Audio only:
Joe breaks down the SSPX schism, the common arguments used to consecrate more bishops, and how the Church has historically handled these situations.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and I want to try to make sense of the current SSPX situation. The Vatican says that the bishops of the Society of St. Pius 10th and not only the bishops have just gone into schism. The Society of St. Pius 10th on the other hand says that they’re against schism and that they’re not actually in schism, even though the Pope says they are. So what’s going on here? Well, today I want to explore the basic facts as fairly as I can in a brief way, explore the question of what the society calls the state of necessity. And then I want to do something a little different than I’ve seen most other people do. I want to take a look at four cases from the church’s traditions. We can see how well the SSPX case holds up against the Vatican’s charges.
And along the way, I’m going to do my best to answer some of the most common objections I’ve heard, but I know I’m not going to cover everything. Now, since I suspect many of you have already followed this story, I’m going to keep the recap pretty simple. The Society of St. Pius the 10th announced this spring they were going to consecrate four bishops. The church told them they did not have permission to do so and that doing so anyways would be a schismatic act. They did it anyways and the Vatican decreed that the two existing SSPX bishops and the four newly consecrated bishops are all now excommunicated, but it’s actually much bigger than that. The church also explicitly declared that their sacraments of pendance and matrimony are not only illicit, but actually invalid. For reasons I’m not going to get into right now, these two sacraments are unique in that they require jurisdiction not only to be lawful, but even just to be valid.
And so the Vatican is very clear. If you go to an SSPX priest for confession, he cannot absolve you of your sins. If you go to an SSPX church to be married, you’re still not married. In fact, clerics and lay faithful are warned not to adhere to the schism of the priestly society of St. Pius the 10th under pain of automatic excommunication. Now, many of you have asked me what does it mean for a layman to adhere to the schism? The society is a priestly society. Well, the church has actually clarified that as well. Occasionally attending an SSPX liturgy is not grounds for excommunication, but you do excommunicate yourself if you A, internally side with the SSPX in defiance of the Pope and B, exclusively attend SSPX liturgies. All of the priests and the deacons of the SSPX are deemed to have met these two requirements, but obviously the church isn’t going to make a case by case determination of every layman.
Now, the DDF has established a process by which if you’ve gone into schism, you may be reunited with the Catholic church. Now traditionalists have long pushed for the church to speak clearly and boldly and love it or hate it. That is what is happening here. Now for their part, the superior general of the SSPX wrote a letter to Pope Leo declaring that these expunications were objectively unjust and invalid in saying that the society had asked a Pope for an egg and he’d given them a scorpion. Now in biblical context, that is actually quite a striking thing to say to the Pope, particularly when you say that you are not acting out of bitterness or revolt. Remember the image here is from Luke 11. Jesus talks about how when a son asks his father for an egg, he’s never going to be handed a scorpion since you, evil as you are, know well enough how to give your children what is good for them.
So Pagliarini appears to be saying the Holy Father is behaving worse than even an evil father would. But how do he and the SSPX leadership justify this open defiance of what the Pope has said and their dismissal of these excommunications? Well, they argue that they’re operating out of what they call a state of necessity. An extraordinary situation which the necessities of natural or supernatural life are threatened in such a way that to safeguard them, one finds oneself habitually obliged to break the law. That’s because despite what you may have heard, this fight isn’t actually a fight about the Latin mass. In fact, both sides of the fight are actually very clear about that. If the SSPX simply preferred the TLM, they could have gone to it in full communion with the Pope. Plenty of people prefer the TLM. But no, in the words of Archbishop Blaphev, the founder of the SSPX, it is not a question of the liturgy.
It is a question of the faith. The position of the SSPX is not just that they prefer the TLM or that it’s better. They claim instead that the new mass is evil in and of itself regardless of the circumstances. And they don’t just think that there are heresies and abuses and sin and corruption in the church. Everybody agrees on that. Rather, they blame many of these things on the second Vatican Council itself. It’s not just that the council was badly interpreted or something like that. They accuse the council of teaching error or heresy on three issues, religious liberty, accumanism, and collegiality. There simply is not time right now to do a deep dive on those charges. Let me know in the comments and I can do a more thorough examination of those allegations. Just suffice it to say they accuse every Pope from the council forwards of imposing condemned errors upon the church.
Now, because of those views, the SSP exposition is not just that schism from the visible church is permitted, but that it is actually required if you want to remain Catholic. Here’s Bishop Tissier de Malare quoting Lephev’s final book.
CLIP:
It is a strict duty for any priest who will to remain Catholic, to separate Earth from the conciliar church as long as she does not recover the tradition of the magisterium of the church and of the Catholic faith. These are the word of our founder.
Joe:
So how should we think about the SSPX consecrations? Do they please God or displease him? Are they blasphemy and schism or are they the preservation of the true church being oppressed by the conciliar impostor? It can be hard to have a fruitful conversation when emotions run high on questions like this. And I want to follow the example of the prophet Nathan. He doesn’t start by confronting David about Uriah and Bethsheba. He starts with what feels like a neutral hypothetical to get David to think about these things more objectively. And that’s what I want to try to do today. I want to look at four other cases from the history of the church. Think of it like what lawyers call case law. Sure, every case is different, but what are the principles we can draw from these prior cases to think about the present? The first case I want to look at is involving Pope Pius XII and China.
It’s from shortly before the council in Maois, China in 1958. And this is a case that the SSPX actually bring up themselves. After being warned that they’re about to go into schism, the society defends themselves with an article entitled Order and Jurisdiction: The Futility of the Schism Accusation. Now they acknowledge that according to Vatican II, the DDF document Christus Dominus in the 1983 Code of Canon Law, an Episcopal consecration carried out against the Pope’s will would necessarily be an act of schism. And they can see that this would of course make their own Episcopal consecration schismatic. But they claim that these arguments rest entirely on the premise of the second Vatican Council, that Episcopal consecration confers both the power of order and the power of jurisdiction. Now the debate about the relationship between order and jurisdiction is an interesting one, but as we’re going to see, it’s also an irrelevant one.
So I’m going to leave it largely to the side. For now, suffice it to say, the SSPX tried to defend their position by citing the Pope Pius the 12th, 1958 encyclical at Epistolorum Princhipius. In it, Pius condemns certain ecclesiastics who have rashly dared to receive Episcopal consecration despite the public and severe warning which this episolexy gave those involved. Remember, the SSPX argument is that an Episcopal consecration not authorized by the Holy Sea when it is not accompanied by schismatic intent or the conferral of jurisdiction does not constitute a break with the communion of the church. But to prove this they’re citing to an encyclical which teaches the exact opposite, that it does constitute a break with the communion of the church. Pius explicitly teaches that no one can lawfully confer episcopal consecration unless he receives a madate of the apostolic sea. Now here, I want to add a little bit of nuance in the SSPX favor.
They rightly point out examples in the past where consecrations happened in remote or dangerous areas where it was impossible to get the Pope’s permission beforehand. Even the future John Paul II is said to have ordained bishops behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War without having gotten explicit authorization. But one of the things that greatly weakens the SSPX argument is that they’re not in that kind of context. They’re not just consecrating bishops without the explicit approval of the Vatican. They’re consecrating bishops after having been explicitly told not to. They appeal to concepts like the state of necesity and ecclesiasuplit, and all of that can sound very legal and technical and can easily get misunderstood, but the basic logic is actually quite simple. Mom tells her son, come straight home after school. On the way home, the son sees a kid who falls off his bike and he stops to help.
In his mind, he’s not trying to disobey. He is operating under the assumption if mom was here, she would’ve wanted me to step up and help this kid. But imagine a second kid, same exact thing, except this time mom is right there and says, “The kid is fine. We are in a hurry.” Now if the son still runs over to help, at that point, he’s just being disobedient. That’s why the SSPX argument falls flat. They can wax poetic about ecclesiasuplet, but the ecclesia has told them, “Do not do this. ” And so to proceed to do it is more like the second case than the first. And so when you’re disobeying a direct order from the Pope and doing something that he has told you is going to lead you into schism, it’s no defense to say that you disobeyed him without schismatic intent. You might as well just say that you cheated on your wife, but you didn’t do so with adulterous intent.
It doesn’t matter. The actions speak for themselves. And that’s the same situation that the Chinese bishops found themselves in, in the 1950s. Pius is quite explicit on this point. If consecration of this kind is being done contrary to all right and law, he argues that this will both seriously attack the unity of the church and will lead to the automatic excommunication of the consecrator and anyone who has received consecration. In other words, the order of jurisdiction distinction turns out to be a complete red herring. Regardless where you fall on that question, both Pius the 12th and Leo the 14th are perfectly clear. Consecrating a bishop and defiance of a papal mandate is an automatic excommunication. In Pius the 12th’s words, the sacraments performed by such men, though they are valid as long as the consecration conferred on them was valid, are yet gravely illicit.That is criminal and sacrilegious.
For the second case, I want to go back a bit further to 1873 to a brief and largely forgotten schism amongst Armenian Catholics and Constantinople. Blessed Pope Pius the Ninth address the controversy in the encyclical cortex supra. Now in it, he traces the traditional role of the Pope in determining who is and is not in schism. And he concludes all these traditions dictate that whosoever the Roman pontif judges to be a schizmatic for not expressly admitting and reverencing his power must stop calling himself Catholic. So according to traditional Catholic theology, you simply cannot call yourself a traditional Catholic. Indeed, cannot call yourself a Catholic at all if you adhere to the SSPX. But Pius knew then what Leo knows now that it has always been the custom of heretics and schismatics to call themselves Catholics and to proclaim their many excellences in order to lead peoples and princes into error.
The early Lutherans, remember, they didn’t call themselves Lutherans. They called themselves evangelical Catholics. And they claimed their excommunication from the church was unjust. It’s why the church now refers to the SSPX as Lepheverus, even while they protest the church and defy the Pope by calling themselves Catholic. The Armenian schismatics in the 19th century responded to the charge of schism in a surprisingly similar way to what the SSPX has done today by creating their own declaration of faith that they claimed proved that they were truly Catholic. But as Pius pointed out, that’s not how this works. In his words, it has never been possible to prove oneself a Catholic by affirming those statements of the faith which one accepts and keeping silence on those doctrines which one decides not to profess. In other words, you can’t just create your own declaration of faith designed to prove your orthodoxy.
You prove your orthodoxy by accepting without exception all doctrines which the church proposes must be accepted. It is not up to the schismatic, in other words, to define the boundaries of orthodoxy. It is up to the Pope. The same thing is true today. Last week, the church established a process for receiving SSPX priests back into communion with the Catholic church and outline specifically which disputed teachings must be affirmed. Now, one of the chief arguments made by the SSPX today is that even though they don’t have any lawful authority to act as they do, they do have what’s called supplied jurisdiction. It’s another state of necessity kind of argument. In an emergency situation, the church supplies jurisdiction that’s otherwise lacking. So for example, a laicized priest can hear your confession if you’re on your deathbed. And the SSPX have tried to argue they have a similar kind of emergency jurisdiction on the grounds that the fact that heresy and even apostasy is widely spread amongst the clergy leaves the faithful and especially those who want to keep the faith and the true religion as sheep scattered and without a pastor.
In other words, if it weren’t for us, they’d have nowhere to turn except for questionable heretics. Well, just so you know, the Armenian schizmatics made that same argument arguing that the excommunications against them were unjust and therefore without authority and that they’re unable to accept the sentence because the faithful might desert to the heretics if deprived of their ministration. And the Pope lambasted this excuse at the time, Pius and Ninth, saying these novel arguments were wholly unknown and unheard of by the ancient fathers of the church. And of course, Pius is right and the society and the Armenian schismatics were wrong. Because taken seriously, the society’s argument would completely destroy the Catholic concept of jurisdiction. Any priest, even one laicized by the Pope, could use this exact same line of reasoning to simply ignore his laicization, disregard his superiors in the Pope and continue to act as a priest.
Otherwise, how do you know they might not go to a heretic? But what about this related idea that you can just ignore an excommunication if you believe that it’s unjust? Again, it’s hard to imagine anyone who’s believed that their excommunication was justified. So it’s no surprise that Pius condemns this line of reasoning in the strongest terms as well. He points out that the Jansenis heretics dared to teach such doctrine says that an excommunication pronounced by a lawful prellate could be ignored on a pretext of injustice. And he pointed out that this exact argument was explicitly condemned by Pope Clement the 11th back in 1713. Pius pointed out that St. Gregory the Great taught that a bishop’s subordinates should fear even an unjust excommunication. Lest in blaming the bishop, they should become guilty of the pride if heated reproof. In other words, even if you’ve been excommunicated and you think your bishop has been completely unjust in the way he’s carried it out, responding to him by lashing out or being rash, by rebuking or ignoring, that can all quickly lead you into the sin of pride.
Keep in mind, these are excommunications even done by a bishop who does not possess infallibility who might actually be imposing excommunication unjustly. Even in that situation as a Catholic, you are not permitted to simply ignore or disregard this act of excommunication on the grounds that you think it’s unjust. I wanted to compare the traditional Catholic teaching here with the response of Archbishop Lefevre. At the ordinations in 1988, he acknowledged that he had in fact been forbidden to perform them, but he laughed while talking about the allegations of schism and excommunication that would be laid against him and declared that St. John Paul II’s declarations against him were absolutely null and void and said that he would ignore them just as he did his earlier suspension. Now similarly, this time around, the SSPX went ahead with their unlawful consecrations and then announced that we consider that every punishment and censure brought to bear against this step will have no validity.
And as we’ve already heard, they declared Pope Leo’s subsequent excommunications of them as being unlawful and unfair. Heed the words then of Pope Pius the ninth. But if one should be afraid even of an unjust condemnation by one’s bishop, what must be said of those men who’ve been condemned for rebelling against their bishop and this apostolic sea and tearing to pieces as they are now doing by a new schism, the seamless garment of Christ, which is the church. The third case I want to look at is from the writings of Pope Leo the 13th. In 1885, he warned against those who would set up some kind of opposition between one Pope and another, or when faced with two different directives, reject the present directive and hold onto the past one. He warned that such men are not giving proof of obedience to the authority, which has the right and duty to guide them.
And in some ways they resemble those who on receiving a condemnation would wish to appeal to a future council or to a Pope who is better informed. Leo’s point is simple. There are basically two ways we can justify disobeying the Pope. One is by imagining that some future Pope or future council will side with us. And the other is by saying that what we want is what some prior Pope or prior counsel would have wanted. Now the liberal form of this era is obvious. Father Richard John Newhouse in his book Catholic Matters, accused liberal Jesuits of what he called futurism. Disobeying the Pope today in order to serve an imaginary pope of the future. Disobeying the church today in order to serve the future church. He quoted the Jesuit Carl Ronner, who told his fellow Jesuits that in their loyalty to the Pope, because the actual form of the papacy is subject to historical changes, your theology and ecclesiastical law has above all the served the papacy as it will be in the future.
Now the danger with that kind of advice should be clear. It allows you to disobey the Pope and the church today in favor of the Pope and the church tomorrow. Or as the Jesuit Paul Shaughnessy lamented Jesuits are all loyal to the papacy, but to the future papacy that of Pope Chelsea the 12th perhaps. And their support for contraception, gay sex and divorce proceeds from humble obedience to this conveniently protean pontif.But the SSPX have a surprisingly similar ecclesiology. They subvert obedience to the living magisterium for the sort of once in future magisterium. They disobey real life Rome in order to obey what they call eternal Rome. This is explicit in Archbishop Lephev’s 1974 Declaration of Fidelity, which reads, “We adhere with our whole heart and with our whole soul to Catholic Rome, the guardian of the faith and of those traditions necessary for the maintenance of that faith to eternal Rome, mistress and wisdom of truth.
Because of this adherence, we refuse and have always refused to follow the realm of neo-modernist and neo-Protestant tendencies such as were clearly manifested during the second Vatican council and after the council in all the resulting reforms. As with the liberal popes disobeying Leo in order to serve the future Pope Chelsea the 12th, Lephev’s ecclesiology lets him get excommunicated by St. John Paul II, while he imagines himself being vindicated by and serving some future Pope. Lephev even insists on this point in his homily at the 1988 Episcopal consecrations that got him excommunicated. He talks about how some liberals in the church had applauded him for ignoring the suspension he was given. And he speaks openly about how in several years, I do not know how many, only the good Lord knows how many years it will take for tradition to find its rights in Rome. We will be embraced by the Roman authorities.
And frankly, it is no surprise that he and the 1970s liberals bonded over this point because their mutual disobedience was rooted in the same eclesiological error. They imagined that the future church would agree with them. So they weren’t really disobeying. They were just obeying in advance. In contrast, the teaching of the church, the perennial teaching of the church as Pope Leo the 13th has stressed, is that you have to actually obey the real life magisterium on eth. In his words, Christ instituted in the church a living authoritative and permanent magisterium and that he willed and ordered under the gravest penalties that his teachings should be received as if they were his own. But worse than pitting Pope against Pope or the earthly Rome against eternal Rome is the pitting of the true church against the visible church. In 1870, there’s a famous conversation that took place between Gregor von Scher, who is the Archbishop of Munich and Ignex von Dollinger.
The two of them had fought against people infallibility at Vatican I, and they’d both lost. But what was remarkable was the difference in their reactions. Sherr said, “Let us now begin to work again for our holy church.” Dollinger answers, “Indeed for the Church of Old.” Sherr then corrects him. There’s only one church that is neither old nor new. Dollinger responds, “They have made a new church.” As you might imagine, these two men went in opposite directions. Archbishop Sherr accepted that the church ruled in a way he didn’t like it in Acumenical Council, but the church is the church. He accepted it. He devoted himself to working for the church. Dollinger instead insisted that this prove that there were two churches, one up to the council and a new church created by the council. And he became an excommunicated schizmatic and he formed a group calling itself the old Catholic Church seeking in vain to sort of preserve this preconceillier church apart from union with the visible church.
This is why the SSPX should be troubled by the theology being taught by one of their newly consecrated bishops.
CLIP:
If the Catholic church in her tradition brings forth life, the modernist church is a desert. It kills. It kills everything that it touches. It kills a supernatural life. It kills the sources of grace. It dries up up everything because it has placed man in the place of God.
Joe:
When former SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson spoke that way back in 2012, the SSPX actually published an article by Father Francois Losni lambassing him for it. Father Lozni in that article made two important points. First, if you believe that the official church is largely conciliar and not Catholic, then logically that would suggest you should refuse any regularization. If the Pope is the head of a false church, why would you want to be in communion with the Pope or the church? Similarly, if your teaching is that Pope Leo is at the head of a modernist church that kills supernatural life, has dubious sacraments and has replaced God with man. Why would it be good to be in communion with that church or submit to that Pope? Now, unfortunately, Lephev himself often spoke in much the same way. When asked if he was worried that the Society of St. Pius X was slowly forming a parallel church alongside the visible church, he responded by saying that this talk of the visible church was childish and that it is incredible that anyone can talk of the visible church, meaning the Conciliar Church, as opposed to the atholic church, which we are trying to represent and continue.
He argued that it was his movement, not the church in Rome, that has the notes of the visible church, one holy Catholic and apostolic. That is what makes the visible church. He claimed that St. John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger didn’t really believe in papal infallibility. And he concluded that obviously we are against the Conciliar Church, which is virtually schismatic, even if they deny it. In practice, it is a church virtually excommunicated because it is a modernist church. But as Father Lazby points out, speaking as though there are these two separate bodies, the true church and the conciliar church or the modernist church is simply not Catholic. It’s actually much closer to the Donatist heresy or the Catholic heresy. As he points out in the Catholic church, communion with the wicked does not harm the good so long as they do not consent with the wickedness.
Now, Father’s drawing that from St. Augustine in his own response against the Donatist heretics. The Donetis of St. Augustine’s day broke off communion with the visible church because there were Catholic priests and Catholic bishops who had, as Augustine concedes, chosen rather to burn incense to idols or to surrender the divine books than to suffer death. The Donotis even claimed that Catholics had killed one of their bishops by throwing him off of a cliff. Now all of this is a point I think worth remembering. The Donates had seen Catholics, including Catholic priests and bishops do legitimately evil things. So had the Lutherans at the time of the reformation. So had Lephev and his followers. The grievances they had were often legitimate. They really witnessed sins crying out to heaven, sins that were often going ignored by the leadership in the church. And even today, horrible things are done by priests and bishops in the Catholic church.
As the catechism of the Catholic church points out, the ruptures that wound the unity of Christ’s body, heresy, apostasy, and schism do not occur without human sin. And that sin involves men of both sides, not just the schismatics. But there are two ways we can respond to this problem of sin in the church. One is focusing too much on the bad news. And that’s an easy trap to fall into with the internet today. You cannot live on a diet of black pills. There is a lot of evil stuff going on in the church, but there’s a lot of good stuff too. If you’ve lost sight of that, you need to remember the words of St. Paul, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious. If there’s any excellence, if there’s anything worthy of praise, think about these things.
But the other error is to imagine that the rod is so deep that the corruption is so thorough that the church itself is corrupt and we need to break away from communion with the visible church in order to keep the faith. That’s what the Donates taught and Augustine rebuked them for it. Instead, he argued that bad men need not harm the good men in the church. He gives us a better response, one rooted in Ezekiel nine. In Ezekiel nine, God says to his angel, “Go throughout the city through Jerusalem and put a mark upon the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in it. ” This was a mark preserving them from destruction. And Augustine’s point in bringing up the passage is that even while Jerusalem was filled with abomination, the good men in the city weren’t called to go out into schism.
They were called to weep for the city, to sigh and groan for it. And it was through this that they were saved. And that’s because just as in Ezekiel’s day and throughout the whole history of the old and the New Testament and in fact all of church history, when God’s people go astray, he ultimately sets them right. In 1988, Lephaev said that he needed to disobey the Pope because by consecrating these bishops, I am convinced that I am continuing to keep tradition alive that is the Catholic church. He said that to obey the church here would have been suicide saying that neither can I leave you orphans by dying without providing for the future. But Jesus Christ has already promised not to leave us orphans. If Lephev had gotten struck by lightning on his way to mass, Jesus’s church would have continued. As GK Chesterton said, there were at least five crises in the history of the church with the Aryan and the Abajinsian, with the humanist skeptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, in which it seemed every time that the faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs.
But in each of these five cases, it was a dog that died. I think it’s fair to say we’ve been through a six crisis in the church, a period of terrible suffering and abuse and heresy and apostasy. And in many ways, we are still going through it, but things are truly getting better. There are signs of life and it’s because Christ purifies his bride that healing comes from within the body, not outside of it. The fourth and final case I want to talk about is from St. Pius the 10th himself, the namesake of the SSPX. In an address that he made to priests in 1912, he reminded them of the need to love the Pope. And how should we love the Pope? Not word or tongue, but works in truth. And then he says, therefore, when one loves the Pope, one does not argue about what he orders or demands or how far obedience should go or in what matters one should obey.
When one loves the Pope, one does not say that he has not spoken clearly enough as if he were obliged to repeat in everyone’s ear that will clearly express so many times, not only verbally, but in letters or other public documents. One does not question his orders adducing the easy pretext by those who do not want to obey, that it is not the Pope who commands, but those around him. One does not limit the scope in which he can and he should exercise his authority. One does not prefer to the authority of the Pope that of other people, however learned who dissent from the Pope and who, if they’re learned, are not saints because a saint cannot descent from the Pope. I know this is a strange and a difficult time, both for those connected to the Society of St. Pius the 10th and for those of us who may have family members and loved ones connected.
So my prayer is simply that both for all Catholics and for all members of the SSPX, we can take to heart these beautiful instructions from the Saintly Pius the 10th himself. Love the Pope and obey him. For Shamus Popouri, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you. I