is in schism. Therefore, to say that they are strikes me as somewhat rash. Why would one make such a judgment?

I wonder.

In considering this question, we might first take a look at the following.   Here are some excerpts from 1988 Motu Proprio of John Paul II entitled Ecclesia Dei adflicta. (me emphasis)

3. In itself, this act was one of disobedience to the Roman Pontiff in a very grave matter and of supreme importance for the unity of the Church, such as is the ordination of bishops whereby the apostolic succession is sacramentally perpetuated. Hence such disobedience—which implies in practice the rejection of the Roman primacy—constitutes a schismatic act [3 – Cf. Code of Canon Law, can. 751.]. In performing such an act, notwithstanding the formal canonical warning sent to them by the Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops on 17 June last, Mons. Lefebvre and the priests Bernard Fellay, Bernard Tisser de Mallerais, Richard Williamson, and Alfonso de Galarreta, have incurred the grave penalty of excommunication envisaged by ecclesiastical law.

Okay.  The Roman Pontiff, whose opinion is the one that counts, thinks that it was a schismatic act and that they incurred excommunication.

4. The root of this schismatic act can be discerned in an incomplete and contradictory notion of Tradition. ....

There’s the "s" word again. 

5. Faced with the situation that has arisen, I deem it my duty to inform all the Catholic faithful of some aspects which this sad event has highlighted. ...

c) In the present circumstances I wish especially to make an appeal both solemn and heartfelt, paternal and fraternal, to all those who until now have been linked in various ways to the movement of Archbishop Lefebvre, that they may fulfill the grave duty of remaining united to the Vicar of Christ in the unity of the Catholic Church, and of ceasing their support in any way for that movement. Everyone should be aware that formal adherence to the schism is a grave offense against God and carries the penalty of excommunication decreed by the Church’s law [8 – Cf. Code of Canon Law, can. 1364].

And there it is again!

Questions can be asked about what constitutes "adherence to schism".

It seems to me that the situation of their clerics is pretty clear.   If a cleric were to "stick with" ("adhere") the schismatic excommunicated bishops after the schismatic act, that seems like "adherence".  They would be sticking with them by receiving ordination from them, obeying commands from them, publically identifying themselves with them, receiving payment from them for their work, etc.

The case of lay people is far far more difficult.  Would attending an SSPX chapel be enough for "adherence"?  If so how many times?   Would public vocal declarations be enough?  Would it require a written statement sent to the parish of baptism for notation in the register?  Would giving money to them be enough?  If so, how much?  Would receiving Communion or other sacraments?  If so, how many times? 

So, where the case of clerics is far clearer, the case of lay people is not clear at all.

We are having freezing rain at The Sabine Farm.  I am guessing that tommorow morning should be absolutely gorgeous.