Bishop Fellay is in the news this week because he’s met with Francis and continues to receive open arms and to be treated as part of the Church without the distance to which he’s grown accustomed. People marvel at this from a Pope who is such a liberal. What does swinging nuChurch Francis have to do with those stuffy, staunch, old-world separatists?
Despite the new warmth, the persistently honest leader of this virtuous group of priests has responded to the FrancisOutreach by telling him his massive exhortation brought him tears. He said it’s like a beautiful sinking boat with a hole in the bottom dug by the Pope. God bless the Bishop, and I agree about it being a ship with a hole in it, though I’ve read many snippets and none of them seemed beautiful.
Still, I’m afraid for Fellay as are others, and we have good reason.
The SSPX group rejects the Paul VI replacement Mass and the errors in Vatican II. They do not support Benedict’s hermeneutic of continuity, seeing it as an impossible blanketing-over. Are there unCatholic messages in Vatican II? Yes there are. That Council in the end presented some new ideas which contradicted Church teaching and tradition. It was not convened to put forth new doctrine and no new doctrine was affirmed decisively by a Pope. It was ‘pastoral’ only. Nevertheless it has predictably spread much trouble because people take it as doctrine, especially liberals. Benedict recognized the break. He said we’re just reading things out of context and blamed the media.
This has been the SSPX case when pressed by Rome to return to full communion. But now, in FrancisChurch, no problem! Here’s why this is happening.
Pope’s JPII and Benedict were there at Vatican II and supported it, but they weren’t its drivers. Those behind Vatican II ultimately were radicals, men who did not hold the Faith and were interested in disabling it, replacing it. Francis is of the same mind as those men who made it necessary for the SSPX to take their stand. He’s not a hermeneutic of continuity guy, Francis. He’s all about rupture.
The SSPX leadership truly seems to think Francis is simply employing his method of openness, dialogue and boosting peripheries. This is naive. Liberals only tout those corrosive platitudes as strategy. Radicals don’t dialogue with the Truth, only with evil and error. Faithful Catholics will always be a periphery to liberals, the more peripheral the better. Francis has no interest in promoting the growth and reception of the SSPX, so what does he want? There are two things.
Satan can create nothing. He doesn’t have ultimate power over things. He can only find ‘hope’ in destruction. In a sense he’s a parasite because he needs a host, a victim. In the same way liberals would be powerless if they couldn’t hitch their wagons to good things that decent people have built. They have to occupy and corrupt under the pretense of stewardship and good will. They have to become judges, professors, actors, and scientists. This is what they’ve done to our Church.
Today we have Francis, a man without Faith. He is completely in line with the philosophical school behind the sixties program that skewered the Church. Now he’s arrived to institutionalize the leftist replacement. The irony is, however, that if he can’t convince people that he’s Catholic, he’ll lose his leverage. He has to maintain the facade so that Catholics follow his deadly leadership. He, more than John Paul or Benedict, knows he needs the SSPX.
Just like the LA Times understands Amoris Laetitia better than Ignatius Press, Francis knows that the SSPX is Catholic more than John Paul and Benedict did. Winners have an awareness and respect for their opponents. He recognizes them as the sort of people they eliminated fifty years ago. He knows their beliefs have an ancient power, that they grow if not checked. Nevertheless Francis needs them desperately to come and make him seem Catholic, to legitimize him with their ‘union.’
That is the first reason. The second reason, of course, is that he wants to ruin them. Ruin is what happens when you ‘unite’ with a predator. He can’t install his FrancisChurch with them around shining their light on it. The SSPX must be integrated, then hollowed out.
How is Francis the liaison to broker this union? A Protestant is entirely incapable of performing any of the functions a pope must perform. Is this not true? Does it matter that he’s extended his approval for SSPX to hear Confessions when he’s also recommended absolving a silent penitent just for showing up? Do you think Oscar Romero was saintly? Was Paul VI blessed? Why for God’s sake? How low are we going to go in our criteria? We’re mass-producing. Before you know it Heaven will have this sprawling encampment full of FrancisSaints. Would you bet your soul on a new FrancisAnnulment?
What will they do someday with the thousand pages of formal FrancisTeaching and those plane interviews? What will they say about the Catholic defenders and excusers when they’re dead? What will Francis have to do before some of you admit he’s not Catholic? Show me the line.
I hear so much about embracing the true pope, receiving his teachings with profound respect, and the work of the Holy Spirit. This is all cowardly and presumptuous. Deal with it! We have a heretic in the papacy and, in the absence of anyone exercising their faithful duty to condemn him for it or remove him, he will go on wrecking the Church and doing everything to kill it.
And it won’t take long. This isn’t like General Motors. Francis isn’t a wrong-headed CEO making K-cars or PT Cruisers. In the Church you either build up or destroy, you gather or scatter.
