I pray for the full re-integration of the SSPX. I was pleased that Bishop Fellay had a two and a half hour meeting with Cardinal Levada yesterday and seems to have been sent off to reconsider what the SSPX phrase "the errors of the Council". I really do think that the Church needs the SSPX but I believe the SSPX needs the Church more.
I have a simple Englishman's faith, that goes along with King Oswiu at the Synod of Whitby, who asked the Celtic bishops, "When I die, who will open to me the gates of heaven, will it be Columba or will it be Peter? The Celtic bishops of course had to answer that it would be Peter, and became Catholic. The same question has to be put to the SSPX bishops, union with Peter is not about anything less than salvation itself.
Yes, of course God can choose to save us outside of visible Communion with the Pope but as Catholics we know that full and visible Communion is God's plan and desire.
Rorate carries an interview with Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais which I find shocking in its arrogance and presumption and in its recklessness towards the salvation of souls. I have no doubt that Archbishop Lefebvre chose the four bishops he consecrated, not to lead the SSPX but to dispense that sacraments. In this interview one can see why, and why the Holy See intends to deal with the bishops individually.
As much as one desires the communion of all humanity to the Church one has to accept that for some this will never be.
The union of Christians cannot be fostered otherwise than by promoting the return of the dissidents to the one true Church of Christ, which in the past they so unfortunately abandoned; return, we say to the one true Church of Christ which is plainly visible to all and which by the will of her Founder forever remains what He Himself destined her to be for the common salvation of men. ...No one is in the Church of Christ, and no one remains in it, unless he acknowledges and accepts with obedience the authority and power of Peter and his legitimate successors... Therefore, to this apostolic See, founded in the City which Peter and Paul, the Princes of the apostles, consecrated with their blood, to this See which is the `root and matrix of the Catholic Church', may our dissidentsons return; let them do so, not with the thought and hope that `the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth', willsacrifice the integrity of the faith, but, on the contrary, with the intention ofsubmitting to her authority and government..." Pope Pius XI: 1927 Encyclical Letter Mortalium animosUltimately the issue isn't about the teaching of Vatican II, it is about communion with Peter: ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia, ibi Deus, (where Peter is there is the Church and there is God). For some members of the SSPX there is mystical Church, a spiritual Rome that only the pure and elect can see, that is not what God has given us but a messy, fish smelling, sweaty crewed barque of Peter.
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