Yesterday I saw a bumper stick on a pickup truck that said something like “Return to Catholic Tradition – Reject Vatican II”. This sparked my curiosity, in part since it seems like it’s about 40 years too late. I tried to look up what the issues were with it, but the websites I did find were rather over-the-top. For Instance, “Pope” John Paul is apprently the anti-Christ. And they assume you know quite a lot about the issues already, which I don’t, since I spent all my Catholic years after the relevant changes.
It is not so much that they are 40 years late as that they have never given up in the ensuing 40 years.
The most prominent among them was the French Msgr. Lafebvre who (helped?) establish(ed) the Fraternite de St. Pius X, (in the States, known as the Society of St. Pius X) and eventually took on the role of heresiarch, ordaining priests in his tradition against the direct orders of the Vatican. (Interestingly, while the Vatican spent enormous amounts of energy tracking down and punishing people on the Left, they spent just about as much effort begging Lefebvre to not quit and making accomodations for his group by trying to modify directives from Vatican II to make him feel more comfortable.)
The primary complaint is that Vatican II made clear that Ex Ecclesiam non salus (Outside the Church, no salvation) had never meant that only Catholics were going to heaven. (This was not new with Vatican II; it was ancient doctrine, but there were always some people who wanted it to mean that they could damn Protestants to hell on their own, and Vatcian II was a real blow to their beliefs.) They also had problems with changes to the liturgy, of course, pretty much along the lines of “If Latin was good enough for Jesus, it should be good enough for us.”
I am really not being very respectful of their opinions, here, but I have had a number of encounters with these folks and their ability to ignore history and twist pronouncements of the Magesterium to suit their needs, along with their rather hate-filled attacks on other people while the church was handling them with kid gloves, tends to erode my usual attempts at even-handedness.
In their defense, I would say that they were certainly brought up to believe in the perpetual and unchanging nature of the church (showing their ignorance of history) as a defense against the “onslaughts” of the Protestant Reformation. (This figures prominently in their psychology, as well. Several of the strongest groups in the U.S. have members old enough to remember the near-persecution of Catholics in this country and I have heard, (although I have never ascertained that it is true), that Lefebvre grew up in a strongly Huguenot section of France. Much of their theology provides a cultural protection from perceived enemies–who now include much of the church that they thought would provide them shelter.
A web search on “society Pius X” will bring up a host of information about them. Not all of the St. Pius X people have gone so far as to break with the church, but they are all mad about the “changes.”
Yeah. Some Catholics reject quite a bit of what comes out of the Holy See these days.
I know otherwise “good Catholics” who practice birth control, engage in extramarital sex, condone homosexuality, and all manner of other things that the RCC feels are bad.
Hmm. Is it just a coincidence that I, a non-Catholic, can only think of “sins” that revolve around sex? What else has the church condemned recently?
Nearly every Christian sect is defined by how it broke off from an older existing Christian sect on some matter of dogma. (How many church schisms do you have to sit through to get to the point where you believe that David Koresh was the Messiah?) If the Catholic church makes a major change in its cathechism (over, say, abortion or the ordination of women), it’s seen as a commercial grab to keep/attract young congregants, or as a slap in the face to the old ones. (“I had nine kids in twenty years and NOW they say the pill is hunky dory!? Those bastards from the parish don’t get dime one from me from now on!”)
Accepting Vatican II meant swallowing a lot of major changes. Most Catholics had no trouble letting the Latin mass go; the ones who busted their humps to learn Latin in school had the side benefit of learning Italian and Spanish with greater ease.
But the Catholics who publicly blamed Jews for the Crucifixion (Father Coughlin’s Amen Corner), even in the harsh light of the then-recent Holocaust, had a hard time backing away from statements they’d made earlier and the social scorn they’d carried as a result; their habitual antisemitism had just lost a major source of its legitimacy. Agreeing with Vatican II on that point was, in effect, saying “My gross bigotry has no justification, and I bear some degree of responsibility for the murder of six million Jews.” That’s more than most people want to own up to in one sitting. It’s hard to admit you’re wrong about something that big and that heinous.
Church doctrine is sold to the faithful as the abvsolute Will of God, and not too many congregants buy that God’s Will is affected by Gallup Polls and Q-ratings. Yeah, some Catholics reject Vatican II.
While it is legitimate to note that some Catholics perceive Vatican II as having been an attempt to keep up with current popular opinion, it should be noted that this simply demonstrates the ignorance upon which some of those opinions are based. Nothing that came out of Vatican II was “new” in the sense of having originated in the 1960s. The liturgical discussions had been going on (more in Europe than the U.S.) since before the 1920s; the issues regarding human rights were, in part, restatements of ancient doctrine addressing issues that became more current (and were addressed by the church) in the 1920s and 1930s); the issues of greater lay participation in the church went back at least 40 years (with some of the seminal discussions extending back into the 19th century).
So, while many of the people who had not expended the energy to follow deeper religious discussion were surprised by the “new” teachings, none of the actual pronouncement were actually new stuff–and none were driven by Gallup polls. I recall my mom, (who went to a Catholic college prep girls’ high school in Indianapolis, graduating in 1934), reading each of the Vatican papers as they were released and saying “This isn’t new! We discussed this when I went to school.”
What/When/Where did this occur? Aside from the loyalty issue of JFK (a fair shot, given the Church’s historic position that the Pope was the sole legitimate ruler of earth), I am aware of the 1880’s and 1920’s being not real pleasant times for Catholics (think Masons and KKK), but have there been more recent unpleasantnesses? It’s not like there was Reformation II and no one told me, right?
This is a stupid question for me to ask, but…if you’re a Catholic who forms a “splinter” religious group in opposition to Vatican policies, doesn’t that sort of make you a protestant?
Hey! No fair! We were protestants first! They have to be “ain’tgonna-ists” or something. No, seriously, if you want to say the Pope is wrong, I’m sure the Methodists will take you. If not them, hey, the Unitarians will take anybody!;j
More a matter of semantics and POV Ranchoth. The splinter group may see the larger as the ones who fell away. I’ll say no more on the topic lest it get thrown into GD but that’s probably inevitable given the subject.
Rancoth, according to Walloon’s link, many of them still believe in the papacy and follow it’s policies. The tricky bit is that the current “pope” is actually an antipope, and they don’t have to heed him. A fine line to walk, but I’m sure they don’t consider themselves Protestants.
While people may bristle at doing it this way, the best way to define who is ‘Protestant’ and who is a splinter group in ‘schism’ is from the Roman Catholic point of view.
For centuries, there have been groups that have ‘left’ being in union with the Bishop of Rome (the Pope). Some groups got thrown out (excommunicated) for heresy.
Now, this group is in schism if:
this breakaway group has a bishop with them, who was at one time validly ordained. They can now make more of their own bishops and priests for their breakaway group. (For only a bishop can ordain other bishops or priests.) And,
the bishops and priests of this breakaway group keep ordaining new clergy the correct way with the correct theology of ordination. Rome has to recognize the power of validly ordained bishops to exercise their power to ordain, for, the power to ordain rests within the person of the bishop, and can not be undone by Rome. Rome can still keep them on the excommunication list, but can not declare the ordination invalid.
Now this breakaway group is Protestant if:
They have no validly ordained bishops or priests. Thus, no one can validly perform the sacraments of the Eucharist or Holy Orders. Or,
They have a validly ordained bishop who changes the ritual or theology of ordination to such a point that Rome can say, “Ha, you didn’t do it right, so it’s invalid.” Then, after a few generations, that breakaway group will have no more validly ordained clergy.
So, e.g., when the bishops of Eastern Europe broke from Rome in the great schism at the turn of the first millenium and created the Orthodox churches, those bishops kept the theology and practice of ordination and thusRome keeps considering them valid.
And when Luther and the Protestants broke away from Rome in the 1500s, they changed the theology and practice of ordination so much, that Rome considered it invalid. (This is a sticky point with the high Anglican communions, since, in reality, there wasn’t such a great shift in ordination theology and practice to warrant Rome’s conclusion.)
There was a famous splinter group (schismatic) over Vatican I’s infallibility teaching. This is the ‘Old Catholic’ church. Mostly centered in Europe.
LeVebre’s group mentioned abvove, does have valid bishops doing valid ordinations, and so, they are schismatic.
There are many, many tiny splinter groups over Vatican II who do not have a valid bishop with them. They’ll wind up Protestant over time, if they continue to exist.
Compared to the huge number of Catholics worldwide, these groups truly are ‘splinters’ in the literal sense of the word.
