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1. I wouldn't let the SSPX back in until they drop their ongoing arrogance towards the Church.
   The SSPX continues to bagmouth the Second Vatican Council, fellow Catholics who attend Mass in the parishes are referred to in derogatory terms, the Mass of Paul VI is caled sinful and many other things.
   To be in unity is more than signing off juridically; it is also especially about being united in spirit and we all know the many gifts of the Spirit and the qualities displayed.

   Posted By: Michael Webb

2. Who said the SSPX is out of the Church?
   Rome has said those who attend their Masses fulfill their Sunday Obligation.
   Regarding badmouthing Vatican II, Msgr. Gherardini, a preeminent Vatican-based theologian, has said this: In all truth Modernism hid itself under the cloak of Vatican II's hermeneutic...The new rite of Holy Mass practically silenced the nature of sacrifice making of it an occasion for gathering together the people of God...the eucharistic gathering was given the mere sense of sharing a meal together...After having said all of this about Vatican II, if someone were to ask me if, in the final analysis, the modernist corruption had hidden itself within the Council documents themselves, and if the Fathers themselves were more or less infected, I would have to respond both yes and no...But yes as well, because not a few pages of the conciliar documents reek of the writings and ideas of Modernism--this can be seen above all in GS.'
   

   Posted By: Brian

3. Brian: You identify Msgr Gheradini as 'a preeminent Vatican based theologian.'
   There are many theologians in the Vatican; the Pope is one. Among whom is Gheradini 'preeminent'?
   You could be more free ranging in you quotations, Brian, because the Monsignor by his own admission says that his 'Roman School' of theology has been in decline for decades, that it is a remnant, and that it occupies the outer boundaries of pre-Vat II theologies.
   He also claims that the chances of a lasting reconciliation between the Vatican and the SSPX is the stuff of fancy.
   I think he is dead right because he says that the SSPX ground their orthodoxy in what they believed affirmed as The Tradition - set, fixed, pure and incapable of any development. They hold as suspect any suggestion of a modern expression of the Apostolic Tradition.
   In effect, the SSPX has endorsed a form of ecclesiatical creationism and have identified their authority in its fossil record going way back into antiquity - a whole 500 years!
   Their imagination and vision have been dulled by subjugating Christ, the Gospel, the Church and its Mission to a state of slavery under outated books of Canon Law and exotic rubrics.
   Ultimately, the Vatican is dealing with an insular and self-obsessed cult which serves not the Church but itself. They are the dinosaurs who missed the Ark!

   Posted By: David Timbs

4. The SSPX is no more a cult than the Catholic church is a cult.
   Their only crime is to remain Catholic but sadly many so-called Catholics find objection and loathing in this. I guess they prefer the clown masses, rampant disobedience to the Pope and the heresies that have flourished in the Church since vatican II.
   The Catholic church needs the SSPX.

   Posted By: Noel

5. Oh dear, there he goes again. Like the proverbial hole in the head does the church need the SSPX.
   I guess they do serve as a salutary warning to the tradition-obsessed.

   Posted By: JR,Sydney

6. Thank you, Noel - Amen †
   

   Posted By: Adrienne

7. David: Ironically, your sentiments were exactly mine, around ten years ago. It might seem outrageous that FSSPX could defy the rightful authority of the Vatican.
   But the crisis in the Church today is probably even worse than the Arian crisis in the fourth century, when Saint Athanasius was 'excommunicated' for ordaining priests.
   Never, in the history of the Church, have we seen such abuse and apostasy; such an influx of modernism. The majority of Catholics don't believe in the Real Presence, and view Holy Mass as communal meal and not the Sacrifice.
   Sans FSSPX, there would have been no Summorum Pontificum.
   Michael Davies was quoted as saying our current Pope is on the side of Tradition. Pope Benedict XVI lamented the death of Michael Davies - they were friends.

   Posted By: Brian

8. Catholic Tradition is not a freeze frame/dead letter/museum piece.
   Yet this is the mentality of the sola Latinists who express thoughts that have only trust in Church documents up until Pope Pius XII and not any Pope or Council thereafter.
   Such thinking is not Catholic but rather set time pieces in playacting a period of time in the past ie the 1950s and judging the living tradition and ongoing apostolic authority of Popes and bishops by this earlier time period that they feel comfortable with.

   Posted By: Michael Webb

9. Brian: Card Ratzinger-before his election as Pope- met Michael Davies on a number of times. He mentions no 'friendship' at all. +Ratzinger said he wished Davies eternal rest when he heard news of his death. Read what +Ratzinger actually wrote not some SSPX reconstruction of 'facts'.
   Davies refused to abandon support for Lefebvre and his fellow schismatic bishops. Intellectually and morally Davies too was schismatic and possibly died so.
   The SSPX leadership are blind to a Catholic vision outside of their own blinkers - and so are their disciples.

   Posted By: David Timbs

10. One shouldn’t lose sight of several perspectives when discussing the SSPX in the context of reconciliation talks, who’s in or out etc.
    First, there’s no doubt Archbishop Lefebvre and the SSPX were crucial in bringing about today’s accelerating revisionism within “mainstream” Catholicism and making sense of it. Though other groups, around figures like the Abbes Coache and de Nantes, or forming a seed-bed for ideas and allegiances from which it sprang, like the Latin Mass Societies, Louis Even’s White Berets etc., it was Marcel Lefebvre and the SSPX that became the lightning rod highlighting the ginger points over the Council’s new formulations. Most other traditionalist groups, including the USA sedevacantists and the FSSP are all derivatives and imitations, which is unsurprising since many of their original members left the bosom of the SSPX. Secondly, though everyone claims logic for their own position, and often none in their opponents’, I feel there’s a certain honesty about the way that the SSPX have created their ‘faithfully separate” existence in the pursuit of what they see as faithfulness to an unchanging religious ‘truth’. By contrast, to my reading, the officially approved or ‘sanitised’ traditionalists, appear happy to white-ant the aggiornamento while professing themselves to be true inheritors of the Council. Third, the members of the SSPX and their many supporters are only as fallible, sincere, ignorant or considered as any other constituency, so the true spirit of conciliar Catholicism should have each of us wary of throwing stones from our glass houses.

    Posted By: Stephen Kellett

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