Rome & the SSPX: Why “Reconciliation” is Impossible

Mr Hall looks at the situation between Rome & the SSPX and explains why, in light of history, a reconciliation is not likely to happen.

From One Peter Five

By Kennedy Hall

There is no way for the faithful to navigate this situation in a perfectly legal manner.

I. A Necessary Distinction

Before proceeding, it is important to establish a couple of necessary distinctions. One can speak about a rupture between the Vatican and a group of priests without thereby speaking about schism in the sense of a spiritual crime.

While it is fitting to the Church that the Pope reside in Rome, history attests that a true Pope may not always be in Rome while the Church herself remains the Roman Catholic Church. This is not to say that such a situation should ever be imitated on purpose or taken as normative. The point is simply that a rupture between the Vatican and a group of priests does not of itself constitute a rupture of faith or sacramental communion.

The Vatican is a city-state in the historic city of Rome, where the pope resides and where his curial officials collaborate with him. In the ecclesiastical sense, when we speak of “the Vatican” in this context, we are speaking of the governing institution of the Church — not of the primacy of the Bishop of Rome as such, nor of his rightful place in the Diocese of Rome.

For the sake of precision, we should also clarify that the word “schism” itself carries multiple meanings. St. Paul warns early Christians to have no schisms among themselves — but he uses the word in an equivocal sense, meaning simply divisions that harm the unity of the Christian community, without necessarily referring to the establishment of a separate church. There is, of course, the further understanding of schism as an illegitimate, intentional, and declared separation — one that is truly schismatic in the strict canonical sense.

With this distinction in mind, we must take a brief survey of Church history to establish the proper context for what follows.

II. A Survey of Historical Church Crises

The Church has faced various crises throughout her history. Beginning at the beginning: there were the Gnostic heresies that arose within Catholic circles during the first centuries of the Church; the Phrygian heresy in Asia Minor, which today finds a kind of resurrection in the Charismatic Renewal; and the great Christological and Mariological heresies typified by Arianism and Nestorianism, among others.

In examining these historical heresies, we find that at times there arose a rupture between Rome — or other patriarchs of the Eastern Sees — and groups of priests or theologians. When these situations became extreme and solidified, the ruptures hardened into official separations. In some cases, strictly parallel ecclesiological structures arose that intentionally rejected the authority of Rome. In other cases, parallel structures arose not for reasons of doctrine but over disputes about the extent of juridical authority — a phenomenon most common in the East. An objective overview of these crises of authority reveals that, in some cases, they did not constitute schism in the truest sense, and because of this, reconciliation between the varying groups and the Roman authorities was possible once certain jurisdictional idiosyncrasies were clarified or better understood.

We can also look to those crises that had to do principally with morals — specifically the morals of the hierarchy, even of the pope. At the turn of the last millennium, we encounter what is commonly called the pornocracy, in which sins against the sixth and ninth commandments ran rampant throughout the hierarchy. We might also call to mind the pontificate of Alexander VI in the fifteenth century, which was, generally speaking, a crisis of morals so grave that great men like St. John Fisher opined that such a corruption of morals would inevitably lead to a corruption of faith — a prophecy that was fulfilled not long after, with the Protestant Revolution, though the latter began, strictly speaking, as a moral crisis.

We should also consider Girolamo Savonarola, who — like St. John Fisher — was severe in his assessment of the Roman authorities for their corruption. For his efforts, he was excommunicated and executed by Alexander VI and by the city of Florence. It is worth noting, as an aside, that Savonarola has largely been rehabilitated in more recent times, and there is presently a cause for his canonization. This should tell us something about the nature of excommunication and the capacity of popes to be wrong and unjust in their application of it.

We can also call to mind the situation in England under Henry VIII, which began largely as a jurisdictional dispute but became a full-blown heresy once the errors of continental Protestantism were adopted to varying degrees. Similarly, the schism between East and West, on a fair reading, begins as something more akin to a dispute about authority, and remains as such for a very long time — including a failed attempt at reconciliation at the Council of Florence, some four hundred years after the initial rupture. Today, the Eastern Orthodox generally do reject certain defined teachings of the Catholic Church, including the impossibility of divorce and the complete ban on artificial contraception.

We should also recall the juridical crisis of multiple claimants to the papacy, which created a de facto schism within the Church for a considerable period before it was finally resolved.

When we survey these various historical crises, we find that they are, generally speaking, either doctrinal, moral, or juridical in character. When left unremedied and allowed to calcify, what one finds is that doctrinal corruption follows upon the corruption of morals and jurisdiction. St. Thomas Aquinas explains that where there truly is a schism, heresy will follow as its sign (ST II-II, Q. 39, a. 1, ad 3).

It is worth considering the multitude of heresies and errors common in the various official documents of prelates of the “Conciliar Church” (a term coined by the Vatican, not Archbishop Lefebvre, I might add) compared to the doctrinal purity of the SSPX. If heresy follows schism, then where is the schism?

Nevertheless, when viewed objectively, each of these historical crises tends to have one predominant characteristic. Arius was a heretic, and the Arian heresy was a doctrinal problem. Its proponents believed they were the rightful successors of the Apostles and did not initially intend to establish a separate Arian church, but rather to have their heresy adopted as orthodoxy. That heresy was ultimately destroyed, and today, though we might consider Islam as a distant echo of the Arian error, the Arian heresy as it existed in the fourth and fifth centuries is practically non-existent.

With the corruptions of morals, we find that for the most part, the doctrinal purity of the Church’s teaching authority was left untouched. And when we look at the crisis of multiple claimants to the Holy See, we find that the various claimants were not asserting their positions for reasons of heresy, but over legal disputes of fact. This is why we find true saints on both sides of the divide — men of impeccable orthodoxy who were simply mistaken, through no fault of their own, about which individual rightfully occupied the Chair of Peter.

When heresies became so pronounced as to require massive intervention, we find the Council of Trent clarifying and reinforcing the precision of Catholic teaching, making the dividing line between Catholicism and heresy entirely objective. It is regrettable that Protestants left the Church. Nonetheless, the line was drawn.

III. The Present Crisis: A Convergence of All Three

Our present crisis is unique because all three aspects of historical crisis — doctrinal, moral, and juridical — are simultaneously present and fully active.

The doctrinal crisis cannot be debated by any man of good sense. It predates the Second Vatican Council, though the safeguards that had previously restrained the official spread of modernism were essentially abandoned, and the modernist mentality now runs throughout official documents of the Church. Certain theologians may dispute this, but at this point, the historical record rebukes them. No man of good sense can honestly deny it.

We also have a crisis of morals. The sexual abuse crisis, even granting that certain sectors of the media or enemies of the Church may have inflated the facts, is bad enough in itself. The reality is undeniable. The presence of perverts in positions of power in the Church is incomprehensible, and we must acknowledge that this continues to the present day — even if to a lesser degree than in the worst decades of recent memory, though this is speculative, since the full picture remains unknown. The problem of homosexuality throughout the hierarchy of the Church is, in any case, massive and documented.

We also have a massive juridical crisis. Consider the case of Archbishop Lefebvre. Much attention is focused on 1988, but what was done to him in the mid-1970s was strictly illegal, and there is clear documentation to affirm this. That legal abuse has continued to the present day. Archbishop Viganò is a more recent example: whatever one’s opinion of him, the sentence of excommunication and schism issued against him was a legal train wreck. Cardinal Fernández and his associates adduced rejection of aspects of Vatican II as proof of the commission of schism — which is unprecedented and conflates evidence supporting categorically different crimes. It is unconscionable. (It should be noted that Archbishop Viganò did not help matters by refusing to defend himself on the grounds that the authorities were illegitimate — but the juridical process itself was nonetheless a disaster.) The inconsistent application of the Code of Canon Law in the case of the Chinese Catholic situation, among others, only compounds the problem.

The point is that we face a crisis that is at once doctrinal, moral, and juridical — an unholy trinity of the worst crises in the history of the Church, and the Society of Saint Pius X demonstrates the effect of this convergence in stark relief. We have men of suspect morals, who are doctrinally compromised, misapplying the law to condemn a group of morally upright, doctrinally pure, and canonically astute individuals.

IV. The Society of Saint Pius X as a Sign of Contradiction

If we take an objective look at the Society of Saint Pius X, we cannot call them a corrupt group of priests. Every order of priests will encounter the tragedy of the occasional priest presenting moral defects for as long as that order consists of human beings, but this is hardly peculiar to the Society.

When we examine the doctrinal acumen of their priests and theologians, we cannot honestly call them heretics. Only the most intellectually dishonest would do so. Nor can we say that they “reject” the Second Vatican Council as such, even if they accuse the Council of certain errors — errors which today are acknowledged not only by partisans of the Society, but by traditional academics across a much broader spectrum.

And if we take an objective look at Canon Law, we find that in the case of Archbishop Lefebvre, the law was not followed but was used as an instrument of abuse against him. The ruling against him in 1988 was, and remains, a matter of legitimate dispute among men of goodwill, for it was legally dubious — if not outright invalid.

We see the continued confusion surrounding the Society’s legal status in the Church, a confusion that the hierarchy cannot clarify, because the corruption of morals, doctrine, and juridical sense within that hierarchy is so pronounced that clarity is rendered practically impossible.

In this way, the Society of Saint Pius X acts, in a sense, as the conscience of the Church — a sign of contradiction. Their mere presence pricks the conscience because they remind us of the purity of the Catholic faith, of the holiness of the Catholic priesthood, and of the need for justice which is denied them.

There are no sound arguments that expels the Society from the Church when all these things are fully considered. By “sound arguments,” I mean arguments that do not themselves depend upon some novelty or upon aspects of the very crisis that would only make things worse. By any traditional understanding of schism, they cannot be called schismatics. The only way to call them schismatics is to adopt the minority and novel interpretation of the power of jurisdiction — half-heartedly expressed in the Second Vatican Council — and to reject what was perennially believed and taught by popes for centuries before it. We must believe, if we hold fast to Catholic tradition, including the solemn teachings of the popes, that the power of order and the power of jurisdiction are separate realities, not automatically conferred by episcopal consecration. Only by rejecting this can we call the Society’s episcopal consecrations necessarily schismatic. But to do so is to repudiate the teaching of the pope who immediately preceded the Second Vatican Council, who wrote to the contrary multiple times — and whose work represented the consensus of centuries of scholarship and theology.

Nor can we honestly call them heretics, for we must acknowledge that the Second Vatican Council defined no new dogmas. Even if Pope John Paul II accused Archbishop Lefebvre of schism on the grounds that he did not adhere to a particular definition of Tradition found in Dei Verbum — which itself generates further confusion, since how can someone be accused of definitively denying the Church’s teachings if the Council defined nothing new? — we find no firm ground for the accusation of heresy.

And again, morally speaking: whatever problems individual priests of the Society may have had, compared to the rest of the institutional Church, the Society stands head and shoulders above in the behavior of its priests — not only in personal morals, but in the moral conviction they demonstrate and their willingness to adhere to the truth in the face of persecution, in a Church where the average priest was too frightened to hear a clandestine confession during a manufactured pandemic.

V. The False Solutions

Because of all these reasons, there is no path to official reconciliation — and this is not because of the Society of Saint Pius X. It is because the hierarchy is enwrapped in this triune crisis that affects every aspect of the Church. We have a Church that is simultaneously anarchical and tyrannical; simultaneously claiming to be pastoral while abandoning its children to the world; simultaneously calling for greater engagement with the modern world while remaining frozen in the 1960s within the ivory towers of modernist theology departments in European universities. It is an absolute disaster, and there is no natural solution.

I speak here of objective structures and not of individual persons. The situation on the ground is far more complicated, and there are good priests to be found here and there. But we cannot allow exceptions and anomalies to obscure the rule. They only prove it.

Even the supposedly traditional orders — such as the Fraternity of Saint Peter — do not represent a genuine solution, for several reasons. First, the use of the traditional liturgy is presented as a charism, meaning something particular to these communities. This is, in itself, a novelty and a tacit admission that the traditional liturgy is not for the whole Church, but only for those who prefer it. This posture only exacerbates the problem of liturgical selectiveness, which is at the very heart of the liturgical revolution in the first place.

Additionally, the Fraternity has made it clear, at least officially, that its mission is to synthesize the teachings of the Council — including heterodox ones like religious liberty — with Catholic tradition. But this is impossible.

Fr. John Berg, the Superior General of the Fraternity, stated in an interview given to The Remnant on July 5, 2007, that it was a mission given to the Fraternity at its very foundation to show the continuity of religious liberty, ecumenism, and collegiality with the Church’s Tradition:

The Remnant: Is it a mission of the FSSP, or of specific FSSP theologian priests, to attempt to show the “hermeneutic of continuity” with certain difficult passages of the Second Vatican Council in the light of Tradition? For instance, religious liberty, ecumenism, collegiality and inter-religious dialogue?

Fr. John Berg: This is a mission that was given to the Fraternity from the protocol at its very foundation.

Religious Liberty, Ecumenism and Collegiality? I cannot think of three novelties more strongly opposed by the conglomerate of Traditional authors than those three things.

The various superiors of the Ecclesia Dei communities stated publicly after Traditionis Custodes was published:

We reaffirm our adherence to the magisterium (including that of Vatican II and what follows), according to the Catholic doctrine of the assent due to it (cf. in particular Lumen Gentium, n ° 25, and Catechism of the Catholic Church, n ° 891 and 892), as evidenced by the numerous studies and doctoral theses carried out by several of us over the past 33 years.

The key here is “including that of Vatican II and what follows.” Does this include Amoris Laetitia and the parts in Laudato Si’ that reek of Teilhard De Chardin?

This understanding presented by the Fraternity — and the other Ecclesia Dei groups — is representative of how Rome views them as well. Consider the following quotation, from Luigi Ventura, the Apostolic Nuncio, from Paris , concerning the FSSP:

It was in a moment of great trial for the Church that the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter was created.  In a great spirit of obedience and hope, her founders turned with confidence to the Successor of Peter in order to offer the faithful attached to the Missal of 1962 the possibility of living their faith in the full communion of the Church.  The Holy Father encourages them to pursue their mission of reconciliation between all the faithful, whichever may be their sensibility, and this to work so that all welcome one another in the profession of the same faith and the bond of an intense fraternal charity… By way of the celebration of the sacred Mysteries according to the extraordinary form of the Roman rite and the orientations of the Constitution on the Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium, as well as by passing on the apostolic faith as it is presented in the Catechism of the Catholic Church,may they contribute, in fidelity to the living Tradition of the Church, to a better comprehension and implementation of the Second Vatican Council… The Holy Father exhorts them,according to their own charism, to take an active part in the mission of the Church in the world of today, through the testimony of a holy life, a firm faith and an inventive and generous charity… (Emphasis added)

The FSSP presumably accept and is proud of this summary of their mission.  They have the text on their website under the title “Blessing of Pope Francis on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the FSSP.”

No matter how hard anyone tries, one cannot synthesize or reconcile something that has been condemned for centuries with the perennial teaching of the Church.

The presence of various traditional Latin Mass communities is also not a solution, even if we may rejoice that more people have access to the traditional Mass today than they did a couple of decades ago. But the very idea that a traditional Latin Mass community must be isolated, requiring special permission, is an admission of defeat. It is of the same genus as the notion that the traditional Mass is a charism for a particular group, rather than the heritage of all Catholics.

If we give the late Holy Father Pope Francis the benefit of the doubt, one can understand why he sought to suppress the traditional Latin Mass. When Pope Benedict XVI further liberated its celebration, he was clear that he desired a “mutual enrichment” between the two forms. This did not happen. At best, one found priests who learned to celebrate the traditional Mass and then began to celebrate the new Mass in a somewhat more reverent way. In practice, in the vast majority of cases, the faithful who found access to the traditional Mass simply stopped attending their local parishes altogether. No one who holds the traditional Mass to be what it is can really blame them.

For this reason, while I firmly disagree with Pope Francis, Cardinal Roche, and others who condemn the Latin Mass; I understand within the coherence of their modernist system, why they view the Traditional Liturgy as divisive — because it is divisive, in that it divides Traditionalists from integration into modernist parishes.

But the deeper point stands: even Pope Benedict’s liberation of the traditional Mass was granted with the implicit intention of a dialogue between the two liturgies. This is itself impossible, because they are antipodal to one another — one is Catholic, and the other is saturated with an anti-Catholic, Protestant spirit. The very idea that one could have traditional Latin Mass communities alongside the new liturgy is a concession to the Hegelian synthesis and dialectic that lies at the heart of the modernism driving this present crisis.

The point is that there is no way for the faithful to navigate this situation in a perfectly legal manner without some degree of entanglement with the modernist problem. Add to this the anxiety that many parents face regarding the sacraments for their children, and the situation becomes all the more acute and grave.

VI. The Acceleration of the Doctrinal Crisis

We must also acknowledge that the doctrinal problem has accelerated under the present pontificate. Just as the early heresies first attacked Christology before moving to attack the Mother of God, so too we find a similar progression today. John Paul II attacked the Kingship of Christ — which is an attack on His nature, rightly considered, since He is King by right — through the Assisi meetings and the general ecumenical spirit that animated his pontificate. We have now moved from attacking the Kingship of Christ, and therefore His nature, to attacking the divine elements of the maternity of the Mother of God.

This is untenable, and there is no natural way for it to stop, unless God stops it — either by way of direct miraculous intervention, which we cannot speculate about here since it would be unknown to us until it occurred, or through secondary causes.

VII. Providence and Secondary Causes

How does God act through secondary causes? He uses persons to accomplish His will. The only way that traditional Catholics could have any recourse during this crisis is for someone to act extra-judicially, because, as we have explained, maintaining the purity of Catholic faith within the juridical bounds of canon law is practically impossible — even if it can be approximated. This is why I personally believe Archbishop Lefebvre was an instrument of divine providence.

But God may also act through secondary causes in another way. Things could become so grave in the Church that there is more or less a complete collapse — such that the only practicing Catholics remaining, through sheer attrition, are orthodox and traditional Catholics. Over time, it would necessarily follow that only faithful and orthodox prelates would rise to the highest positions in the Church. But that is decades away — perhaps even a century.

Some may object: would that not mean the gates of hell had prevailed? No — because so long as there are valid priests and bishops providing the sacraments, and the Catholic faith is held by at least some of them, the gates of hell have not prevailed. That is the traditional understanding of the Church’s indefectibility.

VIII. The Choice Before the Faithful

So here we are. No amount of dialogue will accomplish anything, because just as it is impossible to reason with a man who is intoxicated, so too it is impossible to achieve a reconciliation between faithful orthodox traditional priests and those who have imbibed all the worst elements of the present crisis and show no signs of relenting.

The faithful have a choice to make. We must, unfortunately, choose between canonical regularity and Catholicism. We must choose between being recognized by prelates who do not recognize the fullness of the Catholic faith, and ourselves recognizing the fullness of the Catholic faith while being abandoned by our fathers. It is a disaster of epic proportions.

We must also recognize that as traditional Catholics, we will be hated and scorned — and that this will only intensify unless things change radically.

We must console ourselves by remembering that while Canon Law is extremely important — as law is for any society — Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition are infallible and given to us under the guidance of the Holy Ghost. Changing codes of canon law are not. We must recognize that if our fathers decide to no longer acknowledge us as their children, this is their sin and their tragedy — but it is not our fault.

If a young man comes home to find his father living in adultery, or if a father develops a drinking problem and becomes abusive and destructive, a separation between child and father will necessarily follow for the good of the child. One can only hope that the father will sober up, embrace the fidelity he promised to his bride, and turn his life around. In the Catholic Church, we do not have divorce — but we do recognize the necessity of separation in times of abuse. And in abusive relationships, it is very common for the abuser to blame the abused. The faithless husband will claim that the wife left him, when in reality she escaped with the children for their welfare. But that woman remains faithful in exile, so long as she does not take a new husband — even if her husband continues to break the marital bond. It is also common that some children in the abusive family will blame the siblings, sometimes vengefully and vindictively, who do not acquiesce to the father’s abuse. These poor souls are also victims, but they are also wrong in their assessment.

If we understand this, we can understand why men like Larry Chapp, who by all accounts intends to be a faithful son of the Church, can seemingly lose all charity and rejoice in the prospect of the SSPX being penalized. It is a deranged and sad mentality, but it is consistent with the psychology of children abused by their fathers who resort to blaming the siblings who refuse to accept more beatings.

Chapp typifies this spirit with the following statement:

… [T]he putative “crisis” to which the SSPX is responding is a manufactured one of its own making.  There is a crisis in the Church today and that cannot be denied.  There is widespread dissent from official magisterial teaching on all manner of topics, ranging from moral theology to ecclesiology to Christology.  But far from fighting this lamentable trend, the SSPX is in fact a part of it…

So much confusion — “there is no crisis, but there is a crisis, and it is doctrinal, but it is the fault of the SSPX.” These are the musings of a man who cannot think clearly, a man divided against himself. This same man who accuses the SSPX as being at the heart of the doctrinal crisis in the Church has made a name for himself criticising magisterial documents that came out under Pope Francis. He is like a child from an abusive family saying to the courageous sibling, “Dad isn’t abusive, well yes he does beat us, but that is your fault because you don’t do what he says.”

This is the situation we are in in the Church. It is sad, but it is true.

And this is why, at this moment, no reconciliation is possible — because any such reconciliation would require an effective denial of at least some aspect of the Catholic faith, which no one in good conscience can accept.