The Recusant #61 - Lent 2024

[Stone]

Traditionalist “Schism”/”Excommunication”..?

The following extract is from a longer article which appeared in the summer 2002 issue of ‘The Latin Mass’, under the title “Rumbles from France” and can be found here: http://www.latinmassmagazine.com/article...ara_1.html. We do not agree with everything contained in the article, but the first part, below, is worth reading. Some readers will be familiar with its author, Mr. Christopher Ferrara. For those who are not, it is worth noting that he is a lawyer, and that he was not and is not a faithful of the SSPX.

The SSPX “Schism”: a non-SSPX Lawyer’s View

An article recently published in the French-language theological journal of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter contends, in essence, that all the priests and bishops of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) are non-Catholic ministers whose ministrations Catholics should avoid under pain of sin. This claim goes well beyond any official Vatican pronouncement on the status of SSPX clergy and lay adherents.

In assessing the impact of this development, some background is necessary. John Paul II’s 1988 motu proprio Ecclesia Dei declared that the consecration of four bishops by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre for the SSPX without a papal mandate:

“...implies in practice the rejection of the Roman primacy [and] constitutes a schismatic act. In performing such an act… Mons. Lefebvre and the priests Bernard Fellay, Bernard Tisser de Mallerais, Richard Williamson, and Alfonso de Galarreta, have incurred the grave penalty of excommunication envisaged by ecclesiastical law.”

(It is significant that the co-consecrator of the four bishops, Bishop Castro de Mayer of Campos, was not even mentioned.) Thus, Mons. Lefebvre and the four priests he consecrated bishops, but only these five, were declared to have been excommunicated latae sententiae as envisioned in canon 1382 - that is, automatically by their own act, rather than by a sentence following a canonical process.* These five clerics - but, again, only they - were also declared to have committed the offense of schism as envisioned in canon 751, even though neither canon 1382 nor the canonical warning issued to Archbishop Lefebvre before the consecrations states that an illicit episcopal consecration constitutes a schismatic act.

Adhering strictly to the letter of the motu proprio, various detractors of the SSPX declare the case closed. But it has never been that simple. For one thing, the Church is not constrained by the letter of her own law when justice or charity would indicate a different course. Indeed, given that the Vatican has effectively ceased applying the term schismatic to the Orthodox or even to the one hundred illicitly consecrated bishops of the communist-controlled Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA) in China, it would hardly be commensurate with justice or charity to treat SSPX adherents as rank schismatics, cast into outer darkness, and leave it at that.

This is all the more so when one considers that the actions of Catholics with respect to Church law are not judged by the legal standards applicable to such civil matters as traffic tickets or insider trading. Unlike civil law, Church law explicitly recognizes an excuse from the operation of penalties where subjective culpability can be shown to be lacking, just as God Himself would excuse an objectively wrongful action absent subjective guilt. Even a penalty of excommunication imposed in the external forum arguably does not operate where the offender has acted out of what he believed in conscience to be grave necessity or to avoid
grave inconvenience. Cf. canons 1321, 1323.

Where schism is concerned, there must be a subjective intention to refuse communion with the Roman Pontiff, not merely a single act of disobedience to a particular command (in this case the command that a papal mandate is required for consecration of bishops).

Moreover, there has never been any clear determination of the status of the priests and lay adherents of the SSPX who are not the subject of the penalties declared in the motu proprio. While the motu proprio speaks of “formal adherence to the schism” as grounds for incurring the same penalties as the five, the term “formal adherence” has never been defined in any universally binding pronouncement by a competent Vatican dicastery, which would appear to be either the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith or the Ecclesia Dei Commission.

[…] The recent Vatican approaches to the SSPX constitute a marked departure from the strange double standard which consigns the SSPX to oblivion while an earnest ecumenical courtship is pursued with militantly anti-Roman Orthodox bishops, and even communist controlled CPA bishops handpicked by the bloody Jiang regime - which brutally persecutes the “underground” bishops, priests and laity who remain loyal to Rome.

[…] What does the Church gain from yet another denunciation of the SSPX at the same time both Protestants and Orthodox of every stripe are being treated as “brothers in the Lord” and invited to participate in joint liturgical ceremonies with Catholic prelates, including the Pope himself, without the least mention of the evil of schism or communicatio in sacris with nonCatholics?


* It is important to note that this canon actually originated in a papal decree of Pius XII aimed at the illicit consecration of bishops by the communist-controlled Catholic Patriotic Association in Red China, as to which (paradoxically enough) the current Vatican apparatus has assiduously avoided any declaration of formal schism, despite the CPA’s illicit ordination of fully 100 bishops without a papal mandate.

“You have at your disposal at the bookstall some books and flyers which contain all the elements necessary to help you better understand why this ceremony, which is apparently done against the will of Rome, is in no way a schism. We are not schismatics! If an excommunication was pronounced against the bishops of China, who separated themselves from Rome and put themselves under the Chinese government, one very easily understands why Pope Pius XII excommunicated them. There is no question of us separating ourselves from Rome, nor of putting ourselves under a foreign government, nor of establishing a sort of parallel church as the Bishops of Palmar de Troya have done in Spain. They have even elected a pope, formed a college of cardinals… It is out of the question for us to do such things. Far from us be this miserable thought of separating ourselves from Rome!

On the contrary, it is in order to manifest our attachment to Rome that we are performing this ceremony. It is in order to manifest our attachment to the Eternal Rome, to the pope, and to all those who have preceded these last popes who, unfortunately since the Second Vatican Council, have thought it their duty to adhere to grievous errors which are demolishing the Church and the Catholic priesthood.”

- Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, Consecrations Sermon, 30th June, 1988