Yet more SCV – SMOM reactions (for those of you in Columbia Heights, Stato Città Vaticano v Sovereign Military Order of the Knights of Malta).
Damian Thompson wrote at The Spectator about SCV v SMOM HERE. He strongly underscored the obvious point that this is virtually an annexation of one country by another. Both SCV and SMOM are sovereign states… the size of the states doesn’t change that fact.
Against Damian, at The Spectator there is now a riposte by one Jeremy Norman. HERE Norman argues, as the title indicates, that “The Knights of Malta must understand that they are a religious order – not a country”. Well… quite simply, No. They don’t have to be understood that way.
Yesterday I wrote:
Moreover, as I have been instructed, article 6 of the constitution of the SMOM says that the Sovereign Council alone accepts or rejects the resignation of the Grand Master.
In fact, the Pope is informed only by the Council, for validity of the acceptance or rejection of the resignation. The Pope does not accept the resignation.
In addition, the SMOM’s Constitution does not foresee a “pontifical delegate”. There is no such critter in the life of the SMOM. There is a pontifical delegate in canon law for religious institutes. But, though there are aspect of the religious life to the SMOM, the SMOM is not a religious institute. SMOM is a sovereign nation.
Norman writes:
The Pope should go further and demonstrate his liberal credentials by taking firm action to reform this archaic backwater of the church; it represents the church of old and not the modernity he espouses. A light should be shone into the secret finances and workings of this archaic institution.The Order and its Grand Master must understand that they are a charitable religious order not a country. If they fail to grasp this, they have no meaning in 21st C. They are as Festing now admits, like all Roman Catholics, subject to the ultimate authority of the Holy See.
The Order, having bent its knee, must now drop its claim to nationhood and come clean about its sources of finance. History moves on and so should the Knights of Malta.
My friend Gregory DiPippo quipped: “the author wallows in ignorance like a pig in a sty.”
So you see how this is shaking out?
Consider something else I wrote a while back, about the plural of anecdote being “data”. HERE There is an uptick in priests being persecuted by bishops for being conservative, in seminarians being pressed because of the same, of traditional liturgy being repressed, etc. Soon attacks will come on the language of vernacular rites. In finem citius. Motus in fine velocior.
Pò sì jiù!
