Edgar Lujano and Joe Heschmeyer tackle a question about the Society of Saint Pius the Tenth (SSPX).
Transcript:
Caller: The St. Pius X Society, what is their status with regards to being in communion with the Church? And also how is one able to, you know, respectfully say, wait a minute, I don’t agree with certain things that happened in Vatican II without falling out of full communion with the Church.
Joe Heschmeyer: State of a contest and SSPX are in a different situation. They’re both complicated. I’ll do my best to be fair and nuanced, but sedevit contest would say that the Pope isn’t really the Pope, the chair of Peter is empty and therefore there hasn’t been a Pope. Usually they’ll say since Pius xii, but you can have different people who kind of have different versions of the history. And so they’ll just deny that, you know, John XXIII or any of his successors were really Popes. And this explanation is because they think that Vatican II is wrong. They think the Pope taught error and therefore he must not have really been the Pope. So this ceases to be Catholic. Like when you say the Pope isn’t the Pope, you run into a lot of problems and you run into a lot of problems in several ways. One, union with the Bishop of Rome is one of the hallmarks of Catholicity. I mean, historically, this is one of the ways your union with the Church of Rome, I should say is one of the hallmarks of Catholicity. And sedevicantists aren’t in union with the Church of Rome. And so using this 2,000 year old standard, or, you know, nearly 2,000-year-old standard and they are not Catholic. Additionally, Vatican I, in talking about the papacy, describes it as a perpetual institution. This is something that’s part of the DNA of the Church. The Papacy isn’t just like, well, maybe sometimes when we want there to be a Pope, or maybe God will sometimes raise up a Pope. No, this is an ongoing office in the Church. Now. You can have brief periods of seine of a conte where the sea of Peter is empty. You know, when Pope Francis died, there were a few weeks where we didn’t have a Pope. And that’s standard. But all of that is still governed in an orderly way. So there are church laws talking about how to hold elections. Now those laws can change over time, just like the laws of electing presidents can change over time. But the reality is you’re never gonna have a situation where there’s both a no Pope and b, no lawful way of having a Pope. Because if you have both of those things, no Pope and no way of getting a Pope, then the Papacy is just gone. You would need some new divine intervention to create a papacy again. And then you have something like a great apostasy. And there are a wealth of passages in the Bible that discount the possibility of a great apostasy. The gates of hell won’t overcome against the church. And if you think the visible church fell into heresy and that it’s just, you know, a small group of people who broke away from the Bishop of Rome and denied the Bishop of Rome as bishop and as pope, like that’s not, that’s never going to be the answer. That was not the answer in the 16th century, that was not the answer in the 11th century. That’s not going to be the answer in the 22nd century. There’s not going to be a time where God wants you to break away from the visible church because he prays for the opposite. In John 17, when Jesus, foretelling what’s going to happen, prays for future disciples, the one thing he prays for is that we’ll all be one now. Sedive contests aren’t one even with each other. The amount of disunity and dissension within the world of Sedeh vacantism is pretty extreme. And you have people who grow up in this space where they won’t even go to mass because they don’t believe any of the priests have valid sacraments. That’s a mess. Like that is an obvious repudiation of the visibility of the Church. When you’ve created this church in your own mind that’s so small you can’t find anyone who’s part of it. That’s not what Jesus gives us. He gives us a mustard seed that grows into a mustard tree. It’s big, it’s obvious. It’s the kingdom of God. Daniel 2. It’s a stone that forms into a mountain. Like that’s the prophecy that we’re given. And so that’s state of a contest. SSPX is more complicated because they will say, yes, the Pope is the Pope. And they will say some of the things he’s doing are wrong, some of the non infallible teachings are wrong. That by itself there’s some amount of that that can be fair play. Like we don’t claim everything that the Pope says or does is infallible. You wouldn’t have to have standards for infallibility if you just said everything’s infallible now. You should approach everything with humility, that you should be ready to submit your intellect and will towards even the fallible teachings. But they are not infallible. So you could have something where you say, well, this was not very well formulated, etc. Your default assumption should be the Church is right and I’m wrong. But it may be a situation where you say, I’m not sure, you know, how the Church comes out this way on this issue or that issue. And it might be something that needs greater formulation, greater clarity. Because what’s frequently the case is a thing is said that can be read in one of two ways or one of three ways, and people will get upset. And it turns out there’s a perfectly legitimate sense of it, and people were maybe just misinterpreting. So with Vatican ii, like, the teachings on religious liberty are very much like this. Like, how do we harmonize these teachings? There are good ways of reading these documents, there’s bad ways of reading the documents. And so sometimes people are worried. And the problem isn’t the documents themselves, it’s the way that they’ve been construed or misunderstood. So we should strive to take a charitable interpretation of any of this stuff, the same way we would with anything. There are Bible passages you might get to and say, I don’t know how to make sense of that passage. But hopefully you don’t say, I guess, you know, I’m just going to chuck the Bible. I don’t need that anymore. You would say, I probably just don’t understand. So I would encourage the same kind of docility of saying, there’s probably more here than I get. I’m probably misunderstanding it, or maybe I’m wrong. So that’s kind of the domain SSPX is in in some regards. But the deeper issue is one of just outright disobedience. So this has come up just this past week where they’ve announced that they’re planning to ordain new bishops without the approval of the Pope. And this will incur an automatic excommunication for everyone who participates in it. And that’s just a schismatic action, because you like abusing sacramental authority in this way, which is what this is. When the Pope doesn’t want you to do this and you decide you’re just going to go around him to create bishops that are more in keeping with what you want the bishops to look like, and they are not bishops of any diocese because they don’t have any jurisdiction, you’re creating this. This spiritually chaotic situation that that truly is a schismatic act. So there’s some ambiguity as to whether the SSPX are schismatics or not. With this action, the leaders involved will be very clearly schismatics and very clearly excommunicated for it. So that’s the kind of situation that we’re in right now. If you imagine, like city of a contest, they’re divorced from the church. Sspx it’s more like they’re separated but not fully divorced. But with this act, they’re going to be doing something that breaches union in a. In a very big way.