Commonweal - Perspective of Reality

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JMJ

The Slide Rule of Not Full Communion

The Commonweal has an interesting (albeit warped) article that gets a few things right and ... a bunch of things wrong.

effort at reconciliation with Catholic traditionalists who had broken with the church after the Second Vatican Council.

Wrong: It was not an 'effort at reconciliation' it was a condition for discussions.  The 'broken' from the Church is a little old.  A person cannot be condemned for a law that comes into being after the fact. If it was an act of schism to consecrate a bishop without pontifical mandate, then it would have been in the canonical warning that was received shortly before the consecrations.  So ... the schismatic act is a fantasy.  No schismatic act, no schism. It is (thankfully) that simple.

Benedict’s 2007 motu proprio on the liturgy, which relaxed restrictions on the use of the Tridentine rite

Wrong: What he did was acknowledge that it was NEVER abrogated and always legal.

Despite criticizing those obsessed with liturgy

Wrong and Right: Yes Pope Francis does criticize those who love the old liturgy. No, this is not about the liturgy. I guess they forgot what they wrote in the preceding paragraphs.  This is about doctrine - beliefs.  The liturgy is simple a manifestation or if you will embodiment of that belief.

Instead, he has restructured the church’s relations with traditionalists: first during the preparation of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, when he recognized the faculties of SSPX priests to hear confessions (later extended beyond the Jubilee), then in 2017 when he recognized their faculties for the celebration of SSPX marriages. But a canonical normalization of the status of the SSPX as a “personal prelature” within the Catholic Church—an idea first floated in traditionalist circles in 2012—remains very unlikely. One reason for this is the election in July 2018 of a new SSPX superior, the forty-seven-year-old Italian hardliner Davide Pagliarani.

 Wrong: Oh boy, wrong on a number of points.  The "personal prelature" was first presented in an early form in the early 2000's. The 'restructuing' of relations are basically concessions as any negotiator will tell you.  Calling the current SG a hardliner implies that Bishop Fellay was not a hardliner.  Once again the liberals align with the resistance.  They just can't seem to grasp that the SSPX leadership is guided by ... wait for it ... Catholic principles.  The author seems to have lost that little bit of perspective.

The new motu proprio shows us how Francis sees Catholic traditionalism. He believes that since 2007 Rome has done everything possible to normalize relations with the SSPX, but he also refuses to yield on the development of the tradition.

Wrong: If he believed that he had done everything possible, he would give up.  No there is still a lot of room for discussion about doctrine.  In fact, Pope Francis adds to the volumes up for discussion regularly.

Interestingly, this is how the traditionalists themselves, including the SSPX, have interpreted Francis’s message. Above all, Francis will not accept the SSPX’s rejection of Vatican II as a legitimate council of the Catholic Church. 

Wrong: I quickly read the french article and I don't think it means what they think it means. 

And what he won’t accept in the SSPX he also won’t accept in traditionalists in communion with Rome. The new motu proprio signals that the traditionalists can continue to have the preconciliar liturgy, but they cannot keep the preconciliar theology that usually goes with their liturgical taste. 

Wrong: It doesn't say that anywhere in there and so I'm not certain where the author got that bit.  The fact is that Francis can't change the pre-conciliar theology because much of it is simply DOGMA.  Even changing doctrine that has been held for hundreds of years is a bit of stretch.

This is Francis’s pragmatic way of finessing the ancient principle of lex orandi, lex credendi (“the law of praying is the law of believing”). A strict doctrinal application of that principle would seem to require an abrogation of Summorum pontificum, but this is pastorally impossible. After all, the author of that earlier motu proprio, Benedict XVI, is now pope emeritus and is still living in the Vatican. And while the traditionalist movement has become more fragmented in the past decade, it has also become one of the faces of the intra-Catholic resistance against Francis’s pontificate.

Wrong: A strict doctrinal application of that principle would require an abrogation of the Novus Ordo.  Otherwise the author is admitting that there was a rupture at V2.

The Lefebvrites are now considered more fully part of the Catholic Church than they were under John Paul II and Benedict XVI: a peculiar form of ecumenism has developed for and among those traditionalist Catholics who do not believe in ecumenism. 

Wrong: One either is or is not Catholic.  This slide rule of Catholicism is simply false.

Roman Catholicism today is a world of shifting boundaries; old categories are being redefined. In recent years, it has not always been clear where exactly Catholic traditionalism stops being just a sensibility or a liturgical preference and becomes a schismatic tendency leading toward the position of the SSPX. 

Wrong: A person doesn't get to redefine reality because they don't like it ... or are insanely modern Catholic (iMC - copyright).  As noted earlier, this is not about liturgical preference, this is about core beliefs of the Catholic Faith - ie Dogma.

His motu proprio getting rid of Ecclesia Dei is one of the clearest statements of the church’s trajectory under this pontificate: pastoral pragmatism, a firm commitment to conciliar doctrinal development, and a rejection of the traditionalist revaluation of Vatican II. This pope knows that traditionalism is not going away any time soon, and he is even willing to accommodate it where he can, but he will not give an inch on Vatican II and its binding value for the Catholic Church. 

Wrong: It took the author a who lot of word to  trot out the 'binding character' of the Second Vatican Council.  We Trads don't just believe it has little binding character ... we know it.  It was not a doctrinal council it was a pastoral council and obviously that pastoral situation that necessitated the great obfuscation of doctrine is long past.

Now we need a doctrinal council to clean up the mess made by every Pope since Pope Pius XII.

Well this has been a good rant which I haven't had to time to do in a long time. I'm glad to see that the commonweal is still not looking out for the common good.

I guess the liberals still want to have things their way and we trads still want to have things the Right way!

P^3