Down the street from me, there’s a Catholic church and elementary school. It happens to be the place wherein occured the amusing drama of my baptism, but it was shut down and consolidated with another local parish some years ago. After this occured… well, I’m actually a bit fuzzy on the terminology here. Another group of Catholics moved in, performing the mass in Latin, and with nuns in the traditional pre-Vatican II habit (I see them every now and then).
Anyway, my question is this: Per official Church doctrine, are these and other Catholics who observe the mass in Latin and deviate in other ways from Vatican II, considered to be condemned to Hell for essentially doing things the way they were done for a few thousand years? My limited understanding of the RCC indicates that this might be so–but the understanding -is- quite limited, as despite my baptism, I was never actuallly raised Catholic.
The church has possibly been taken over by the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX). There’s some info here on the SSPX. Opinions differ on whether the SSPX is in schism. I think the official answer is “no”, although I personally wouldn’t attend any of their masses.
Or it may have been taken over by one of the newer, Church-approved traditionalist orders like the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter (FSSP). They’ve been experiencing significant growth in recent years and are always looking for churches that are going vacant where they can set up new traditionalist parishes. I attend mass at one of these churches.
No, not if it’s a Church-approved mass centre. If it’s an SSPX centre - I really don’t know enough of the ins and outs of the SSPX saga and how it relates to canon law to give any sort of opinion.
My suspicion is that it is not, simply because they’ve set up in a church/parish that was vacated by the diocese. Unfortunately, my knowledge is quite limited–I’ve always meant to go down there some Sunday to see/hear a mass performed in Latin (not to mention to see the inside of that church, as I’ve not been in it since I was a baby), but never quite managed to get up and do it.
…
Actually, a quick google search turns up an article on the subject, not only of SSPX (or in this case, SSPV?), but the very church I was asking about. Quite interesting.
I doubt that any church property is ever abandoned. Since someone owns the property, finding the owner will tell you much about what is going on. If the owner is the local Catholic diocese, then I would suspect that the parish is following the path of the FSSP mentioned by Cunctator. If the property is owned by the parish, then my guess would be that the diocese sold them the land and that they are a break-away group. (Since the parish was being closed, anyway, the bishop may have decided the funds were more important than the fealty of the buyers, or the buyers may have gone through a third party to disguise their intentions, or the bishop may be sympathetic to their cause.) In the U.S., at least, all Catholic property is owned by either the incorporated diocese or the incorporated religious order. No parish may own its own property.
Tom – not to disagree with your position, but there are anomalous parishes that are religious corporations holding their own property. The dioceses are slowly bringing them into compliance with the policy you outline. There was an instance of a St. Stanislaus parish in the St. Louis area recently in the news regrding a lawsuit over the conditions under which the diocese took title to the parish from parish trustees.
That could be. I was under the impression that those battles had all been fought in the period 1900 - 1930, but I suppose a few remnants could have held out longer if they had kept their heads down and not made trouble.
On the other hand, a parish that had been “vacated” by the diocese would seem to imply that it had once been owned by the diocese, making it a more traditional situation regarding diocesan ownership.
There are several denominations with “Catholic” in their names who are not affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church. Many of them claim apostolic succession (as do other religions like Greek Orthodox and Anglicans).
For example. here’s a link to the Old Catholic Church which dates their split with the Roman Catholics to 1702. And here’s one for the Independent Catholic Union that makes it clear they are not Roman Catholic.
In other words, a church can be “Catholic” but not “Roman Catholic” in the same way you could have “Lemur’s Democratic Party” and not be affiliated with the Democratic Party.
Technically, Vatican II did not ban mass in Latin, per se; it did recommend an extensively revised form of the liturgy, which eventually took the form of the 1970 Roman Missal, sometimes referred to as the Novus Ordo (a bit of a misnomer, as it’s actually based on ancient, Early Christian practices). Among many other significant changes from previous missals, this form of the mass stresses a more interactive role of the congregation. To make the mass especially interactive, however, vernacular languages were permitted, although not exactly prescribed. Nevertheless, it became pretty much universal custom for priests to say the Novus Ordo mass in their vernacular language, which is what you will see at most Catholic masses today.
As for the pre-1970 liturgy–often referred to as the “Tridentine” rite nowadays, or simply the “Latin mass”–this form of the mass is not generally encouraged by the Church. However, John Paull II granted an indult in 1984 which does permit the Tridentine rite (following the liturgy of the 1962 Missal), at the discretion of local bishops. Thus, a priest is not given free rein to celebrate mass in the Tridentine rite unless the bishop of his diocese has authorized this practice. Furthermore, all Catholic clergy are required to recognize the legitimacy of the Novus Ordo liturgy.
In other words, if the bishop of your diocese allows it, then priests at your local church can say the Tridentine mass (which must be said in Latin, unlike the Novus Ordo which can be said in Latin or in the local vernacular). And the bishop and those priests must recognize the Novus Ordo. If they were to claim that the Novus Ordo mass is not legitimate–for instance, if they say that transubstantiation can only occur in the Tridentine mass–then they’d be in schism, just like the SSPX priests are.
I would defer to our RC Dopers, but my understanding is that being in schism from the Church does not mean you’re hell-bound. In one of the other threads on this topic right now, there’s a quotation from the catechism saying that churches such as the Orthodox and the Anglicans are in imperfect communion with the Roman Catholic church. I don’t think mattters of church organization are mortal sins, are they?
That fight is reappearing, now in the Episcopal (Anglican) churches.
Some right-wing Episcopal parishes are quitting the church over the ordination of an openly gay bishop. Only to discover that legally, the actual church building & land is the property of the local Episcopal bishop. Several have sued, claiming that they, not the bishop, own the property. And despite the legal precedents, some have even won this at their local court.
However, regardless how the various groups within the Anglican communion have organized themselves, the policies of the Catholic Church have been pretty consistent for several hundred years.
The Catholic Encyclopedia (in 1912) presents this information on the Trustee System. The incident in St. Louis to which Poly alluded came about when the lay trustees changed the bylaws of their charter to eliminate “interference” from the Catholic hierarchy. I am not sure how that played out under U.S. law, but it was in direct violation of the church rules under which the trusteeship had originally been established. The CE article to which I’ve linked notes that the rules had been hammered out more definitively in the period 1820 - 1850 (under the same sort of power struggle). It was my impression (although the St. Stas issue in St. Louis proves that there were exceptions of which I was unaware) that various ethnic parishes had tried to flex their independence during the height of the last immigration boom and that they had all been “reined in” by the time of the Depression. It is possible that there are more of these cases than I had been aware–but they tend to be fairly rare. When Cardinal Szoka was busy consolidating ethnic parishes in Detroit in the 1980s, there were rumblings that different parishes were going to assert their “ownership,” but they pretty much all failed as soon as the archdiocese brought out the deeds to the properties.