And it is on that last point that we seem to disagree.
I do not posit that the Pope is an anti-Semite, or even that all of the SPXX group are. But Vatican 2 and its Dignitatis Humanæ and Nostra Ætate declarations represented a major shift in how the Church interfaced with others. They represented a change in the climate of the Church from that which had facilitated anti-Semitism and acts of evil in the Church’s name for many many years into an organization interested in developing mutually respectful relations with those of other faiths. The Traditionalists have stood steadfastly against those moves and I find it impossible to read these recent moves as anything but as signs that the Pope is willing to water down interpretation of those declarations in order to bring these Traditionalists back in the tent. He may desire to have good relations with those of other faiths but he desires to reconnect with the SPXX group more. And he really cannot have both without their renouncing their objections to those declarations.
Diminishing the power of those clear declarations will again foster a climate that allows for, even facilitates, the hate of others, including Jews. Refusing to stand by silently as that occurs is not taking the ball and going home. It is merely making sure that the unavoidable consequences of actions that are occurring are understood.
If i did not find the SSPX crowd boring, I would have known about Williamson a long time ago.
On the other hand, it is very likely that the pope spends less time on Google than we do.
There is a medium-sized brouhaha in the church, right now, with a number of people claiming that the pope’s advisors really were not paying attention. One crowd handles the attempts at reconciliation with the SSPX group and a different bunch is in charge of the ongoing attempts to encourage better relations with Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and others. The second group is currently hopp9ng mad with (somewhat) veiled accusations that the SSPX facilitators are either utterly incompetent or that they maliciously omitted some of the information about Williamson from their reports to try to keep the talks from getting bogged down in what they considered side issues.
I have no inside information on those matters. I think there are different things going on among a lot of different groups:
The pope wants to heal the divisions in the church;
the pope also wants to continue to extend rapprochement to people outside the church;
the pope relies on the various congregations to provide him the information he needs to achieve both goals;
the pope may or may not be up on areas outside his particular areas of expertise, although it looks as though he is not;
each congregation or society has its own agenda;
the pope has not demonstrated an awareness of the politics surrounding the congregations.
(He appears to be a pretty bright academic, but he has demonstrated no sure grasp of communication and seems to have been isolated in his ivory tower.)
My guess is that if the pope had talked to a few people outside the SSPX reconciliation team, (like, just about any German bishop), he would have gotten a seriously different set of advice regarding Williamson. (I have no idea how the Germans feel about the SSPX bunch, in general.) We cannot know that he would have followed that advice, but his insistence that Williamson recant leads me to believe that he would have insisted on some sort of retraction by Williamson before the lifting of his particular excommunication although he would have probably continued on for the other three bishops.
I do not believe that this point was “the” major one. In 38 years of stumbling across statements and protests from the SSPX bunch, I have never seen that at the core of their complaints. It is one serious dispute among several. It is being played up in the press, now, because it bears so closely on the damage that the Williamson affair has done, but if you read all the charges and counter-charges between the church and the SSPX bunch over the years, that would show up as simply “one more” dispute, not the central dispute.
It is easy to view that as the central issue when the news outlets always focus on that issue, (in the context of the current hoopla), but reading all the texts for all the intervening years would not present that in the same light.
Huerta88, the Crusades weren’t all about us either. Nor was the Inquisition. Nor were a myriad of other events that the Church was complicit with. They were not about us, although maybe they were about not-us to some degree.
Tom, we’ve had a long thread here and I have learned much about the Traditionalists from links provided within. So far all I’ve read has portrayed the conflict to be primarily over two issues about Vatican 2: liturgical changes; and relations to other religions including Jews. The Pope has already moved in their direction regarding liturgical changes. What other issues have they had that they hold as important as those two?
I hate to say it, but that’s a result of your bigotry and not bigotry within the church. Sarahfeena has amply explained to you what excommunication means. If you understood ANYTHING about Christianity you would understand what being severed from communion means, and therefore would not wish it upon a Christian just because you find the person vile and distasteful. This is a sense of entitlement on your part and a highly disrespectful position FROM YOU. The church has denounced the behavior, but as it has nothing to do with the excommunication should have no impact upon whether or not they excommunicate someone. What you are pissed off at is that a religion won’t change it’s core tenets to satisfy your own piques. Past victimization of your ancestors (not even you) does not give you license to anything and doesn’t make everyone beholden to you. You won’t accept the denunciations, you expect internal Catholic disputes to conform to you and your beliefs.
The bigotry in this case is from Williams and from the Jews who are pissed off about it. The Pope has displayed no bigotry whatsoever and has bent over backwards to maintain good relations with Jews. If you and others want to spit in his face over it, then it is not HIM that doesn’t want good relations but you.
DSeid Liberal multi-cultural political correctness as was the trend in the late 20th century seems to be on the wane, and people are going to have to start dealing with real cultural issues, as history reasserts itself. Being completely inflexible due to righteous indignation over past transgressions against your people doesn’t really advance your cause.
Again mswas what exactly have the Traditionalists done that showed they were ready to be back in Communion with the Church?
The act that earned the excommunication was the elevation to Bishop status and that act stands. There has been to my or your knowledge no regrets expressed for having taken that act. That act was the culmination of a schism that grew out of the groups unhappiness with Vatican 2 (and I await Tom’s additional information regarding what their other major issues were other than liturgical and relationships with other faiths) and they have expressed no regret over those positions.
They haven’t moved and yet now they are back ini the tent. The only conclusion is that the tent moved to include them.
Yes, “history reasserts itself” and the tolerance for others that you call “political correctness” is “on the wane”. Given the nature of that history you’ll have to deal with the fact that some us will not be passive as that happens.
DSeid Political Correctness is not about tolerance in any way shape or form, it is about resentment. Tolerance goes only so far as one is part of a suspect class that has been deemed as a ‘victim’ for purposes of self-aggrandizement so that people can feel like the defenders of the weak, or they themselves receive some kind of political influence from the politics of victimization. Tolerance in the politically correct environment is a one way street. In America if you are white and male you are responsible for the victimization of everyone, deserve no toleration and should keep your mouth shut as you are ‘master of the universe’. Of course it’s irrelevant what your actual social class is, you are deemed ethnically as part of a perpetrator category. The same is true of the Catholic church in this regard. The Catholic church is a perpetrator, unworthy of tolerance.
As I understand it what was agreed upon was that the re-communicated sect was that they wouldn’t act as bishops, and in some cases can’t even act in lower priestly functions. So they did submit to this. When you say ‘they haven’t moved’, what you are really saying is, ‘they didn’t do the only thing that matters to me’.
If the Catholic Church is moving more toward a Catholic church of state power, how exactly does being a belligerent actor toward the church benefit your position? How do the politics of resentment benefit you? What preparations are you making for the day when, “but the Shoah, but 1492, but Pogroms!”, no longer have the visceral impact that they do? Do you really think that taking an intractable stand is going to make a difference? The church’s mission is to bring people into communion with Christ, if you are not accepting of that, then you are intolerant against Christianity. It’s really that simple, that binary. Christians think that Jesus, a Jew was the messiah. You don’t have to believe that, but by asking them not to pray for Jews to accept the messiah you are asking them to abandon a core belief. It’s a ridiculous thing to expect, and shows that tolerance is merely a buzzword, a rhetorical tool, as it only goes one direction.
Here’s an op-ed about the piece that goes in depth. It’s from a political commentator who I often disagree with, but when he talks about Jewish-Catholic relations that’s when he is at his most interesting and insightful.
As he points out the Pope is actually rather Philo-semitic, but the efforts he does make are ignored. There is a reality that underlies this, that there are some intractable theological disputes that divide religions, that is why they are separate religions, and not part of the same religion. Co-Religious understanding is a very delicate process, you work around the bases that you can work with, as there should be a recognition that there are intractable disputes that are not in any way resolved through belligerant one-sided politically correct rhetoric.
I think part of the problem here, as I said before, is that if you have no background in the theology of the Church, there are things that inherently don’t make sense. For example, if the Pope is in charge of the whole thing, why can’t he just “unmake” a bishop if he wants to? Well, it doesn’t work like that, and that’s not based on whims, it’s based on 2000 years of philosophy and theology. The fact is (fact meaning, how the Church sees it), God makes a bishop, and once that is done, it can’t be undone. A bishop is elevated to that position by another bishop, and the ordaining bishop is supposed to have permission from the Vatican. If they go ahead without that permission, they can be excommunicated for that act, but that doesn’t take away the fact that the ordination happened. The Church can’t “undo” it…they have no authority over God. What they CAN do is prevent those bishops from acting as bishops…that is, doing their job. To bring it down to a base analogy, a person can lose their children, say, in a custody battle, or by the state if they are an unfit parent, but that doesn’t change their biological status as a parent…there are some things that can’t be undone.
This doesn’t necessarily cover all situations…there are certain situations where the ordination is INVALID, meaning it didn’t actually happen, vs. being ILLICIT, meaning it happened but without Vatican approval. For instance, when a woman is ordained a priest, I believe that is considered to be invalid.
Priestly ordination is not the only sacrament that this is relevant to, incidentally. There are many rules of the Mass, for instance, that are broken every day in churches around the world. These masses are illicit…meaning, not Vatican approved, but still “count” as a Mass (and a reception of Communion) to the congregation. There are some egregious violations of the rules, however, which would render the Mass invalid. The difference in this case is in an invalid mass it would be assumed that the consecration of the communion (turning it into the Body & Blood of Christ) did not actually happen, and the congregants are only consuming bread and wine. In an illicit mass, the consecration does happen, and everyone gets their communion.
I think that one of the points that mswas and others have been trying to make is that current polictial correctness doesn’t really have an influence over most of this. They haven’t change the rules on how you make a bishop. or whether you can unmake one, and those rules are not likely to change. A man can leave the priesthood of his own volition and get married, and he will still be a priest. You can excommuncate a priest, and he is still a priest. Excommuncation…well, I think that word does not mean what you think it means (despite all efforts to explain it to you).
I mentioned upthread that I was trying to find out about this…there is an SSPX church near me, and since I’ve never been to a Latin Mass, I wanted to check it out. Couldn’t find a straight answer anywhere on the Internet at the time.
Well, while you have characterized it as “relations to other religions including the Jews,” the Jews played a pretty minor role in the arguments over the last forty years. Most of the criticiam from SSPX was against outreach efforts toward the Anglican Communion and to Lutherans. Beyond that was a whole list of issues regarding dogma in which the SSPX folks insited that their particular interpretation of dogma, (based on their particular reading of the documents from the Council of Trent), was the only possible truth. This included, but is not limited to, such matters as:
their perspective that Extra Ecclesiam nulla salvus was an almost absolute truth that only Catholics could get to heaven–a point rejected by the church long before Vatican II, (the SSPX is a little bit flexible on who they will let in, but they are much stricter than the church as a whole);
a rejection of collegiality promoted by Vatican II, in which authority is recognized as being shared among the members of a group rather than existing only in a top-down hierarchy*;
a rejection of all signs of “Modernism,” (which can be applied to a wide variety of things from accepting the legitimacy of trade unions to an attempt to reconcile the philosophy of Emmanuel Kant with church teachings in the way Aquinas reconciled Aristotle);
a rejection of the underlying theology of the Mass, (which is often erroneously shortened to wanting to hold on to Latin, but goes much deeper in the area of theology regarding the very meaning of the celebration–a point on which Pope Benedict has given no ground).
Collegiality recognizes that a hierarchy is necessary for good order, but insists that the authority inherent in the Church arises from the entire body of the church. Many of the changes announced in the Second Vatican Council were the result of the views of people at the grass roots level of the church–priests, religious, and laity–percolating up to the hierarchy, who considered those changes and implemented many of them. The SSPX folks insist that all Truth can only be handed down from above and they reject anything that they perceive to have arisen from among the people.
Sarahfeena I am sorry that you think I understand it so poorly; I do not. I know that being elevated to Bishop is not something that can be undone and have not claimed otherwise. My question has been what then demonstrates that an individual or group of individuals has placed themselves back within the body of the Church? So far the only answer that I have gotten has been from you: some of them have stated that the excommunication causes them pain. Period.
Reality of course is that rehabilitation is held out as a carrot to motivate changes in attitudes and expressions of attitudes regarding the issues that led to the critical event. A Pope rehabilitates if they believe their has been honest contrition or at least promises to behave as if there was in the future; or if they are willing to move the Church position towards the dissenters POV. They have not changed, they expressed no contrition; instead the Pope has decided that he is willing to take them back in anyway with no change on their part.
mswas’s link confrms what the issue of the schism was:
Spin it how you may, the author is correct that Jews do at least try to be like elephants and not forget. As the author states, it is no shock that there are anti-Semites at all levels of the Church. A Pope has responsibility for his actions and ignorance of the dangers and presence of anti-Semites and of the horrific history of the Church in its relations to Jews is hardly understandable. If it is not important enough to him to consider as he renegotiates the place of Vatican 2 that is his choice. And it is the choice of Jews as to how to react in kind.
. My apologies…I guess I didn’t understand what you meant by:
Well, if I knew any more, I would tell you! But I don’t, and I would venture to say that it’s none of my business. I don’t expect to be privy to private conversations the Pope may have. I think I said before that my guess is that he’s hoping that access to the sacraments will help truly rehabilitate this guy. See, it’s not all just rules & regulations…these guys really believe that the sacrament confers grace on individuals, and strengthens their relationship with God. This, in turn, presumably will help guide them down the right path. If they have let the Pope know that they are sufficiently pained from the lack of access to communion, he might believe that this is an indication that they are ready to reform.
Tom did a much better job than I ever could of laying out all the issues. There’s a lot that changed at Vatican II…it’s a lot deeper than most of us can even get a good grasp of.
As a bit of an aside, I am no expert by any means on Vatican II, having only lived in a post-Vatican II world. However, if you had asked me what I thought the central conflict in the Church is right now, it would be this issue right here. As a typical parish layperson, it’s by far the issue that I have seen cause the most conflict in the day to day operations of the parish, and it’s also the one that I see as a fundamental difference of opinion that seriously could undermine the future of the Church.
I quote this because I think it bears repeating. This is the salient point of why it’s so important. So often religious motivations are difficult to understand because in the west, even the religious speak of religion in secular humanist language and talk about it in terms of systems, law, and political relationships.
I don’t care what religion one is, it is important to me that people become closer to God, and is always a good thing.
The old Latin Mass is indeed beautiful. I’ve been to a few (non-SSPX) Masses in the last few years, and they’re lovely. I have vague memories of the Latin Mass from childhood, too.
The old rite is gaining in popularity, and many dioceses have a church or two that offer the Latin Mass, so you don’t have to turn to the SSPX. I don’t know where you live, but a little poking around the web might turn something up. You might start here: http://www.fssp.com/
Tom I appreciate your post. I do note that from my position relationships with others, including other others, still bespeaks for the attitude to my group as an other. Even if the conversation is focused on another other. I know that sounds confusing but I think you know what I mean.