SSPX: Would that this energy was aimed at targets other than the Catholic Church

A Quarter Century of Schism

By Austin Ruse 

Schismatic bishops have once more laid down the law to the Catholic Church. Abjure your teachings or we are never coming back.

The recent statement of the three remaining bishops of the traditionalist Society of Saint Pius (SSPX) puts even further off any hope that the Church will reconcile with them any time soon. Notice that I say the Church reconciles with them, rather than they reconcile with the Church, because for them the reconciliation is all one way.

In a statement released on the twenty-fifth anniversary of their schism, the three bishops insist the problem is not with any misinterpretation of the documents of the Second Vatican Council, but with the documents themselves. They say the documents are quite clear and quite heretical.

Among the most important work of the last two pontificates was wrestling the meaning of Vatican II away from Church crazies and placing the documents strongly within the tradition of the Church. Benedict XVI insisted that they must be seen only through what he called the “hermeneutic of continuity.”

SSPX sees Vatican II through a “hermeneutic of rupture.” It says the Council initiated “a new kind of Magisterium, hitherto unheard of in the Church, without roots in Tradition.” It takes aim, as it has from the beginning of its outright revolt in 1988, at “religious liberty, ecumenism, collegiality and the New Mass.”

SSPX insists that religious liberty is no more than demanding that God renounce His reign over man and is the “equivalent to dissolving Christ.”

Ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue have led to a point where “a large part of the clergy and the faithful no longer see in Our Lord and the Catholic Church the unique way of salvation.”

SSPX also hates what it calls the “New Mass,” which “diminishes the affirmation of the reign of Christ by the Cross. Indeed the rite itself curtails and obscures the sacrificial and propitiatory nature of the Eucharist Sacrifice.” The SSPX bishops' statement says that the Mass destroys "Catholic spirituality."

There is some truth to the criticism of how things have sometimes spooled out in the Church since the close of Vatican II. Ecumenism has been a bust except where it has been practiced by faithful Catholics working with Evangelicals on social issues.

And for me there is no question that the Tridentine Mass is more beautiful in almost every way than the new Mass. It is also true that many Catholics today believe that all roads lead to God and therefore evangelism is not necessary. And you sure do wish that individual bishops would be stronger on their own and that reliance on episcopal conferences would fade.......................
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