Posted on 02/12/2009 6:39:39 AM PST by NYer
PARIS (Reuters) - An ultra-traditionalist bishop seeking rehabilitation from the Vatican said in an interview on Wednesday that his breakaway movement could not fully accept landmark 20th century church reforms, as his critics demand.
Bishop Fellay, whose excommunication was lifted last month along with those of three other bishops, said his Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) did not agree with a key document of the Second Vatican Council on respecting other religions.
He also told the French weekly Famille Chretienne he did not reject the 1962-1965 Council completely but only "a dangerous spirit that runs through the whole Council" that caused what he saw as a break with centuries of Roman Catholic tradition.
In a debate that broke out after SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson denied the Holocaust, several leading Catholic prelates and Jewish organisations insisted the SSPX must support all Council reforms in order to be fully rehabilitated.
While the lifting of excommunications readmitted them into the Church, the four men must now negotiate with the Vatican to be officially recognised as bishops and take posts of responsibility within the Church.
Fellay said of the Council: "One cannot approach it in a dogmatic way and say 'amen' to everything. This approach is completely wrong. There are different domains, themes and degrees of authority."
"In my opinion, many of the problems we point out can be resolved by distinctions and not by absolute acceptances or rejections," he said.
Fellay said the Church had given up trying to convert people to Catholicism in recent decades because the Council stressed respect for other faiths. "The Church no longer has the will to convert. We don't agree here. This is serious," he said in the interview, distributed before publication next week.
(Excerpt) Read more at in.reuters.com ...
He’s absolutely right, and the headline is misleading. He’s saying that Vatican II is not some kind of super council, which supersedes all that came before. He’s also right that the documents vary in authority.
The Holy Father is well aware of this, and has spoken about it before. This regularization process, whether or not it is successful, affords an opportunity to bring these questions out into the open for the first time if forty years.
The other thing is, how about we start to test various societies and orders for acceptance of other councils, like Trent?
Excuse me for butting into this thread, but I’m trying to get some kind of facts about “Bishop Williamson.”
The mainstream press seems to have this story very mixed up and I’d like to know what is actually going on. All their stories very strongly imply his is a Roman Catholic Bishop without actually stating so.
Is he a Roman Catholic Bishop?
Was he a Roman Catholic Bishop?
Does the Pope’s action make him a Roman Catholic bishop?
I suspect the answers to these questions are all “no,” but somebody here please enlighten me.
Correct. No on all questions. See this sentence from the article:
“While the lifting of excommunications readmitted them into the Church, the four men must now negotiate with the Vatican to be officially recognised as bishops and take posts of responsibility within the Church.”
Fellay said the Church had given up trying to convert people to Catholicism in recent decades because the Council stressed respect for other faiths. "The Church no longer has the will to convert. We don't agree here. This is serious," he said in the interview, distributed before publication next week.Asked about the Council statement that Jews were spiritual "elder brothers" of Christians, he agreed the two faiths shared the Old Testament but said Jews rejected the New Testament.
"That is not enough for them to be saved," he said.
As for cooperation with other Christian churches, he said it was acceptable if it led them to return to the Catholic Church they left during and after the Protestant Reformation.
"If that's the true aim of ecumenism, we certainly don't oppose it," he said. "There is only one Church and there cannot be several."
Fellay said the modern Catholic Mass, which the SSPX rejects in favour of the traditional Latin liturgy, was valid but sometimes not reverent enough. Pope Benedict extended use of the Latin Mass in 2007 as part of his drive to win back the SSPX.
Fellay, who lives at the SSPX headquarters in Switzerland, said he hoped the negotiations with the Vatican would start soon but he had no idea when this would happen. "I love this Church even if I take some knocks from it," he said.
That's controversial? Good grief.
Bishop Williamson confirmed my daughter in the spring of 2001. When he was the head of the SSPX seminary in Winona, Minnesota, he used to travel to different traditional Catholic chapels around the country and perform traditional Confirmation rites together with solemn high Mass. The confirmation took place at a chapel near Tysons Corner, VA, one of four traditional Mass sites I frequent in the DC-Baltimore area.
I refused to have my daughter confirmed in the novus ordo parish where I live, which is dominated by pro-aborts and various forms of whack job liberals and dissenters; therefore, in trying to figure out how to get her properly confirmed, I had to wait until she was almost 17 (most Catholic kids are confirmed around ages 13-14).
I’m a little concerned about Bishop Williamson’s views on the Holocaust; when I was in college 35 years ago, I had an inter-departmental major called “Soviet and East European Studies”. The events of World War II were fresher in people’s minds then than now. Based on my reading and research, there appears little doubt that something like 52 million people perished between 1939 and 1945 as a result of the big dictatorships and the war. I don’t know if there is seriously much to dispute that 6,000,000+ Jews were killed during this time; however, in the revision of history, it is conveniently forgotten that Josef Stalin directly or indirectly arranged for the deaths of 30-35m human beings. Many more Christians than Jews perished as a result.
Bishop Williamson’s dabbling in this area saddens me, because it undermines all the other great work he does in defending the immemorial Christian religion from the total immolation that the crew in Rome has in mind for it.
As far as who he is and where he came from, he is an Englishman who was raised in the Church of England, and apparently had a conversion experience much like John Henry Newman (Newman was Oxford; Williamson is Cambridge). His inquiry for truth led him to Abp. Marcel Lefebvre, one of the great Christian figures of the 20th Century, whose name has been dragged through the mud by the enemies of Christian tradition. There was a time when the SSPX was accepted by Rome, as Pope Paul VI gave Abp. Lefebvre authorization to form the SSPX. It was in 1988, when Abp. Lefebvre informed Pope John Paul II that he intended to consecrate four bishops to carry on his work beyond his death (who would necessarily be without territorial jurisdiction, but who would serve to consecrate priests and perform confirmations and other bishop-type duties), when, without any kind of an ecclesiastical trial, JPII “excommunicated” Abp. Lefebvre, the four new bishops (Williamson, Fellay, Gallarreta and deMallarais), and also Bishop Antonio deCastro Mayer, the bishop of Campos, Brazil, the last traditional bishop with a territorial diocese in the world. Abp. Lefebvre died in 1995 at age 90. Bp. Williamson will be 69 next month.
His consecration as bishop remains not licit. He is now a Catholic priest in good standing, but not recognized as bishop. That is because his ordination as priest came from a licit bishop prior to the point when archbishop Levefbre was disciplined. Correct me, all, if I am wrong.
Bishop Williamson is a validly consecrated Catholic bishop, but he has no official Jurisdiction or Territorial Authority within the Church.
There is certainly a part of the Catholic Church which has given up trying to convert but the Church itself has not. It's the same part of the Church that is into women priests, saving the planet and "self affirmation" psycho babble.
Feel free to shout me down but I think Fellay is talking about a difference in approach. The SSPX approach to conversion from what I've seen is "heretics convert or go to hell". Not surprisingly, that doesn't win too many to the Church. My feeling is strengthened by what I see on these boards and what I see on "trad" web sites. Look around and see who is engaging in apologetics with Protestants, here or anywhere else. It's not SSPXers. It's those Catholics who have not broken with Rome. It's Catholics who support this and previous Popes. SSPXers, now greatly diminished around here, would come out in hordes for any thread dealing with Rome or the Pope but were totally out to lunch on any disputations concerning the Reformation or Catholic teaching posed by Protestants. It's still the case today.
Look at other web sites. SSPXers congregate on boards which are devoted to discussing how the Pope has lost the plot or who is the latest cardinal to apostatize. They have minimal interest in engaging in dialog with Protestants. Their attitude is "take it or leave it, heretics".
Despite what Fellay says the SSPX is in fact, extremely insular. That's not surprising because Vatican II was supposed to bring the Church to the world, however badly that went wrong. The SSPX attitude is that the world can go to hell......and probably the rest of the Catholic Church, too.
Fellay is completely right when he says that missionary zeal has greatly diminished within the Church but that is a result of all the other errors which we now carry as baggage, not the Council. John XXIII wanted to take the Church to the world, not turn the Church into a mirror of the world. It was a pastoral council.
I don't think anybody who observed Pope John Paul II, of happy memory, could say that the Church did not want to bring Christ to the world. How many came into the Church because of him? I'm sure there were many and I know of several on FR.
Fellay and also the modernist whackos with whom we still struggle need to understand that "respect" for other faiths is a demand of charity. Islam is what you get when you have no respect for the faith of others. However, "respecting" the faith of others does not mean abandoning your own. You must live it and that is what will bring people into the Church.
Just my 0.02.
Your excellent post is a very good summary of the situation.
Lol ... bingo! Thanks for the .02 :-)
It sounds like Fellay’s idea of ecumenism is convincing other Christians to convert to Tridentine Catholicism. In short, it’s preselytizing Protestants, Anglicans, etc. In his mind, does he not draw a distinction between non-Catholic Christians and non-Christians?
“It was in 1988, when Abp. Lefebvre informed Pope John Paul II that he intended to consecrate four bishops to carry on his work beyond his death (who would necessarily be without territorial jurisdiction, but who would serve to consecrate priests and perform confirmations and other bishop-type duties), when, without any kind of an ecclesiastical trial, JPII ‘excommunicated’ Abp. Lefebvre, the four new bishops (Williamson, Fellay, Gallarreta and deMallarais), and also Bishop Antonio deCastro Mayer, the bishop of Campos, Brazil, the last traditional bishop with a territorial diocese in the world.”
Archbishop Lefebvre and his followers were not excommunicated because he announced his intention to consecrate four bishops.
Neither did Pope John Paul II excommunicate these men.
Rather, Pope John Paul II explicitly forbade Archbishop Lefebvre from carrying out the consecrations, and consecrating bishops when the pope has explicitly forbidden the act is an act of schism, and causes excommunication latae sententiae, that is, automatically. The act of consecrating bishops (or receiving consecration as a bishop) against the expressed will of the Roman Pontiff is expressly forbidden in the Canon Law of 1983, and is automatically punished with excommunication. No trial necessary.
Thus, it was Archbishop Lefebvre & Co.’s actions, not intentions, that caused them to automatically excommunicate themselves.
Pope John Paul II merely noted their new, excommunicated status.
sitetest
That's fairly mild compared to some of the things I've said of the Pope Paul VI missal ... or at least, of the way the Mass is commonly offered in these United States ...
Fellay said the modern Catholic Mass, which the SSPX rejects in favour of the traditional Latin liturgy, was valid but sometimes not reverent enough.
I never went to SSPX chapels, am a regular congregant at a Novus Ordo Mass, although I visit Traditional Latin and Melkite liturgies and love them. Still I can sign under the statement above with both hands.
There is no evidence that Fellay's ecclesiology is any different from the traditional Catholic ecclesiology. There is a concern that some post-Vatican II writings attempt to create a superchurch that is somehow larger than the visible Catholic Church (of many rites). The clarification on the status of non-Catholic communities of faith, I think, put that concept to rest (RESPONSES TO SOME QUESTIONS REGARDING CERTAIN ASPECTS OF THE DOCTRINE ON THE CHURCH):
FIRST QUESTIONDid the Second Vatican Council change the Catholic doctrine on the Church?
RESPONSE
The Second Vatican Council neither changed nor intended to change this doctrine, rather it developed, deepened and more fully explained it.
[...]
There is, of course, a possibility of sanctification through any Christian community of faith, and especially through authentic Churches such as the Eastern Orthodox Church, which remain not in communion (see the same document). Prozelytizing effort should take into account these differences. We are separated from the Protestant Christians in profound matters of theology; it is the duty of every Catholic Christian to seek to eradicate the theological errors of the Reformation. The differences with Anglicans are relatively slight, and vanishingly small with the Orthodox.
Of course the Grand commission of the Church to evangelize the non-Christians remains, and includes evangelizing the Jews.
Am I answering your question?
What we have here is secular leftwing press wringing their hands, as the Church moves toward unity and tradition.
Thank you, sir.
You are exactly right.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.