Debate: Have the SSPX-Vatican talks been a waste of time?

No Preconciliar Pope wanted Catholics to attend Heretics or Pagan services.

And No CONCILIAR Pope want Cathoic to attend Heretic or Pagan services!!!

A Catholic cannot participate in services of pagans or heretics: before or now or never!

Ecumenis is NOT about participate in services of Pagans or Heretics. It is aboiut dialogue, NOW about participating in their rites or services.

The Church before and NOW stricly fobiddes Communio in Sacris.

There are many instructions from Roman Congregations stricly forbiding participation in heretical or Pagan services.

That is why no Catholic Priest can particpate on an Anglican service or join Masses.

From Ecclessia Eucastia to Mysterium Fidei, etc, no Pope can ever recommend or authorize participation with Heretics or Pagans in their rites or authorize active participation of Heretics or Pagans in the distribition of Sacraments.

Ecumenism is nothing about that. It is about dialogue and diplopmacy, not about Catholics participating in Heretics or Pagan rites.

There can be exeptions in which Catholic are allowed by Canon Law to participate in Orthodox Masses to receive Holy communion (in grave cases only)

And there are expetions in which Catholic can participate PASSIVELY in Pagan rituals such as the special permission that Pope Pius XII gace to Catholics in Japan to participate in Pagan Funerals and Weddings back in the 1950s.

But those are rare exeptions. A Catholic cannot participate in Heretics or Pagain rites: period.

The Pope can err and has erred Pope John the 22nd erred when he preached from the pulpit that no one would see the Beatific Vision until after the General Judgement. He was called on the error, initially resisted and then appointed a commission to study it. He recanted of his error shortly before his death.

The Charism of Infallibility prevents the Pope from BINDING the faithful to any errors. When he binds the faithful universally he is infallible.

Other examples of error that fall outside of infallibility is in the absolute mess regarding Pope Stephen exuming the corpse of Pope Formosus and putting it on trial. For years and numerous pontificates afterwards the declarations of invalidity of orders and rulings went back and forth invalidating and validating the ordinations and actions of Formosus with Stephen being overturned in his rulings despite being a legtimate (if corrupt) Pope.

The Holy Ghost does not promise good fruits from a Council. Vatican II was a real council. It was also a bad idea, executed badly. It even fails to fulfill the criteria established by John XXIII in his opening speech. It did not preserve or find new formulations for the doctrine of the Church (it doesn’t even mention Hell once in all of it’s wordiness.) What we wound up with was theological sounding words for political and ideological policies and re-definitions of old words that drained them of all previously understood meaning and clarity.

What you wrote above is the typical defence of SSPX, they know too well they are disobeying, so they feel the need to invent a new theory and new interpretation of “Infallibility” to justify their disobedience, it has been running for decades. And no heresy is new, this kind of arguments was applied by people centuries ago, and they were excommunicated, by the Church long before the contended Vatican II Council.

I keep on thinking of Luther, he even changed the Bible to justify his own interpretation of what is really Christian…

why all this stuff about numbers ,if sspx are holding firmly to the truth then it matters not a jot whether there millions of them or a mere handful the truth is still the truth. What we really need is a good dose of Oliver Cromwell treatment for those who corrupted Vatican 2 and superimposed their version of the ‘spirit of vat 2′ and laughed while the rest of us followed like sheep!

Bishop O’Donoghue [late Lancaster] delicately touched on Mother Church post Vatican II, where each bishop and each priest and each layman appears to be becoming their own pope and confessor. Overhanging this situation is the problem of collegiality within the bishops’ conferences [+O'Donoghue only spoke out in his retirement]. We now have national associations of priests, and, would you believe association of deacons – each of these telling BXVI ton “get lost” with regard to the new N.O. Missal translation. These dissenters predicate the arising of ‘National Catholic Churches’ nominally tied to Rome, but independent thereof – CofE, Protestant?

A few years ago the E&W Bishops’ Conference issued a document which stated: in order to fulfil my Sunday Duty [what that today?] I could attend my village CofE or Non-Conformist place of worship – are they Catholic? In respect of the post-Vat II they will be judged as being so! Is Vatican II to be declared [infallibly] an ‘Article of Faith’ of Mother Church?

Regarding +Williamson: when he opines upon matters of Faith, as far as I am aware, he speaks truth. When he speaks upon his hobby-horse – he exposes himself as an eccentric nutter. He is highly educated, intellegent and a contraversialist, wherein he has chosen a ground where he argues on a subject which is incapable of verification – one way or the other. However, his opponents have been stupid, in such respect, to play him at his own game – at which he cannot be beaten. He shoudl be challenged, not on the numbers of Jewry who died in gas chambers, but on his attitude to the numbers ghettoised and incarcerated in concentration camps and the principle of such action by Germany. Msgr. Lefebvre erred in elevating +Williamson, erred in sending him to the USA, where he attracted head cases, of a type found widespread in the USA.

Mother Church is splitting asunder and it will take a couple of generations to resolve – but it will be resolved and Vatican II, in history, seen as a gigantic mistake. The Holy Ghost cannot err, but the quislings of Protestantism, did their deeds with impunity.

My parish priest has preached against the BXVI; celibate clergy; lack of lay status in the church, etc., etc. and Celebrates Mass with CofE affectations – perhaps I should attend the village church!

Tell me if there is any Saint in the history who rejected the decision of an ecumenical council.

The Paul example is again typical: William Ockham, an excommunicated monk of the 13th. used it to reject the Authority of the Pope.

You can cry as loud as you like, the Universal Church will move on without you.

(Genuine, well-intended, question here) What would the SSPX like the Church to do? What doctrines, in their views, has the Pope failed to accept in these recent talks? I don’t understand what the Church refuses to do, in their eyes.

I have been to several Vatican II churches with holy priests. I have seen the “new” Mass celebrated in more reverent and dignified way than the Tridentine Mass. Vatican II churches where people kneel at communion, receive on the tongue, where Latin is used, where the vestments are unchanged since 62. Vatican II parishes with many pious traditions such as processions, and proper catechism. I have even been at a Mass where the priest faced east (but spoke English).

What is the row all about?

Vicente, don’t be daft.

It is a theological TRUTH that popes can be heretics. Read St (Cardinal) Robert Bellarmine on the subject. http://www.romancatholicism.org/duty-resist.htm

That doesn’t meant that the Church has failed or could fail. The Church is indefectible but that is due to the workings of the Holy Spirit, not to the impeccability of popes, who can be wrong like anyone else. Your final quote from Saint Alphonsus acknowledges this and actually cites St Robert Bellarmine.

You need to remember the distinction (not clear in some of the quotes above, probably because until our times, it was not so essential to make the distinction because popes tended not to teach heresy!) between a pope repeating traditional Catholic doctrine – always, when he does this, he cannot err – and between what we are getting today throughout this diabolical crisis in the Church, modern popes giving us new “doctrines” about ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue, religious liberty (encouraging the worship of false gods in the name of human rights – an entirely new idea in the Church, therefore cannot possibly be part of the infallible Faith.)

Hi Vicente,

It’s a waste of time trying to convince these people that they are in error. They choose to be willfully blind.

And since when does the Holy Spirit run around telling the Holy Father that the church is teaching heresy? If that’s the case, then Jesus lied to St. Peter when he gave him the keys to the kingdom.

“Let every soul be subject to higher powers: for there is no power but from God: and those that are, are ordained of God. Therefore he that resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist, purchase to themselves damnation.” – St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 13:1-2

I would suggest you look up Canons 68-70 of Lateran IV and see if you wonder why virtually the Church ignored those canons. I can’t give you a saint that I can think of that resisted a Council since they all had anathemas attached to the important decrees. Can you point to the anathemas of Vatican II?

You seem to have this technique of avoiding an actual point and moving onto something else. The fact that the St. Paul example is used does not mean the SSPX are Protestants or that they deny papal authority any more than St. Paul. The fact that JPII is no St. Peter when it comes to character is the relevant argument.

Re: St. Thomas. Instead of actually dealing with the argument of St. Thomas concerning obedience. You are going on a tangent about Bishop Tissier noting the differences between Thomism and Phenomenology.

Then you go into the tactic of personal attacks citing Luther as analogous when it is not an apt comparison.

Romano Amerio is correct and Archbishop LeFebvre preceded him by decades by complaining about Vatican II’s attack on the power of the Pope (See Ralph Wiltgen’s the Rhine flows into the Tiber) And the SSPX didn’t write that horrid encyclical Ut Unum Sint which puts the authority of the Pope up for dismantling by non-Catholics. Just as liberal Presidents of the U.S. tend to hate the U.S. Liberal Popes tend to hate the office of the Pope and they falter in their performance.

I don’t know what you’re talking about since I do consider the FSSP traditionalists as well as many diocesan priests, unfortunately they are under the same persecution that LeFebvre faced. The only difference being they are not bishops. The liberals were perfectly willing to let the “trads” die out so long as there would be no more traditional formation of priests. LeFebvre effectively ended that.

William of Ockham, you say? The same William of Ockham that the good Jesuit Fathers taught me when I was at Jesuit school and then at the Gregorian University, Rome. If the Jesuits teach him at Rome he cannot be ‘unreconciled’ or a purveyor of heretical doctrine – can he? I am happy to be a Papist but I will not become a papolator. If it comes from Rome or the Bishop of Rome’s curia then it must be right and we may not question it? Utter rot and bad theology, but I am sure you would agree with me – and all the Popes prior to Paul VI – on that one, wouldn’t you? Thomas Acquinas is no joke – as many of us came to understand throughout our time at seminary.

Why, you are avoiding addressing the main point. To use the Lateran Council is such a slate of hand, anyone who rejected this order at that time was disobedient and must be excommunicated. As Council decisions of this kind are ruling the relationship between Church and the situation in the society, this kind of decisions can be changed when the social circumstances are changed. But nobody was rightfully against these decision as long as the Church doesn’t decide otherwise.

Your argument is simply invalid.

Dear Scott

The point appears to elude you. It is not about kneeling at communion, it is not about ‘holy priests’ or ‘presbyters’, it is not about the so-called Novus Ordo Missae being celebrated reverently and in a dignified manner and it is not, really, about Latin. It is about ‘lex orandi lex credendi’ and about a sacrament signifying what it contains and containing what it signifies. The Novus Ordo does not signify the Catholic theology of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It is ambiguous – deliberately so – and tends toward giving a protestant understanding of the Lord’s Supper, which gradually will replace the Catholic Mass in the eyes and Psyche of whatever remaining ‘catholic’ attend it. It is simple: No sacrifice = no need for a sacrificing Priest = no need for an altar but merely a table for a commemorative meal over which the Presbyter presides and in which the People of God exercise their Universal priesthood and so they, not any Priest, worship God in their way instead of in His. It is stuff for which Luther would have eagerly burned Bugnini as a heretic and which has already been condemned by the Church. Archbishop Cranmer made the skeleton for the Novus Ordo Missae during the brief reign of Edward VI in England and Cranmer did it all with love, beauty and reverence. All the love, all the beauty and all the reverence did not make Cranmer’s liturgy either redolent of Catholicism or sacramentally valid. same goes for the Novus Ordo, Scott. Sorry, it is not about feelings and reverence – it is about theology or the lack of it.

They are against the Church’s commitment to Religious Freedom. A gentleman I know talked personally confidentially to Pater Schmidberger, the Prior of German SSPX, they reject in the most stubborn way this teaching in Lumen Gentium. If I remember correctly, that is why Monsig. Lebvres rejected to be incorporated into the Church when the then Cardinal Ratzinger offered him a viable option.

Neither mad, bad nor dangerous, merely tedious.

Did you mean ‘sleight of hand’, Teresa? Why so strident? You sound totally bitter ………;-)

OK, enough of all of this bitching and complaining. If Jesus was obedient, even obedient to death on the cross, then why can’t the SSPX rbe obedient to the Holy Father?

Get over it!

It’s like going to confession every time I hear you speak
You’re makin’ the most of your losin’ streak
Some call it sick, but I call it weak

You drag it around like a ball and chain
You wallow in the guilt; you wallow in the pain
You wave it like a flag, you wear it like a crown
Got your mind in the gutter, bringin’ everybody down
Complain about the present and blame it on the past
I’d like to find your inner child and kick it’s little ass

Get over it
Get over it
All this bitchin’ and moanin’ and pitchin’ a fit
Get over it, get over it

Thank you for the answers. For me the old Latin Mass seems far more ambiguous and theologically vague because most people can’t speak Latin! The priest could be saying anything, but thanks to the Novus Ordo my ignorant heart saw and heard the true meaning from the first moment I entered a Catholic church, thank God. As I said in a different thread, it was the disunity of the SSPX that later caused a stumbling block for me, far more so than Vatican II.

PS: Forgive the typographical errors……

“Dialogue” and “conversations” are novelities inthe Church. . “Negotiation” of the faith is anathema, and “dialogue” and “conversations” are only euphemisms for “negotiation”. Debate and arguments are the only ways to truly settle a dispute, especially concerning matters of faith, because the faith is non-negotiable. Today, you say “argument” to anyone, they believe you are engaging in a moral wrong. Why are you arguing, they will ask. Are you “angry”. The only answer to such a silly question is, “if I seem angry I am.” It is only then that they will finally ask you the pertinent question, which is “why”. “Argument” is not a dirty word, and until there is an appreciation of its value, we will remain in this malaise and will negotiate the faith away. Today, we salute ourselves because we do not “argue” about matters of religion. Instead, we argue about important things, like which restaurant we wish to go to. The next war will not be about “religion”. It will be about the Iranians creating an environmental hazard because they are not dusting their furniture properly. In ten years, this will not be a hyperbolic statement.

Jesus was obedient to the Father because the God is the only being who warrants absolute obedience. We owe only God absolute obediences, we owe the Pope “true” obedience as Vatican I states.

A person giving the Pope absolute obedience turns the Pope into God and breaks the first commandment.

Again, you don’t know what you’re referring to. I stated that the FSSP undergoes some of the similar persecutions LeFebvre went through prior to 1988. Protocol 1411 being one and the refusal of the FSSP their own bishop after almost 23 years is still relevant. There are other ways the bishops coral and limit the effectiveness of the FSSP and other priests offering the TLM in the post-Summorum Pontificum period.

Re: Lateran IV and the canons against the Jews, the Church as a body rejected those, they obviously while a resolution to a problem was obviously not the resolution that would have been blessed by God.

Now, what is invalid is your argument that Vatican II demands the same level of obedience simply because it’s a Council. When in reality it makes no demands, makes no anathemas, and engages in assertions that are demonstrably false or irrelevant 5 decades later.

Are you going to get back to the original point becing St. Thomas’ explication of threefold obedience or not?

Dear Gerard,

I think it likely you are right on the points you make. It is likely that those who call the shots do not want the SSSP to have ‘their own Bishop’. Their hope seems to be that ‘traditionalism’ will wither away and leave them alone on the ecclesial field, free to impose their will, God forbid. If I am reading your Lateran IV comment aright, I do not see how it is honestly possible to disagree with what you write. Here comes that much abused noun, again, our old friend ‘obedience’. It is without doubt the teaching of the Church that there is more than one ‘kind’ or degree or quality of ‘obedience’. Vatican II neither demanded nor merits that we obediently prostrate ourselves before it, its participators, the Pope who promulgated its ‘decrees’ and most certainly does not require that we suspend our God-given critical faculties when discussing it. Vatican II made no claim to infallibility and received no such charism. Where Vatican II declares anything that is, may be or could be seen to be contrary to the teaching of the Church all catholics may safely ignore it. In fact, they must ignore it.

I, too, await the demanded/requested ‘explication’ of St Thomas’s teaching on obedience. The Jesuits at the Gregorian taught on it extensively. I have my lecture notes before me as I write. They are very clear and copiously annotated so I am eager to hear what anyone else has to say about ‘obedience’ according to Acquinas.

God bless

Russell Berry

Dear Mr Regan

I am sorry you wrote ‘don’t pick me up on the wording – I really don’t care’ for it is precisely that sentiment that has got us where we are, today viz in the ecclesial doo-doo!

Your proposed change to Canon Law is interesting. It would be quite uncharitable, coming from the new church of universal ‘lurve’ but not at all inconsistent since it is this new ecclesial body that seeks to be ‘free’ from nasty things like Canon Law but seeks to use it as a stick to beat all-comers who disagree with it. The ‘ecumenical church’ whose ‘presbyters’ dishonestly ‘celebrate’ a neo-protestant liturgy with honest protestants would be telling good catholics to take a hike while getting into bed with heretics. In other words, Mr Regan, your interesting suggestion would, in practice, be rank hypocrisy, would it not?

Your natural sequitur ‘Then, the Church should declare SSPX to be in formal schsim’ is entirely in conflict with new Vatican policy. Be careful or you will be accused of sinning against the unity of the church!

I see very little of the love of the new church in what you write. I see nothing of the Gospel. Either you are hiding your love and your charity under a very big bushel or you need to point out where it is being kept. If you have any charity or love, Mr Regan, you have a Christian duty to show it. Nothing approaching either can be detected in what you write.

God bless you, Mr Regan. You need His blessing as much as I, I see.

In Christo

Russell Berry

Dear Teresa

You wrote: ‘The Council documents can be re-interpreted, that is, in the light of Tradition’ and in my earlier reply I should have asked ‘Why do or should authentic documents of the magisterium need or require to ‘be re-interpreted’? Should they not ring clearly as authentic and not require to be ‘re-interpreted’? Do they need to be be ‘re-tuned’ to make them sound different? What tinkering about with them will make them appear more in tune with the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. Do they not speak for themselves? Did the Council and Paul VI misspeak themselves? Did they not mean what they said, say, about religious liberty? Does ‘Gaudium et Spes’ need editing the better to make it conform to Catholicism ? Is the suggestion to keep the substance but change the appearance? Or should we jettison what is not Catholic? You can put lipstick on a pig but piggy will remain piggy, Teresa. Is that not so?

God bless!

Russell Berry