Some time ago, I wrote HERE:
If there is a malaise in the Church today, if there is an interior decay (and there is), then [as Pope Francis says] we should look to peripheries for that which can help to revitalize our identity, get us strong and healthy again. We need what the periphery has to offer.
Traditional Catholics whose “legitimate aspirations” have been drawn to the traditional forms of our sacred liturgical worship, and who stick closely to traditional expressions of doctrine, are a periphery. They have even been made into a periphery by the Church’s own appointed pastors.
It’s time to start listening to this periphery.
I drive at this point in some other posts as well.
I read at One Peter Five an interview of Bp. Athanasius Schneider with the Spanish-Language website, Adelante La Fe (Advance the Faith). In the interview we find this:
Adelante la Fe: Can Your Excellence give some words of encouragement to those priests who, for being faithful to Church Tradition, are isolated and pushed into the background in their dioceses and not given temples where they can officiate Holy Mass in the Extraordinary Form, as well as to those faithful who are deprived of Traditional Holy Mass?
Mons. Schneider: I would like to say to these priests, seminarians, young people and families: “It is an honor and a privilege to be faithful to the Divine truth and to the spiritual and liturgical traditions of our forefathers and of the saints and being therefore marginalized by those who currently occupy administrative power in the Church. This your fidelity and courage constitute the real power in the Church. You are the real ecclesiastical periphery, which with God’s power renews the Church. Living the true tradition of dogma, liturgy and holiness is a manifestation of the democracy of the Saints, because tradition is the democracy of the Saints. With Saint Athanasius I would like to tell you these words: Those in the Church who oppose, humiliate and marginalize you, have occupied the churches, while during this time you are outside; it is a fact that they have the premises – but you have the Apostolic Faith. They claim that they represent the Church, but in reality, they are the ones who are expelling themselves from it and going astray (cf. Letter to his flock)”.
Beautifully expressed.
He is right.
Be the Maquis!
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