Posted on 01/04/2002 4:32:15 PM PST by cathway
Rome--- Vatican olive branch to traditionalists. Pope John Paul II has decided to try to end the Church’s only schism of the twentieth century by allowing an ultra-conservative movement in Latin America to return to communion with Rome as a separate diocese. According to the Turin newspaper La Stampa, the decree of reconciliation has been drafted and needs only the Pope’s signature to bring an end to the 13-year separation.
The Vatican has made no official comment on the report. La Stampa said the agreement would pave the way for reconciliation with the so-called 'Lefebvrists', but according to a Swiss Catholic news agency, only a branch of traditionalists in Campos, Brazil, are concerned. The Society of St Jean-Marie Vianney is a distinct group, though similar, which broke from Rome in 1988 at the same time as followers of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre incurred excommunication.
The Swiss news agency said officials at Lefebvrist headquarters had denied drawing closer to a reconciliation with Rome. It quoted them as being further alienated by the approaching multi-religious prayer gathering to be held in Assisi on 24 January, which they see as an aberration.
The Lefebvrists, officially named the Fraternity of St Pius X, have more than 160,000 members living in some 40 countries. Archbishop Lefebvre, who was a French missionary in Dakar, founded the fraternity in 1969 in Switzerland to combat what he saw as the deviations of the Second Vatican Council. He was hostile to the reform of the liturgy and the Church’s new openness to other religions. He and his followers excommunicated themselves from Rome when in 1988 he illicitly ordained four new bishops. He died in 1991, unreconciled with the Roman Church in which he had been a bishop since 1955. For all practical purposes, the Lefebvrist group today lives as if Vatican II had never happened, continuing to celebrate the Latin Tridentine Mass.
A member of the Roman Curia – who called the plan a 'big mistake' – confirmed that an agreement had been drawn up for the traditionalist group in Brazil. He said it was his impression that the wording of the document was vague enough to allow the traditionalists a means by which they could avoid accepting the changes made by the Second Vatican Council which drove them into opposition.
More like the last 14 centuries.
No trads can be reconciled without accepting the teachings of the Pope.
So much for some of the saints who "taught" some Popes a lesson in what is was to be a true Catholic.
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