While texting with a priest friend recently an idea came up.
Picture if you will…
SSPX Superior Fr. Davide Pagliarani going to the Sant’Anna gate of the Vatican every day asking that Pope Leo grant him an audience.
Rain or shine, there’s Fr. Davide, with an increasing number of people, every day.
They say the Rosary. They sing litanies. They sing the Pro Pontifice chants.
Soon it is live streamed on the interwebs.
Each day larger and larger crowds join in. Dozens. Hundreds. Thousands.
They keep it up until …
Leo, his arms wide . . . .
What is sad is that it would ever have to come to that.
I pray for Leo. I pray for Christ’s church.
It would take an incredible amount of humility on Fr. Pagliarani’s part. In terms of a prudential judgment would he and the council allow for anything that would suggest crawling to a “modernist post-conciliar church”? Would it make a large swath of their laity feel betrayed?
When humility is equated with cowardice by various factions (and this is not just the Society, but just life in general), it’s hard to make a good judgement call.
+Fellay when the walls fell.
@WVC – I had the exact same thought!
Juliet on the balcony?
Great suggestion but the time for that is past. Maybe 3 months ago that would’ve worked but now, no doubt they’d keep him out there until well after July 1st. If I recall they reached out many times for an audience with Leo. I hope and pray that Fr. P is being guided by the Holy Spirit in all his actions
I think this makes sense. In fact, it seems to be the obvious choice of action. I’d throw in some fasting, too.
SSPX holds that Leo is Pope. Christ taught us to be persistent prayer. Put the two together! Whether the prayers are answered as desired all those prayers won’t be for nothing!
The scenario would be more accurate if Pagliarani arranged for the pope and himself to be dropped in contested Nigeria.
In a crucible like that, perhaps they could finally understand each other’s language and together confront the Beast (at Tanagra).
“The Jesuits, their eyes uncovered!”
Though Vir Qui Timet Dominum has the best one already.
And I fear this might equally well end with “There. Are. FOUR! Lights!”
He keeps it up until….the Vatican has police remove him as the pope still refuses to engage with him.
From your lips to God’s ears. I like this idea because (1) it sounds like a very Catholic thing to do and (2) it shifts the framework from obedience to pronouncements from the Vatican to obedience to Christ’s words. Or, as Mary said to the servants at the wedding feast at Cana: “Do whatever He tells you.” The only winning move for the SSPX is to not play their game.
Fr Pagliarani needs to drop the quest for a “minimal” set of beliefs he can sign up to. By all means challenge Peter to his face, but trying to become a cafeteria Catholic with lace is a pointless and doomed enterprise. At some point you have to either submit to the Roman Pontiff or decide you are out of communion.
@haydn seeker
“either submit to the Roman Pontiff or decide you are out of communion”
Isn’t this position itself merely being a cafeteria Catholic with a strong taste for papal supremacy? Folks seem to wave away all manners of liturgical malarkey, doctrinal confusion, endorsed depravity, attacks on Tradition, and abuse of power so long as they focus on “submission to the Pope” as being the only necessary thing for Catholics. This is just cafeteria Catholicism of a different stripe.
The pope should grant him an audience while wearing the full regalia (including tiara).
That’d solve it, I reckon.
haydn seeker, the Church’s job is to prescribe a “minimal” set of beliefs we can sign up to and agree to. (ie. Council of Nicea).
PatriotPoohBear is not incorrect that Fr. Pagliarani would be displaying a great amount of humility, perhaps with great personal difficulty, but the media optics of such an prayerful and open-hearted outcry should be in the favor of those outside the gates (i.e. the peripheries).
This proposal, of sorts, between Fr. Z and his priest friend, cuts me most deeply. It is a tremendous cry of the son, the priest, to the Papa, the Holy Father, begging for a path of true, clear fidelity, where the ordained priest does not have to combat and navigate sincere moral injury every where he turns in his priestly ministry vis-à-vis his Ordinary and the Holy See.
[“where the ordained priest does not have to combat and navigate sincere moral injury every where he turns in his priestly ministry vis-à-vis his Ordinary and the Holy See”]
Doing such requires hope, even a fool’s hope.
The reason you don’t see a common place of individuals taking the stance of the widow before the unjust judge is that there is a lack of hope that these unjust judges will do the right thing for the wrong reasons.
There are many people, myself included, who could go and kneel outside of the cathedrals of the closest bishop within driving distance and pray and beg and plead that the SSPX might be accepted for the Catholics they are.
That it doesn’t happen is because people don’t have hope that they will be heard.
And that lack of hope is an indicator of how cold charity has run and how sick the modern Church actually is.
@Lurker 59
To support your position, I don’t have any hope that my bishop will allow the confirmation of my younger children in the traditional form, and even if we all kneeled outside his chancery every day I have no hope that he would stop forcing us to cancel one Mass a month or allow those TLM communities banished to school gymnasiums to return to the parish building. Given his actions and his words, I have no reason to believe anything short of an order from Rome would make him change his course, and he’s actually a better bishop than what the good folks in Charlotte are suffering under.
I say, without exaggeration, that I do not feel that my bishop or that the majority of bishops actually care about the spiritual lives of traditionalist families or about the Tradition of the Church at all. I’m convinced that a majority of them behave as if they had no real belief in the entire concept of sacramental grace. Illegal aliens, climate change, and “accompanying” LGBTQ+ activists, on the other hand . . . . about these things enough effort can never be exerted.
My hope would be after such prayer that he would be open to cooperation with divine grace so that “the Holy Spirit [would] enlighten those responsible for the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X so that they may reconsider the extremely grave decision they have taken.”
I suspect that most of this could be resolved in an afternoon if, instead of asking for an audience, Pagliarani asked to concelebrate a Novus Ordo Mass with Leo. It would clear the air of the sanctimony that oozes from the SSPX and affirm that, while they find it distasteful, they acknowledge that the NO serves exactly the same food as the TLM and it has the same amount of grace provided to those attending as well as dismissing any doubts about post-concilliar order and sacraments. After all the “i”s are dotted and “t”s crossed Leo could preside at a TLM offered by an SSPX bishop or priest. (I rather suspect the SSPX would disown Pagliarani since they probably couldn’t get away with burning him.) On a side note, while I expect the consecrations will pass with a bland statement affirming the excommunication from the Vatican, in a strange way, the SSPX might appreciate some theatrics to it with a ritual similar to Richard Burton excommunicating a nobleman in “Beckett.” (Sorry I couldn’t come up with a play on the Tanagra theme.)
Okay, that comment by TheCavalier just made my day.
That and any comment that starts with the simplistic “I suspect that most of this could be resolved in an afternoon if…” Thanks for the laughs.
The dominion has not surrendered in war in 2000 years (as they see their defeat coming).
@Senor Quixana
With respect, your post shows a fundamental lack of understanding. The SSPX would never in a million years desire to celebrate a novus ordo Mass in any way, shape or form.
They do accept it is a valid liturgy – as the Church authorities promulgated it – but they see it for what it is: a deliberate watering down of the Mass to produce a “lowest common denominator” liturgy, in order to facilitate the meaningless ecumenical services which the Church puts so much stock into today.
The purpose of *the* Mass (TLM) is to broadcast Catholic doctrine. The purpose of the novus ordo is to be like the protestants. But I do not want to be like the protestants and in my opinion the SSPX are correct to warn people not to attend the novus ordo. Why? Because “Lex orandi, Lex credendi” as I learned from Father Z years ago now.
In my opinion, this misunderstanding also typifies the Vatican – I think its full of people who fundamentally do not understand the SSPX, who couldn’t be less interested and who prefer to busy themselves pandering to protestants and talking nonsense about “our common faith”.
The SSPX will ultimately be proven correct on my opinion, though it could take decades or centuries yet. I go to an SSPX Chapel (best decision I ever made) and our priest once said during a sermon that he doesn’t think he or any of the current congregation will likely live to see this resolved. And so we wait.
Meantime, the Church’s authority is an absolute joke and not worthy of being taken seriously. I wish it was, but it isnt. Its just a tool of oppression.
Compare the actions of the Chinese Government, Sarah Mullaly, and the Catholic Bishop photographed “playing a role” during an Anglican consecration, with those of the SSPX and explain how anyone of sound mind could take this seriously?
My daughter and my niece both recently made their First Communion, on two consecutive Saturdays. My daughters was at the SSPX, my niece’s at her local parish.
SSPX
-Sung Mass
-Solid sermon regarding the Eucharist
– Communion in the manner of Catholics
-May procession with a Stature of Our Lady into the Church grounds, followed by a May crowning of Our Lady.
-Then a lovely BBQ in the Church grounds.
Local Parish
-Genuinely awful novus ordo, featuring “1970s protestant bangers” as hymns
-Priests stand up comedy routine – beginning with shouting into his mic to give everyone a fright – as he paced up and down the central aisle.
-Adults then watch Priest engage with “Our wonderful young people” (children)
– Children invited up on “stage” (actual quote) to receive Communion in the manner of Protestants
-More stand up comedy, concentrating on the elderly assistant priests apparent love of communion cake
– “Shine, Jesus, Shine” as the recessional hymn, with the elderly assistant struggling to stop himself openly dancing
The Novus Ordo was a genuinely crummy service and I am so glad my wider family got to experience the two services in close order as even they could not deny which was the superior and which was trash.
That it was mainly non-Church goers in attendance at the Novus Ordo was painfully obvious. Its just a “family event” not a religious matter.
I played a game with my two eldest kids (8 and 10) at the novus ordo. I said, “see what differences you can spot from our Church and we can discuss later”.
They came up with:
– very noisy inside the Church
– everyone was talking before it, no one was praying
– no-one genuflected
– everyone who spoke during it (priest and organist) concentrated on making jokes
– no focus on God (i.e. no silence, no facing tabernacle, no acknowledging His presence), everything took place between the priest and congregation
-more like their school assembly, than the Mass they are used to
-they did Communion differently
I’m so proud of them!