Sandro Magister has an intriguing piece today about the Second Vatican Council and the possibility of reconciliation of the SSPX.
It might upset some people.
I think that some parts make sense.
A few bits from the larger piece…
The Impossible “Road Map” of Peace with the Lefebvrists
A leading representative of the traditionalist camp lays down the conditions for healing the schism. There are four of them, but three appear impracticable. Fr. Divo Barsotti’s criticisms of Vatican Council II[…]
Fr. Barsotti wrote:
“I am perplexed with regard to the Council: the plethora of documents, their length, often their language, these frightened me. They are documents that bear witness to a purely human assurance more than two a simple firmness of faith. But above all I am outraged by the behavior of the theologians.”
“The Council is the supreme exercise of the magisterium, and is justified only by a supreme necessity. Could not the fearful gravity of the present situation of the Church stem precisely from the foolishness of having wanted to provoke and tempt the Lord? Was there the desire, perhaps, to constrain God to speak when there was not this supreme necessity? Is that the way it is? In order to justify a Council that presumed to renew all things, it had to be affirmed that everything was going poorly, something that is done constantly, if not by the episcopate then by the theologians.”
“Nothing seems to me more grave, contrary to the holiness of God, than the presumption of clerics who believe, with a pride that is purely diabolical, that they can manipulate the truth, who presume to renew the Church and to save the world without renewing themselves. In all the history of the Church nothing is comparable to the latest Council, at which the Catholic episcopate believed that it could renew all things by obeying nothing other than its own pride, without the effort of holiness, in such open opposition to the law of the gospel that it requires us to believe how the humanity of Christ was the instrument of the omnipotence of the love that saves, in his death.”
[…]
How does Radaelli see the healing of this opposition? In his judgment, “it is not the model of Church obedient to dogma that must once again submit to the pope,” but “it is rather the model obedient to the pope that must once again submit to dogma.”
In other words:
“It is not Ecône [editor’s note: the community of the Lefebvrists] that must submit to Rome, but Rome to Heaven: every difficulty between Ecône and Rome will be resolved only after the return of the Church to the dogmatic language that is proper to it.”
In order for this goal to be reached, Radaelli presupposes two things:
– that Rome would guarantee to the Lefebvrists the right to celebrate the Mass and the sacraments exclusively according to the rite of St. Pius V;
– and that the obedience required for Vatican II would be brought back within the limits of its “false-pastoral” language, and therefore be subject to criticisms and reservations.
But before this culmination – Radaelli adds – two other requests would have to be granted:
– the first, advanced in December of 2011 by the bishop of Astana in Kazakistan, Athanasius Schneider, is the publication on the part of the pope of a sort of new “Syllabus,” which would strike with anathemas all of the “modern-day errors”;
– The second, already proposed by the theologian Brunero Gherardini to the supreme magisterium of the Church, is a “revision of the conciliar and magisterial documents of the last half century,” to be done “in the light of Tradition.”
[…]
