Sigh…
I am going to keep the combox on moderation.
A site HERE is reporting rumor that…
I have been informed of an upcoming clandestine meeting of clerics who were recently expelled from the FSSPX. These priests were invited to leave the Society after the intrigue and disobedience surrounding their opposition to the Superior General of the FSSPX and his cautious willingness to engage the Roman authorities regarding the doctrinal issues which have kept — and continue to keep — the Society in a canonically irregular state within the Catholic Church. They denounced Superior General, Bishop Bernard Fellay, as a traitor to the memory and mission of the Society’s founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, for +Fellay’s mere willingness to communicate with the Holy Father and officials in the Roman Curia after the Supreme Pontiff liberated the traditional Mass and “lifted” Pope John Paul II’s 1988 excommunications of the Society’s bishops.
The report suggests that this meeting is to be held in two weeks’ time at Vienna in Virginia, being hosted by Fr. Ronald Ringrose. Bishop Richard Williamson, a former member of the FSSPX, will be in attendance. The purpose of the secret conclave is to reorganise amongst themselves what they see as being the “true” Society of St. Pius X, and, most distressingly, to consecrate a new bishop for their new hardline sect. It is rumoured that Fr. Joseph Pfeiffer is to be chosen a bishop at this time.
If it is true, hasta la vista, baby.
Did I mention, “rumor”?
Again, the combox is on moderation.
UPDATE 13 Jan 18:25 GMT
There is in circulation a PDF from a group within the SSPX who are resisting the Society’s work with Rome. Click HERE for the pdf of a Dec 2012 newsletter, which I put on my server, lest it go away.
Highlight:
THE RESISTANCE IS ORGANIZING Our retreat was also an excellent occasion to discuss about the kind of organization the Resistance needs in the near future. Bishop Williamson agreed of being the “moral authority” for the Resistance, thus accepting to give us doctrinal guidance and the administration of the sacraments of Confirmation and Holy Orders. A moral authority means that he guides more by example and counsel, rather than by command. Beneath his moral authority, the Resistance will continue to work with its different kinds of organizations: Fr. Pfeiffer’s group, the two Religious Communities in Brazil (The Benedictines of Santa Cruz and the Manossians), and the different independent churches and chapels (like St Athanasius’, in Vienna, VA). In other words, we established a kind of “federation” rather than a centralized organization.
Maybe in the future another kind of organization more structured will be needed, but it was agreed that this kind of structure is the best suited for the actual circumstances. This good news, we hope, will also comfort all the faithful resisting all around the world the conciliar church and the “operation suicide” of the neo-SSPX. We all are happy to see Bishop Williamson “back to work” when the Resistance is most needed of a leadership coming from a true successor of the Apostles.
You decide.
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Father, I just want to say that I think it was wise of you to post this and to do so in the manner that you did. Let’s all pray for everyone involved, that God’s will be done, and that all hearts will be open to His will above all else.
[Let’s pray that the division with the SSPX will soon be brought to an end.]
Catholic Protestants are more annoying than Protestant Protestants. Benedict XVI is the pope of Christian unity!
[Indeed he is.]
I wish that we could be one as our Lord desired.
I remain at a loss how one can claim to be in union with the Holy Father but remain in defiance of his authority and will.
Will someone from the Thuc line be co-consecrating? I’m reminded of the line ” history repeats itself, first as a tragedy, then as a farce”
I hope these rumours are untrue. :( While I am cautiously optimistic that the SSPX under Fellay will regularize in the foreseeable future, I am less hopeful that a group under Williamson’s direction would, or could. I can only imagine them walking a dangerous path.
God’s will be done.
Coincidentally, or maybe not, a dear friend of mine and I are praying a Novena to Our Lady, Help of Christians from “Mary, My Hope” (a GEM of an old book) starting tomorrow. Father, if you think it’s appropriate, I’m forthwith sharing; it’s certainly seems applicable to the nth in this situation…
To Our Lady, Help of Christians
Immaculate Virgin, Mother of God and Our Mother Mary, you see the attacks that are everywhere made by the devil and the world upon the Catholic Faith, in which, by God’s grace, we intend to live and die, in order that we may attain to eternal glory.
O Help of Christians, renew your former victories and save your children. They entrust to you their firm purpose never to enroll themselves in societies hostile to our holy religion.
You who are all holy, present to your divine Son our good resolutions, and obtain for us the grace we need to be unshaken in their observance even to the end of life.
Console the visible Head of the Church, sustain the Catholic bishops, protect the clergy and people who proclaim you Queen.
By the power of your intercession hasten the day when all nations shall be gathered at the feet of the Divine Shepherd. Amen.
Mary, Help of Christians, pray for us!
(500 days)
Prayer and prayer for this situation.
It’s worth remembering that if (please God when) the SSPX are integrated fully into the Church, it’s highly likely that some of their more hard hearted members will break away into a further group. God is, however, in control. Please, lord, who had blessed us with the Pontificate of Benedict XVI, the Pope of Christian unity, please soften the hearts of the members of the Society of Pius the tenth, that they may submit to your holy will and become a full and vital part of your Holy Church, and help bring about the salvation of souls. And that all members of your Holy Church will welcome their brothers and sisters in Christ with all charity.
Looks like another popular blog which posted on this has removed their post. Perhaps there is hope it can be averted?
Looks like the post on the other site is back up…
Here’s why I’m skeptical that the SSPX will ever make the right decision. All the current SSPXers who would like to enjoy full communion with Rome could, you know, *leave the SSPX* (for the FSSP, or the ICRSS, or whatever). I assume there are some SSPXers who have done that (since 1988, I mean). But those who aren’t doing that don’t want Rome, or at least they don’t want “modernist Rome,” with its, you know, Catholicism.
I’m an SSPXer and I expect that, one day (who knows when) the SSPX will return to full Communion with Rome. I look forward to the day when the superiors of the Society decide that the time is right for that to happen.
I live in a country where the bishops continue to ignore Summorum Pontificum; where suppressing the scandal of gay Masses means moving them to a different Church in a better area and increasing the number of blasphemous Masses; where Catholic doctrine is not only neglected but replaced by false doctrine and where the great and the good of the Catholic establishment are, for the most part, unreformed Marxists, committed to a radical socialist agenda, who treat the Pope with utter contempt when they can’t ignore him entirely.
I would no more leave the SSPX for that than I would convert to Mohammedanism.
I am heartened to see the green shoots of hope reappearing around the Catholic world, but I owe a debt of obligation and of gratitude to the priests of the SSPX for preserving Catholic Tradition for me and for others like me.
I understand that, without Abp Lefebvre, it is very likely that I would be in the extremely fortunate position of being able to assist at the Traditional Latin Mass or to receive the sacraments in their proper form……I also believe that the Holy Father’s gracious agreement to free the Traditional Mass, so that all Catholic priests may celebrate it (despite the bishops in my country’s deliberate disobedience) will leaven and regenerate the Faith.
I see Bp Williamson as an analogue of Hans Kung, albeit on the opposite side of the political spectrum. Their aims are the same; their tactics are the same – both wish to deprive the Church of the Faith and both will meet the same end, in due course.
The time will come when the SSPX returns to Rome – we just need to be patient for a bit longer.
Shakespeare was right.
“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their lives is bound in shallows and in miseries”.
That high tide has passed for the SSPX, unfortunately. The Holy Father rescinded the excommunications, issued “Summorum Pontificum” and reached out to engage SSPX in dialogue but the procrastination continues. All that awaits SSPX from here on out is further schism and splintering. The long and winding road to irrelevancy, kookiness and ever wilder conspiracy theories will be sad to behold but inevitable, alas. We will have “True SSPX”, “Reformed SSPX”, “The Society of St. Marcel Lefebvre”, “Neo-SSPX” and many more. This is simply sedevacantism by any other name. Although they pay lip service to the Pope, by their actions, they behave as if he doesn’t exist.
Ahhhh well, life goes on……….with or without those “more Catholic than the Pope”.
Clever logic: “We are not against the SSPX as an institution, but we are resisting those who are setting a neo-SSPX with a new doctrine…” which sounds alot like “We are not against new Rome as an institution, but we are resisting those who are led by what the Council said”, all the while splintering, separating, and refusing obedience (to God) as promised to and through the organization that they are ‘resisting’.
And also declaring: “Let us make clear that our main enemy is first of all the conciliar church.” That would be the Church that Jesus founded, and the Church that validly called the Second Vatican Council, right? It seems that this new protestant group is defining that the gates of hell have prevailed against the Church, no?
This update post sounds something out of “The life of Brian”… When does the colonel step in to finally put an end to this silly sketch?
It’s interesting to see that the phrase “the memory and mission of the Society’s founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre” is taking on the same properties as ‘The spirit of Vatican II’, i.e., is becoming a support for whatever the speaker decides it should mean, regardless of whether said authority would even have contemplated such an act.
For the rest, at least they seem to have saved us from the irony that would have ensued had they came up with an FSSPII, with P II referring to ‘Peter II’. Perhaps Williamson, upon reflection, didn’t like taking a new name after all…
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“The Resistance” with a capital “R”. Good name for a group whose primary activity is destroying bridges…..
Inigo,
Wait. Is this the People’s Front of St. Pius, the St. Pius People’s Front, the St. Pius Popular People’s Front, the Campaign for a Free Church, or the Popular Front of St. Pius?
And what has the Church ever done for us? I mean . . . .
Y2Y gets there slightly ahead of me. It’s always amused and irritated me in equal measure the way that traditionalists have appropriated the adjective tradition and turned it into both a proper nound and a verb by talking about “Tradition” in the sense that they say they practice Tradition (not Catholicism, but Tradition).
How ironic, in a nuns on the bus kinda way, that the traditionalists have “moved beyond Tradition” and are now practicing “Resistance”. Now I would have thought that they’d have learned from the Borg that Resistance is futile, but seeing as they are harping back to the heady, hippy days of the 60’s and 70’s of the hermeneutic of resistance and protest I just have to wonder how long it will take for them to sit round with their guitars and tambourines during mass and sing Kumbaya M’Lord in the hypomixolidian mode?
I look forward to the formation of the Society of St Pius the Asymptotically Approaching Zero of the Strictest of Strict Observance.
Hi Fr Z.
Just to clarify: the PDF you posted in the update is from the same group as mentioned in the initial rumor, and the leaders of the group are definitely OUT of the SSPX at this point, although they try to maintain contact with those who are still members (i.e. priests) in an attempt to get them to leave to join them, as they also try to maintain contact with some the faithful who go to the chapels of the SSPX. This group of priests is not “within” the SSPX any longer: that became very clear in the last half of 2012. Some were expelled and some chose to leave. This group has also found allies amongst priests and groups who were never members of the SSPX but collaborated to a greater or lesser degree. Needless to say that collaboration is fading as the disagreement takes a more clear shape about the principles of what should be the proper attitude toward Rome.
And since we are engaging in spreading rumors, the last seemingly credible source that I heard would place this presumed episcopal consecration by +Williamson towards the end of this year 2013.
[Thanks for adding that.]
Archbishop Lefebvre himself kept contacts with Rome. He did not will separation from Rome, believing it was the Rome which separated itself from its past – and with Vatican II that did seem, in some important things, to be true. Rome has met the SSPX conditions for talks, and Bp Williamson and his followers never balked at those conditions. Now they are objecting to the fact that there have been – and will continue to be – talks, that some kind of sell-out has occurred or is about to occur. The main stumbling block to canonical regularisation is, I suspect, the uncertainty of what would happen to the society once regularisation occurred. Would it be bound to silence on the questionable parts of Vatican II (and prelates of unimpeachable integrity have publicly stated that there are questionable parts)? I hope the rumor mill surrounding Bp Williamson has got it wrong, but Williamson comes across as so headstrong and cocksure he’s the “one with the gold” that I wouldn’t be surprised if it were all true. I’ll say a decade of the rosary for all priests of the SSPX and Bp Williamson, too, that cool heads and God’s will prevail.
“I live in a country where the bishops continue to ignore Summorum Pontificum… …
…who treat the Pope with utter contempt when they can’t ignore him entirely.”
For all that I understand your angst, Florian, I have to say that I don’t believe I’ve heard of even one country which DIDN’T have most of these problems. Never forget that Holy Mother Church has the survived the idiocy and rubbish of “human invention” many times before. Each time, we keep finding the way back, even with bishops who ..aren’t as stern in discipline amongst their clergy as we’d wish.
Christ gave us one head, St Peter, who has been succeeded by one bishop, that of Rome. If our own bishop isn’t in full, regularized, communion with him, we begin to place our souls at risk, no matter how much we may think we know of Catholic faith.
I’d also comment that by failing to be in full communion with the rest of the Church, the overall Church loses some of its ability to recuperate from madness. If only a very few of us ever speak up with traditional ideas in mind, ..our priests, pastors, and bishops have a tougher time making the case in favor of more traditional practice.
Those who vote with their feet make the rules in many, many cases. If you don’t show up, your pastor and bishop may think you don’t care so much.