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June 22, 2010
When the Eye of Sauron
that goes by the name of mass communication first fastened its fiery gaze on
Bishop Richard Williamson in the wake of the pope’s attempt to bring the
Society of St Pius X back into communion with the Church by lifting the
excommunications that followed latae
sententiae from the act that made Williamson a bishop, his excellency was
living in Argentina, where he was rector of one of the society’s seminaries.
He now lives in Wimbledon, England, home of the famous tennis tournament. If home
is the place that has to take you in when no one else wants you, it’s clear
that the SSPX headquarters on Arthur Road was his home. The
lifting of the excommunications as a prelude to healing the schism gave birth
to the hope that Bishop Williamson might find a home in the Church again,
but, as I approached Wimbledon, the signals were mixed. The lifting of the
excommunications signaled the start of negotiations, but the signals
emanating from the negotiations were also mixed. Walter Cardinal Kasper
announced a few days before my arrival that the negotiations were going
nowhere; indications from the other side were equally gloomy. Bishop Fellay,
another of the four bishops, had been interviewed at the SSPX seminary in
Winona, Minnesota and the interview had been posted on YouTube. Fellay began
the interview by throwing Williamson under the bus, and it went downhill from
there. “The Church has cancer,” Bishop Fellay opined, “and if we embrace the
Church we’ll get cancer.” He went on to say that the SSPX reserved the right
to consecrate other bishops if the negotiations turned out to be
unsatisfactory. Hope for unity seemed
a long way off as I gazed at the preparations for this year’s Wimbledon
tennis tournament from a passing train.
The fields surrounding Wimbledon were full of people, many of whom
were pitching tents on this blazingly hot day in late June. The hubbub surrounding the
tennis match seemed particularly distant because at this particular moment a
Ugandan by the name of Jasper was shouting the letter of Paul to the Hebrews
into my ear above the din of the train. Jasper began the conversation by
informing me that he used to be a Catholic. He was, in fact, a seminarian,
until he was captured by the Ugandan revolutionary movement known as The
Lord’s Army and marched off to God knows where. As Ugandan armies go, the
Lord’s Army was probably not as bad as the army of Idi Amin, which murdered
hundreds of thousands of Ugandans and dumped them into the Nile. There were
so many corpses in the water that even the crocodiles couldn’t eat them all.
As a result, they began clogging the intake pipes of the local power plant.
So being a captive of the Lord’s Army wasn’t as bad as the situation a few
years before, but it was no picnic either. Jasper and his fellow captives
were marching somewhere or other when they ran into the current regime’s
army, the successors of Idi Amin, at which a point a firefight ensued and
Jasper was wounded in the leg. At this point he paused in
his autobiographical narrative to reach down and pull up the left leg of his
trousers to reveal a number of coin size scars on his chocolate-brown leg. “That’s where the bullets
entered my leg,” he says. At this point everyone in
the train stops what they are doing and takes a look at his leg. Then they
gaze away and go back to their newspapers or gaze off into space listening to
their I-pods. Jasper in similar fashion goes back to reading the epistle of
Paul to the Hebrews, pausing for emphasis to read “and remember always to
welcome strangers, for by doing this some people have entertained angels
without knowing it.” It’s clear that
Jasper feels that this passage has some special relevance to our situation.
“You need faith,” he tells
me. “No,” I reply, half
wondering what the London commuters are making of our conversation. “I have
faith. You need the Church.” My reply unleashes another torrent of Bible
verses of the sort I have heard more than once from ardent fundamentalists in
America. When I bring up, “You are
Peter and upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of Hell will
not prevail against it,” Jasper goes etymological on me, claiming that “ecclesia” means “assembly,” which is
true enough, and that therefore any assembly which proclaims the word of God is
the Church. “You and I are church,”
Jasper tells me earnestly, omitting the definite article like someone in the
liturgy program at Notre Dame. “No, we’re not,” I reply.
“I am a member of the Church and you are an ex-member, and that’s the point
of this whole discussion.” This too elicits another
torrent of scripture, which pours forth from his mouth like the flood-swollen
river in Brazil which I saw the night before on the BBC. The theological
equivalent of refrigerators, cars, hen houses, etc., sweep past my ears as I
try to assess the theological significance of it all. This must be happening
for a reason, I keep telling myself, but all I can say to Jasper is, “You’re
not listing to what I’m saying,” which, of course, releases another torrent
of scriptural passages, which would still be pouring forth as I write this if
the train hadn’t arrived at Wimbledon Park station, at which point I get up
and disembark. At some point during our conversation, I told Jasper that I was going to give a talk on the priest sex abuse crisis in Ireland. The image this conjures in Jasper’s mind must be fertile because it mutates over the course of our train ride together into a scene in which he envisions me arriving in a house full of pedophile priests with nothing more in my spiritual arsenal than the talk I’ve prepared to defend myself. It’s clear he doesn’t think much of giving talks. He urges me instead to cast out demons in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ. For a moment I consider taking him at his ill-informed word. Pedophilia, schism, whatever: chuck the talk and drive out the demons with a command. The idea would recur to me throughout the day. When I got to St. George’s
House on Arthur Road, the headquarters of the SSPX in England, Bishop
Williamson greeted me at the door. It’s been roughly ten years since we last
met in person, at the SSPX seminary in Winona, Minnesota, where I gave a talk
to the seminarians on horror movies. This time the conversation was more
focused on the situation in the Church. After the initial pleasantries, his
excellency informed me that, as a result of the media circus of 2009, he had
been stripped of all assignments in the SSPX. This comes as no surprise because I had seen the Bishop Fellay
interview on YouTube. So, after being expelled from Argentina, Bishop
Williamson returned to England, where he now resides, all dressed up with no
place to go. Whatever hopes which the
lifting of the excommunications in January 2009 engendered were superceded by
the uproar surrounding the media lynch mob which attempted to derail any
reunification of the society and the Church by bringing up the issue of
holocaust denial. By now the waves of that storm have subsided, but it looks
as if the chances of reconciliation have subsided with them.
By proposing an official interpretation, another meaning gets imposed on central conciliar texts other than the meaning which the will of the majority of the Council fathers intended. . . . . What’s at stake here is the direction of the future path of the Church, a direction which the Council chose when it decided to open itself up to the modern world, when it chose ecumenical solidarity with the orthodox and reformation churches as well as dialogue with the Jews and other world religions. The main person
responsible for wanting to “square the circle,” i.e., make the council
documents compatible with both modernity and tradition is, in Schockenhoff’s
view, Pope Benedict XVI. Magister claims that “In explaining how to interpret
the Council correctly, Benedict XVI shows how it did in fact introduce new
developments with respect to the past, but always in continuity with ‘the
deepest patrimony of the Church.’” And as an example of this interplay
between newness and continuity, the pope illustrates precisely the conciliar
ideas on freedom of religion: the main point of division between the Church
and the Lefebvrists.” On December 22, 2005, Pope
Benedict gave a speech to the curia in which he tried to explain the
Zeitgeist which was regnant when the council was in session: The Council had to find a new definition of the relationship between the Church and the modern age. This relationship started out difficultly with the Galileo trial. It broke completely, when Kant defined “religion within pure reason” and when, in the radical phase of the French Revolution, an image of the state and of man was spread that practically intended to crowd out the Church and faith. The clash of the Church's faith with a radical liberalism and also with natural sciences that claimed to embrace, with its knowledge, the totality of reality to its outmost borders, stubbornly setting itself to make the “hypothesis of God” superfluous, had provoked in the 19th century under Pius IX, on the part of the Church, a harsh and radical condemnation of this spirit of the modern age. Thus, there were apparently no grounds for any positive and fruitful agreement, and drastic were also the refusals on the part of those who felt they were the representatives of the modern age. However, in the meantime, the modern age also had its development. It was becoming clear that the American Revolution had offered a model of the modern state that was different from that theorized by the radical tendencies that had emerged from the second phase of the French Revolution. Natural sciences began, in a more and more clear way, to reflect their own limits, imposed by their own method which, though achieving great things, was nevertheless not able to comprehend the totality of reality. Thus, both
sides began to progressively open up to each other. In the period between the
two world wars and even more after the second world war, Catholic statesmen
had shown that a modern lay state can exist, which nevertheless is not
neutral with respect to values, but lives tapping into the great ethical
fonts of Christianity. Catholic social doctrine, as it developed, had become
an important model between radical liberalism and the Marxist theory of the state.
As a result of this
opening to the modern world, discontinuities began to emerge. Catholics began
condemning things that the Saints of previous eras considered praiseworthy.
Similarly, things that the Council considered praiseworthy—things like Schockenhoff’s
“dialogue with the Jews”—would have been condemned as pernicious by Church
fathers like St. John Chrysostom. Before long the discontinuities became too
big and too important to ignore, or as Pope Benedict put it: It is clear that in all these sectors, which together are one problem, some discontinuities would emerge. Although this may not have been fully appreciated at first, the discontinuities that did emerge – notwithstanding distinct concrete historical situations and their needs – did prevent continuity at the level of principles. The Church now finds
herself in the process of reconciling those discontinuities, and it is this
process of re-establishing continuity with tradition which Schockenhoff sees
as a betrayal of the meaning of the Council.
The SSPX, on the other hand, sees the process of reconciliation as a
betrayal of Church doctrine, and it is at precisely this impasse that the
negotiations with the SSPX stand at the moment. The pope feels that the
Council succeeded at being both new and connected with the past: By defining in a new way the relationship between the faith of the Church and some essential elements of modern thinking, the Second Vatican Council revised and even corrected some past decisions. But in an apparent discontinuity it has instead preserved and reinforced its intimate nature and true identity. The Church is One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic both before and after the Council, throughout time. It “presses forward amid the persecutions of the world and the consolations of God,” announcing the cross and death of the Lord until he comes (cf. Lumen Gentium, 8). Yet those
who expected that with this fundamental “Yes” to the modern age, all tensions
would melt away, and that this “opening up to the world” would render
everything harmonious, underestimated the inner tensions and contradictions
of the modern age; they underestimated the internal tensions and the
dangerous fragility of human nature, which have threatened man’s journey
throughout all historical periods and configurations. Given man’s new power
over himself and over matter, these dangers have not disappeared; instead,
they have acquired a new dimension. We can clearly illustrate this by looking
at current history.
It was clear that there
were people within the Church who didn’t want reunification to happen because
it threatened their interpretation of Vatican II as the normative view.
George Weigel was one of the people who felt threatened. “It is not easy,” he
wrote in an editorial in Newsweek in
February 2009, “to see how the unity of the Catholic Church will be advanced
if the Lefebrvist faction does not publicly and unambiguously affirm Vatican
Council II’s teaching on the nature of the Church, on religious freedom, and
on the sin of anti-Semitism. Absent such an affirmation, pick-and-choose
cafeteria Catholicism will be reborn on the far fringes of the Catholic
right, just when it was fading into insignificance on the dwindling Catholic
left, its longtime home.” Having a Neocon like George Weigel accuse the SSPX
of “pick-and-choose cafeteria Catholicism” was a classic instance of
the pot calling the kettle black. Weigel had been picking and choosing his
peculiar brand of Catholicism according to Neocon principles for years,
beginning with his justification of the war in Iraq all the way up to his
reading of Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical on church social teaching Caritas in Veritatem. When Weigel put
on his magic neocon glasses to read the pope’s encyclical, some passages
appeared in gold, which is to say, they were congruent with the neocon
agenda, while some passages appeared in red, which meant that they were not
and could safely be ignored by real
Catholics, which is to say, those who
followed the neocon agenda as articulated by George Weigel. To people like
this, the holocaust denial brouhaha was the answer to a maiden’s prayer because
it provided a way to shut down unwelcome discussion of suppressed
topics. But by June 2010, the time of
my meeting with Bishop Williamson, it looked as if the holocaust issue had
been resolved. In the spring of 2010 Williamson was convicted in a German
count and fined 180,000 euros, a sum that was later reduced to 10,000 and is
now being appealed. Bishop Williamson had
“put that issue behind him,” as the politicians like to say. He was
now “ready to move on with his life.” Or was he? At the height
of the media cycle, Williamson wrote to the pope and suggested that he be
thrown, like Jonah, into the sea to calm the waves. That is a fairly close approximation of what happened, but it
wasn’t the pope who threw his excellency into the sea, it was Bishop Fellay,
who threw him under the bus. Richard Williamson is now a bishop without a
portfolio. In addition to removing him from the seminary in Argentina, Bishop
Fellay has forbidden Williamson from saying anything in public, including
presumably granting interviews to people like me. If there was an assumption
on my part behind this meeting it was that the lifting of the
excommunications and the subsequent holocaust denial brouhaha had changed the
situation. The only evidence I had to go on was Williamson volunteering to be
thrown into the sea, but that seemed indication enough that the situation had
changed him. The lifting of the excommunications had certainly changed my
attitude toward the SSPX—from accusations of the sort that we had leveled in
the investigative pieces we had run in the ‘90s to a desire to do whatever it
took to restore full communion. Actually, that desire had come into existence
long before the excommunications had been lifted. When we had met at the SSPX
seminary in Winona in the ‘90s, I had asked his excellency what I could do to
help end the schism. His reply was simple enough, “Get Rome to revoke Vatican
II.” “Is that all?” I said
jokingly back then. The more we talked,
however, the more I had the sinking feeling that nothing had changed. “Semper
idem” (always the same) was the motto of Cardinal Ottaviani and the
phrase had always seemed appealing in dealing with the modernists, but now it
began to recur in a different, less positive light, which is to say, not so
much as a reaffirmation of tradition, but as the theological version of
Groundhog Day, the movie in which Bill Murray plays a weatherman from
Pittsburgh who finds himself repeating the same day over and over again. The
SSPX had been claiming for over 20 years that the issue was doctrine,
specifically doctrinal issues concerning Vatican II, and in the wake of the
excommunications, they had persuaded Rome to engage in dialogue under those
auspices, but now it was clear, as Cardinal Kasper had pointed out, that the
dialogue was going nowhere. This is not surprising
because doctrine was never the heart of the matter. In fact, by allowing the
dialogue on doctrine to proceed, Rome had fatally undermined its own position.
The real issue is schism, not doctrine. Heresy is a sin against doctrine, and
in the negotiations which followed the lifting of the excommunications, the
SSPX was engaged in an attempt to turn the tables on Rome and convince them
that they were guilty of heresy. Before entering into dialogue with the SSPX,
Rome would have done better to watch Bishop Fellay’s interview on YouTube. In
it, Fellay gets to the heart of the matter when he says, “The Church has
cancer. We don’t want to embrace the Church because then we’ll get cancer
too.”
What Rome overlooked in
this matter was the psychological need on the part of the SSPX to divert the
negotiations into a discussion of doctrine. That need is based more on guilt
than anything in the documents of Vatican II. The SSPX committed a sin
against charity when Archbishop Lefebvre, claiming that a state of emergency
existed in the Church, broke communion by consecrating the four bishops.
Their justification for breaking communion is ultimately irrelevant because
the Church is always to some extent or other in a state of emergency because
the Church is always at the mercy of the venal and wicked men who rise to
positions of power in it because such men always rise to positions of power
in human institutions, but no state of emergency (real or imagined) ever
justifies breaking communion. The
Irish priest sex abuse crisis is a case in point, and it was the invitation
to discuss that crisis in the light of tradition which brought me to the SSPX
headquarters in Wimbledon in the first place. The Church and Her
Enemies
In talking with Bishop
Williamson, it becomes clear that the doctrinal issue is uppermost in his
mind, but that’s only because he refuses to admit the real cause of the
problem, namely, that the SSPX broke communion. Schism is a word that never
gets mentioned in traditional circles. It is only with difficulty that I can
broach the topic in our conversation. Bishop Williamson wants to talk about
the pope instead, who, according to his view, sometimes says 2 plus 2 equals
four and sometimes says 2 plus 2 equals five. The pope’s views of the
Council are certainly tied to a view particular Zeitgeist, the Zeitgeist of
the ‘60s. When he claims that “It was
becoming clear that the American Revolution had offered a model of the modern
state that was different from that theorized by the radical tendencies that
had emerged from the second phase of the French Revolution. . . . Thus, both
sides began to progressively open up to each other” what he is really telling
us is that he had fallen under the influence of John Courtney Murray and
therefore under the influence of Time
Magazine, which was responsible for Murray’s celebrity status, as well as
C.D. Jackson, who was the CIA controller/liaison with Time/Life. We are
talking about the widespread promotion of the self-induced illusion that the
Church no long had enemies. During the 1930s, the
Church had enemies. When the Church was strong, which is to say when it was
united, the Church won the battles against her enemies. In 1933, the Church
in America took on the Jews in Hollywood when Cardinal Dougherty of
Philadelphia called for a boycott of all Warner Brothers theaters in his
diocese. The success of that boycott led to the institution of the Hollywood
production code. In 1935 the Catholic Church led by Msgr. John A. Ryan, head
of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, defeated the WASP ruling class’s
attempt to get the federal government involved in the funding of
contraception. If you ask yourself what had changed in the 30 years between
1933 and 1963, it wasn’t Church teaching.
Because of Vatican II, the Church believed that she no longer had
enemies. In fact, because of a magical
process known as dialogue, our
former enemies had been transformed into our friends. Needless to say, this was
not the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church. The traditional teaching
of the Church had been articulated some 1500 years earlier, when St.
Augustine wrote that “Heretics, Jews and Pagans have made a unity against
Unity.” The loss of its enemies turned the Church against itself. In the
absence of external enemies, the presence of evil in the Church had to be
attributed to the Church itself. The Church, to cite Bishop Fellay, developed
“cancer.” Benjamin Franklin once
wrote that “Experience keeps an
expensive school, but fools
will learn in no other.” What the Church had to learn in the expensive school
which experience has conducted for the past 45 years is that nothing has
changed. Our enemies were still our enemies. The only thing that had changed
was the sophistication of their tactics. What the pope’s 2005
speech to the Curia shows is that Joseph Ratzinger was influenced by a
sophisticated disinformation campaign orchestrated by Henry Luce, the
publisher of Time/Life, and his Catholic agent, John Courtney Murray. What it
does not show is that there are flaws in the conciliar documents. The same is true of Nostra Aetate and the Jews, who were paying Malachi Martin to act
as a double agent at the council. Now
as in the past, the Church continues digesting the documents, which is to say
it continues to interpret them in light of tradition, which is what the
Church has always done. Archbishop Lefebvre accepted the idea; but, as I was
to learn in the course of our conversation, evidently Bishop Williamson
cannot. What we’re talking about
is the background of council documents like target="_blank"Dignitatis Humanae and Nostra
Aetate, but not the documents themselves, which were vetted by the
world’s bishops. Having attended more
than one synod in Rome, it’s easy to see how an individual bishop (or a
bishops’ conference) might introduce a political agenda into the Church’s
deliberations, but it is not easy to see how this agenda could prevail. In my
experience the only thing that the world’s bishops could possibly agree upon
is Catholicism. Bishop Williamson claims that there are ambiguous statements
in the documents of Vatican II, and that this fact justifies his separation.
The former statement is undeniably true; the latter undeniably false. Maynooth,
Ireland, June 19, 2010 Four days before our
meeting, I attended a conference on “Fertility, Infertility, Gender,”
sponsored by the Linacre Centre for Healthcare Ethics at Maynooth, the home
of the seminary for Ireland’s Catholic priests. The participants at the
conference are congenial enough, but looming behind the conference is a pall
of both sexual and economic crisis in Ireland and the Irish Church. A bishop
freshly deposed by the pope for his negligent handling of the crisis is in
attendance. The seminary itself was criticized for its tolerance of
homosexuality in recent articles in the Irish press. One of the most powerful
presentations at the Linacre Conference was given by a Jesuit by the name of
Kevin Flannery. Twenty-five years ago, he and Paul Mankowski, another Jesuit
speaker at the conference, showed up at my house as newly ordained priests.
At the time I took it as a sign of hope for a bright future in the Church
that the Jesuits would ordain dedicated men like this. What I should have
told these bright young men back then is “if you wish to serve the Lord,
prepare for suffering.” Paul Mankowski, who would go on to receive a degree
in Semitic philology at Harvard while serving as boxing coach there, would
spend the next 25 years circling the ring with his Jesuit superiors, fending
them off with theological jabs like “I accept the authority of my Jesuit
superiors insofar as it is congruent with the teaching of the Catholic
Church.” Father Mankowski spent years teaching at the Biblicum, but as part
of the ongoing battle over his allegiance to the Jesuits and his final vows
he was summarily dismissed and sent to teach freshman Latin at a ghetto high
school in Chicago. Father Flannery fared
better at the Gregorian University in Rome, where he is now a dean, but that
only enabled him to become involved in abstruse bioethical doctrinal battles
at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. His talk was about one of
those battles. Paragraph #12 of Dignitas
Personae, the most recent document on fertility technology issued by the
Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, has been taken to imply that
procedures like GIFT (or Gamete Intrafallopian Transfer) are morally
acceptable. Father Flannery feels that they are not because they “involve a
third active factor” which violates the integrity of the sexual act. Father
Flannery used the rest of his talk to explain how this contradiction arose
and how he as a faithful Catholic had to deal with it: How has the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith gotten into this tangle of setting out conditions for morally acceptable procedures and then saying that procedures that cannot meet those conditions are acceptable? In my opinion, what has happened is that, when the Church first began to consider these issues and her thinking was more clear than it is now, she set out sound principles for their analysis. She has also always been aware of couples—both within the Church and without—who experience difficulties in conceiving and who desperately want children: a very natural and, therefore, good desire in itself. So, while continuing to propound the sound principles at the core of the Church’s teaching, the Congregation has seized upon whatever opportunity the language with which those principles are formulated affords—or appears to afford—in order to approve procedures that might allow couples to have children. Father Flannery bolstered
his case by citing one document after another which showed that “In this
regard, the teaching of the magisterium is already explicit” [“Ad rem quod attinet, magisterii doctrina
iam explicata est”]. He then attempts to explain how a doctrine that is
“already explicit” could undergo corruption by giving a close analysis of
Pius XII’s 1949 address to midwives: He first says that artificial fertilization outside of marriage is to be condemned as immoral and that the child resulting from such a procedure would be illegitimate. (Repeatedly in his addresses regarding this issue Pius XII expresses concern for the upbringing of progeny and so also for their legitimacy.) He then says that artificial fertilization “within marriage, but effected by the active factor of a third party, is equally immoral and, as such, to be condemned out of hand.” The problem with such a procedure, he says, is that, “between the legitimate husband and the child, fruit of the active factor of a third party (even were the husband consenting), there exists no connection of origin: no moral and juridical connection of conjugal procreation.” In effect, the problem is that the husband in this marriage has not generated the child who results from the procedure, for generation has been effected by the third party. It is clear that the problem here for Pius XII is not illegitimacy, for he speaks of the husband as legitimate; the problem is rather, who has generated the child: who is the initiator, the agent, whose action results in the generation of a child? How then did the
corruption of doctrine come about? The small word iam inserted into the paraphrase makes all the difference. Where Pius XII speaks simply of “the natural act performed in a normal manner” [“l’acte naturel normalement accompli”], the paraphrase, imposing a meaning upon the participle “accompli” it can hardly bear, speaks of an act that has been normally performed in the past. The Supreme Pontiff is suddenly not condemning all types of fertilization but approving one type—a type in which clearly the act of generation is not the conjugal act but an act performed by technicians in a lab. Father Flannery, as a result, finds himself in a
dilemma. This all places individuals (such as myself) who believe that they owe to the teachings of the magisterium religiosum voluntatis et intellectus obsequium in something of a dilemma. One welcome way out of the dilemma would be to discover that we (I) am simply wrong: there is something wrong with the present analysis and there is nothing contradictory about the teaching of DP§12 (and the related teaching in Donum vitae). But let us say that I am
not wrong. It is logically impossible
to give obsequium (of any sort) to
a set of ideas that are contradictory and recognized as such: obsequium involves at the very least
acknowledgement that a set of ideas could be true, but a contradiction cannot
be true. The way out of this
dilemma is not to be found by leaving the Church because: . . . finding such a contradiction does not leave obedient sons and daughters of the Church completely in the lurch, for the teaching office of the Church is exercised within a tradition of moral reflection inspired by the Holy Spirit. An incoherent paragraph or two in a magisterial document—such as are inevitable when human beings are writing the documents—do not cancel out the tradition, but quite the converse: the offending paragraphs (if they truly are such) ought to be judged from the perspective of the tradition. This is the proper attitude to adopt toward Dignitas personae §12, derived as it is from Donum vitae, which states that “in this regard”—that is, in regard to homologous artificial fertilization—“the teaching of the magisterium is already explicit.” New
Light Father Flannery’s struggle throws a new light on
the complaints of Bishop Williamson. To begin with, unlike Bishop Williamson,
who complains about ambiguous statements in council documents, Father
Flannery believes he has come across an actual contradiction of Church
teaching. The only way the contradiction in DH 12 is going to be resolved is
the way the Church has resolved issues in the past, which is to say, by going
over the issue again and reconstruing it in the light of tradition. Non datur tertius. There is no other
way. To pretend there is is to be radically anti-traditional. This is precisely what the SSPX is refusing to do
by refusing to affirm their acceptance of the documents of Vatican II as
interpreted in the light of tradition. All that Bishop Williamson and the
SSPX have to do to be readmitted to the Church is affirm the statement, “I
accept the documents of Vatican II in the light of tradition.” He does not
have to affirm that x number of Jews died in the holocaust. He does not have
to affirm Professor Schockenhoff’s interpretation of Vatican II or his
endorsement of “Gespraech mit dem
Judentum.” When Bishop Williamson tells me this affirmation
of Vatican II in the light of tradition is the condition which Rome has set
for readmission to the Church, I blurt out, “It’s that simple?” “It’s not that simple,”
Williams replies. “Yes, it is.” I feel like
saying, but do not. “If we sign this document,
we are affirming the validity of Vatican II which means that we are affirming
the very thing which is destroying the Church.” The statement is patently preposterous,
but I bite my tongue and attempt to steer the conversation in another
direction. “Has the Church failed in
its mission?” I ask. “No,” Bishop Williamson
replies. “Then there’s no reason to
separate from the Church.” “We haven’t separated from
the Church..” “Then what are the
negotiations about then?” Before long it becomes
apparent that they are about bringing Rome around to the point of view of the
SSPX. As another sign that the discussions are doomed to go nowhere, Bishop
Williamson told me that an SSPX priest is planning to use their meeting with
the Ecclesia Dei commission in the Spring of 2011 as an opportunity to the
explain to Rome the errors in Dignitatis
Humanae. By now it is clear that this dialogue became Mission Impossible
for a number of reasons. First of all, by concentrating on doctrinal issues
in general and Vatican II in particular, it avoided the main issue that
needed to be resolved, namely, schism, which has nothing to do with doctrine.
Secondly, there are large segments of the hierarchy which confuse the
documents of Vatican II with the spirit of Vatican II and as a result want to
make readmission to the Church contingent on a particular theological
interpretation of council documents rather than an affirmation of the documents
themselves “in the light of tradition.” Bishop Williamson seems determined to
conflate Rome with that group of people, thereby granting an unearned victory
to the George Weigels and Professor Schockenhoffs, and allowing them by
default to impose a neocon litmus test on the rest of the Church.
Our conversation goes back
and forth over church history. His excellency brings up the Inquisition,
intimating that if it were re-established, he would rejoin the Church. I
point out that there was a time when there was no Inquistion, but there has
never been a time since when Christ walked the earth that there has been no
Church. He brings up doctrine, but the same applies here. There was a time
when no Christian could say for certain that Christ was true God and true
man, because the formula hadn’t been articulated, but there was never a time
when there was no Church. I then bring up the Church’s position on usury,
which is still awaiting its definitive explication. By now it’s time for lunch
and the theological discussion lurches to an unresolved end. After lunch, his
excellency takes a nap and I prepare my talk by walking around the gravel track
in their lower garden, making mental notes about the talk which gradually get
supplanted with thoughts about what I would do if it were my garden. When
Father Morgan, the English SSPX superior, appears to give the timetable for
the rest of the afternoon, I tell him that the middle of the garden would be
the ideal place for a fountain. “My mother said the same
thing,” he replied. In the end the talk went
well, there was a lively question and answer period afterward, but no one in
attendance address the talk’s conclusion, which I reproduce here in its
entirety: Yes, the Church was
derelict in not preaching the gospel, especially on sexual matters. Yes, the
Church chose therapy over the penal sanctions required by canon law. Yes, the
Church is being punished for following the advice of the psychologists. Yes, the current scandals are being
orchestrated by the Church’s traditional enemies, Protestants and Jews in
order to destroy traditional cultures and make the world safe for Capitalism
and the universal rule of Mammon. But what is the proper response. Let’s answer that question
by explaining what is not the proper response. In a recent interview, Bishop
Fellay talked about the current state of the Society of St. Pius X. After
throwing Bishop Williamson under the bus, Bishop Fellay went on to say that
“the Church has cancer” and that “we do not want to embrace the Church
because we might contract cancer.” There are a number of
things one might say about such a statement. First of all, cancer is not
contagious. Secondly, this image—the Church has cancer—can be found nowhere
in the tradition of the Church, not in the Gospels, not in the acts of the
Apostles, not in the Epistles and not in the writing of the Church Fathers. The reason is simple enough: it does not
and cannot correspond to reality. If the cancer image is
faulty, anti-traditional and unscriptural, what image does correspond to the
situation of the Church in our time? The answer is the story in Mark 4:35-41,
the story of Jesus calming the storm.
We are told that It began to blow a gale, and the waves were breaking into the boat so that it was almost swamped. But [Jesus] was in the stern, his head on the cushion, asleep. They woke him and said to him, “Master, do you not care? We are going down!” And he woke up and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Quiet now! Be calm!” And the wind dropped and all was calm again. Then he said to them, “Why are you so frightened? How is it that you have no faith?” They were filled with awe and said to one another, “Who can this be? Even the wind and the sea obey him.” All of the Church Fathers
are unanimous in saying that the boat is the Church and that the boat is
going to be tossed about by storms, which is to say, campaigns orchestrated
to destroy the Church. St. Hilary of Poitiers
writes that Christ “bids us to be within the Church, and to be in peril until
such time as returning in His splendor He shall give salvation to all the
people ... Meanwhile the disciples are tossed by the wind and the waves;
struggling against all the storms of this world, raised by the opposition of
the unclean spirit.” St. Augustine tells us to
“Think of the boat as the Church, and the stormy sea as this world. . . . For
when any of a wicked will and of great power, proclaims a persecution against
the Church, then it is that a mighty wave rises against the boat of Christ.”
We are to remain in that storm-tossed boat until, “when the night is nearly
ended, He shall come, in the end of the world, when the night of iniquity is
past, to judge the quick and the dead.” When Christ finally does
come, according to St. Hilary, he will find His Church wearied, and tossed by the spirit of the Anti-Christ, and by the troubles of this world. And because by long experience of Anti-Christ they will be troubled at every novelty of trial, they shall have fear even at the approach of the Lord, suspecting deceitful appearances. But the good Lord banishes their fear saying, It is I; and by proof of His presence takes away their dread of impending shipwreck. From the perspective of
the faithful who have to endure these storms, it always seems as if Jesus is
asleep, which is to say, unconcerned with their plight. This is, of course, not
the case. God is always with his Church, even when it appears that he is not.
Jumping ship means instant death. Because God can calm any storm, the real
issue is not the magnitude of the storm, but rather as Jesus points out, the
magnitude of our faith. As things stand now, the
only thing holding back the reconciliation of the SSPX and the Church is
Bishop Williamson’s (and three other SSPX bishops’) signature on a document
that he himself admits Archbishop Lefebvre would have signed. Four days after
I gave my talk at SSPX headquarters in Wimbledon, it was clear that my
overture to Bishop Williamson had failed. On June 28, 2010, his excellency
wrote on his blog that: Archbishop Lefebvre chose a third way, in between the two extremes of either Truth or Authority. His way, in which he has been followed by that SSPX, was to cling to Catholic Truth, but with no disrespect towards Church Authority, nor any blanket disbelief in the status of its officials. It is a balance certainly not always easy to keep, but it has borne Catholic fruit all over the world, and it has sustained a faithful remnant of Catholics with true doctrine and the true sacraments for the 40 years we have so far spent in the Conciliar desert (1970-2010).
Non datur tertius. When it comes to the Church there is no third
way. Bishop Williamson affirms here all of the propositions—the Church has
failed in its mission, the SSPX is the Church—that he denied in our
conversation. The only thing that remains the same is his adamant refusal to
restore communion, not even on terms that Archbishop Lefebvre would have
accepted. In his history of the
Hussite rebellion in Bohemia, Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini, who took the name
Pius II when he became pope, referred to Jan Zizka, the one-eyed military
genius who lost both eyes leading the invincible Hussite armies, as “the
blind leader of a blind people.” The phrase kept popping into my mind during
the course of our interview, but especially when Bishop Williamson said that
the society was going to break apart, for it seems as if he is determined to
stick by an organization that is doomed to self-destruct anyway.
Ultimately, the inscription was no laughing matter. Unity in the Church is not some optional feature, like white wall tires on a car. It goes to the very heart of Christ’s conception of the church and it goes to the very heart as well of the woes that have been inflicted on the world since the cataclysmic violation of that unity which followed from the events of 1517. That situation was not improved by the events of 1988. Bishop
Williamson is 69 years old. That is one year short of the Biblical allotment
of years granted to men. If the
society is going to break up anyway, I argued, then let it be through his
unilateral signing of the agreement with Rome. At this suggestion, he simply
throws up his hands, as if to say the suggestion is too preposterous for
words. The suggestion is far from preposterous. In fact, as live options go,
it’s the only option he has left. E. Michael Jones is the editor of Culture Wars. This piece is an excerpt from a lengthy feature article published in the September 2010 issue of Culture Wars. Index of SSPX articles
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