Prudence and the Consecrations

Mr Hall discusses the virtue of prudence, as it relates to the SSPX consecrations in July, because there are competing goods at stake.

From Crisis

By Kennedy Hall

The question of whether or not the SSPX should consecrate new bishops is a question of prudence, as competing goods are at stake.   

The word “prudent” gets thrown around a lot, and it is often misused. Recently, a friend posed a question to me about the prudence of the forthcoming SSPX consecrations, and it was not the first time I had been asked. There are, of course, many people who are sympathetic to the Society of St. Pius X to varying degrees. The consecration of bishops without papal approval, however, is something that troubles many consciences, for obvious reasons.

I understand that people of goodwill come down on different sides of this question, and that is entirely understandable given the profoundly confusing period in which we live. When questions are genuinely in dispute, men of goodwill can reach different conclusions based on the same facts, depending on how they weigh and assemble them. In this article, I will argue that the forthcoming consecrations are, in fact, prudent. I will also address the legacy of Archbishop Lefebvre’s own consecrations in the light of recent events. But first, we must establish what prudence actually is, and what it is not.

What Prudence Is—and Is Not

If you ask the average man on the street what prudence means, you will likely get a blank stare. If you ask the average Catholic, you will probably hear something like: “to act prudently is to make a calm decision without being hasty.” That is certainly one aspect of prudence, but it is incomplete. In the interest of brevity, the definition I offer here is a concise and condensed version of the more elaborate treatments found in classical theological and spiritual works; my personal favourite being found in the devotional book Divine Intimacy.

Prudence does not mean inaction. It means waiting prayerfully for Providence to manifest in a clear way, consulting wise counsel, making a decision based on all available information, and then acting on that decision without delay.

Critically, a prudent decision involves choosing between two possible goods, not simply choosing the good over the evil. Choosing good over evil is morally obligatory, strictly speaking. Prudence is required precisely when two legitimate goods are in tension, and a decision must be made between them.

Consider a familiar example. A father of a family often faces decisions of this kind. Providing for his family financially is a genuine good. Being present with his family is also a genuine good. Being close to home while working is yet another good. Now suppose a financially strapped family is presented with a position that would require the father to travel or work significantly longer hours, but would substantially improve their economic circumstances. There is no one-size-fits-all answer. He might accept the position; or he might instead choose to downsize, relocate to a more affordable location, and find work that keeps him closer to home, accepting a lateral financial move in exchange for greater presence and a relative financial upgrade. Different fathers could make either decision rightly, because the answer depends heavily on circumstance. The point is this: prudential decisions are, in part, relative to circumstance. They involve choosing between competing goods, not between good and evil.

The Two Goods Before the SSPX

So, how does this framework apply to the Society of St. Pius X? We can identify two competing goods quite clearly.

On one side: if the SSPX were to postpone the consecrations, it would satisfy many people of goodwill, avoid perceived scandal, and sidestep controversy. This is genuinely good, and it is entirely understandable why someone would advocate for that path.

On the other side stand approximately one million souls around the world who depend on the Society for their traditional sacraments. Even granting, for argument’s sake, that a third of them could access priests from other traditional communities, which is probably an optimistic estimate; the pastoral reality is stark. The Society’s current bishops are aging, and there are only two of them serving this enormous flock spread across multiple continents. Given the birth rates within traditional Catholic communities, that number will grow dramatically in the years to come. The need for confirmations alone is staggering. Meanwhile, the Society is ordaining priests at a rate that dwarfs the average diocese.

One might object that the SSPX is simply not necessary. If that is genuinely your position, there is little ground for further argument here. But if we accept that Catholic tradition must be preserved, and that the faithful have a right to it, which they assuredly do, then we cannot simply discount the second path. The bishops and priests of the Society stand in a paternal relationship to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of souls. That responsibility cannot be waved away.

We must also reckon with the direction of Rome. Whatever one makes of Pope Leo’s personality compared to his predecessor, he has confirmed many of Francis’ decisions, and the trajectory of the post-conciliar Church does not appear to be reversing itself. The SSPX is not deliberating in a vacuum.

Is the Consecration an Evil Act?

This is the decisive question. If the consecrations are intrinsically evil, then no prudential calculus can justify them. But the theological case against them is far weaker than is commonly assumed.

According to perennial Catholic theology, held by virtually every theologian as far back as we can trace, the power of orders and the power of jurisdiction have always been considered distinct. This means that it is theologically coherent to consecrate a bishop without thereby creating a schism when a papal mandate is missing. There may be other effects that must be confronted, but schism is not the automatic result.

The Second Vatican Council complicated this picture by treating the conferral of jurisdiction and the power of orders as simultaneous. However, it is the position of the very popes who oversaw the Council that it defined no new dogmas. The documents of Vatican II, then, fall under the category of ordinary Magisterium, which means, according to both pre-conciliar and post-conciliar theology on the binding weight of magisterial acts, that one is not bound in conscience to a particular statement when there is a grave and theologically grounded reason for disagreement. When we combine this with the unanimous pre-conciliar tradition on the separability of orders and jurisdiction, and with the prior Code of Canon Law, which enshrines the perennial position, I do not think it can be reasonably maintained that these consecrations constitute schism de facto.

To act as though all of that accumulated theology, the saints, the Doctors, the scholastics, the canonists, the practice of bishops and popes across centuries, was simply mistaken on so fundamental a point would itself be the imprudent position. I say it would be imprudent, because one would have to decide to pursue the good of working with novelty in Vatican II, which could bring about the good graces of the authorities, while at the same time failing to acknowledge and accept the prevailing good of perennial theology that came before the Council. It is perfectly permissible, and indeed well-grounded, to hold a contrary position to the mainstream post-conciliar consensus on this matter.

The Fallout of Either Decision

No matter which path the Society chooses, there will be consequences. A prudent decision must weigh those consequences honestly.

If the SSPX concedes and indefinitely postpones, we run a very real risk of watching Catholic tradition slowly diminish. It may be somewhat speculative to say so, but looking at the past half-century, we would be fools not to at least seriously entertain that possibility. The record of those who have been most motivated against Catholic tradition is not ambiguous.

If the consecrations proceed, there will be fallout as well. Letters of excommunication will likely follow for the bishops, and possibly for some priests. This will cause real hardships. People like myself will be labelled schismatic monsters by the mainstream Catholic press. None of that is pleasant. But it must be weighed against the alternative.

The Signs

We noted earlier that prudent decision-making requires waiting for Providence to manifest clearly. It is worth recalling the signs that presented themselves to Archbishop Lefebvre, and that continue to accumulate.

The inter-religious prayer meeting at Assisi was one of the most significant. We have grown so accustomed to scandal that it may no longer register with proper force, but virtually everything that took place at that gathering would have been considered mortally sinful; in some cases, ipso facto, just a decade and a half prior. The entire tradition of papal teaching from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was flatly contrary to what John Paul II did that day, and the broader history of the Church speaks in the same voice.

Archbishop Lefebvre did attempt to work through normal channels; negotiations, dubia, and so forth; and the results were troubling. He also suffered a grave miscarriage of canonical justice in the 1970s, the ripple effects of which make the Society’s canonical situation to this day almost unintelligible, and that injustice was not of his making.

Furthermore, when a quasi-agreement was reached with the Vatican, Rome kept stringing him along, postponing the promised consecrations again and again. One need not be a canonist to recognize that it is simply not reasonable to continue extending trust to someone who repeatedly breaks their word or who, in the most sympathetic viewing, seems unwilling to deliver. That is common sense.

The signs continue in our own day. The recent magisterial document diminishing the honour and titles of the Blessed Virgin Mary, suggesting that their use constitutes bad theology, was a momentous scandal. It is difficult to overstate how grave it is to denigrate the Mother of God in such a fashion. Furthermore, the Superior General of the SSPX cannot even secure a meeting with the Pope. Under those circumstances, how could he ever realistically expect a response to his questions?

A Simple Man’s Summary

I am a simple man, and I prefer simple terms. If you are lost at sea on a raft and you pray to God to be saved, and then a boat appears and says, “Get in, I’ll bring you to shore,” you get in the boat. You would be a fool to refuse on the grounds that God is going to save you, because God works through secondary causes. He works through instruments. He sent you a boat to save you.

In the context of the Church, the only way out of this crisis is through prelates who act like prelates. We need bishops to confirm the faithful. This is as ancient a truth as the Church itself. The crisis will not end because of internet commentators like me, or even because of good Catholic scholars. It will end because bishops act as they are supposed to act, and ultimately, the Pope will have to follow suit.

It is my belief that God did send us a boat to get us at least out of the open water. And from at least a human perspective, we must contend with the possibility that the boat has been the preservation of Catholic tradition, which we must largely attribute to Archbishop Lefebvre, if not almost entirely so. We cannot do this without bishops.

There is no decision before the Society that will not carry consequences. Those consequences will be very real, whatever path is chosen.

In prudent decision-making, the truths with the greatest moral weight must bear the greatest influence on the argument. What is ultimately at stake here is not merely canonical regularity or debatable sanctions. It is the truth of the Catholic faith itself.

It was always understood that the primary element of communion with the Church was, first, to share the same Faith; and then to share the same sacraments and recognition of the same governmental authorities. The true unity of the Church is based, first and foremost, on the Faith, as Pope Pius XI teaches in his encyclical Mortalium Animos: “since charity is based on a complete and sincere faith, the disciples of Christ must be united principally by the bond of one faith.” The principal bond: that is, the bond that itself lies at the very foundation of the unity of governance.

What happens, then, when the preservation of the faith itself becomes strained, or even improbable, if one seeks regular relations with those authorities? This is not a position any of us created. It is one we have inherited.

So a decision must be made, because prudence demands a decision. I hope that even those who disagree with the Society’s approach can at least, in goodwill, understand the decision-making process.

My friends, we are far from out of the weeds. We sometimes read about periods like the Arian crisis or the crisis of multiple papal claimants as though they were neat and tidy chapters in a history book. But the fallout from such crises lasted decades and centuries, and so, in many cases, did the lead-up.

We are roughly fifty or sixty years into this one. If we are honest students of Church history, we should prepare ourselves for fifty or sixty more years of something similar. We have a priestly class that is woefully ill-formed due to deficient seminary training. We have a lay population that is either poorly catechized or actively mis-catechized. And our bishops? There are a handful of genuinely good men, but it is a handful.

We are entering a period in which the dominant ruling class of the Church has no living connection or memory to anything before the Second Vatican Council. These men are largely convinced that neither the Council itself, nor what followed from it, can be the source of the problem, despite all evidence to the contrary. For some reason, there is a blindness they cannot seem to overcome.

It is an uncomfortable situation to inhabit. But God has placed us here, at this time. So we must act. You may choose a different course of action than I, and someone else may choose differently still, but so long as each of us acts as prudently as possible, we can, as individuals, we can make our decisions in good conscience.

Pictured: Don Davide Pagliarani, SSPX, Superior General of the Society of Saint Pius X