Many Catholics have lived their entire lives conscious that one post Conciliar Pope after the other has been influenced by the ideologies of the world, with negative results for the Church in general. Nobody enjoys this situation, but Catholics know that the Church has experienced equally long periods of crisis before due to weakness at the centre.
A “Traditionalist” Reformation to finish off the Tridentine Church?
Inexplicably, certain traditionalist writers believe the answer is to change the Church’s divinely founded constitution. They wish to succeed where the German bishops will fail, and change the Church’s permanent structure, and therefore the faith.
For example, there are those who believe we are entering a period of Church “invisibility”, or a Church without the Papacy in Rome to confirm the faith – clearly Lutheran, non-Catholic beliefs. There are those who want to “reform” the Church along Jansenist, Gallicanist, Conciliarist lines, by reinventing the episcopate as a body with a territorial jurisdiction underived from that of the Pope and effectively in opposition to his; a parliamentary, “smells and bells”, Synodal Way.
These innovators, jubilant over ambiguous Vatican II texts that can be construed as supporting their ideas (Peter Kwasniewski declares Vatican II was “providential” for this reason), glide over the fact that the First Council of the Vatican, Pius XII (Mystici Corporis, 1943) and the entire history of Church teaching, condemn their view.
To react to the crisis in the Church by giving up on the Church as it has always been is about as logical as abolishing fathers or putting children in charge of the family because of the instance of drunken fathers. Vatican II’s texts, like some of those of the Council of Constance, will one day be understood according to the sober mind of Church of the future.
It’s not for anyone, whether he claims to be “traditionalist” or not, to take advantage of the Church’s present inebriety to “reform” the Church, its structure and beliefs. One has only to think of Luther’s “reform”, which claimed to be traditionalist, “loving”, and opposed to corruption.
Catholic reflexes in action. Archbishop Lefebvre.
Instead of this attitude, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre explained that where Vatican II innovated, crisis has resulted. In a letter to Cardinal Ottaviani (20/12/1966), he scathingly describes the decline of Catholic practice and belief, which he directly blamed on Vatican II:
“It is nothing less than the logical continuation of the heresies and errors that have been undermining the Church in recent centuries”.
Archbishop Lefebvre therefore places the current crisis in the context of a long fight led by the Popes since Trent against Protestantism and later heresies:
“Catholic Liberalism was condemned by Pope Pius IX, Modernism by Pope Leo XIII, the Sillon Movement by Pope St. Pius X, Communism by Pope Pius XI and Neo-Modernism by Pope Pius XII”.
But at Vatican II, instead of continuing the successful approach of the last five hundred years:
“It [Vatican II] has unsettled the certainty of truths taught by the authentic Magisterium of the Church… [concerning] The transmission of the jurisdiction of the bishops… the life of grace among heretics, schismatics and pagans, the ends of marriage, religious liberty… numerous texts of the Council on these truths will henceforward permit doubt to be cast upon them”.
As the second part of the article High Church Modernism and Peter Kwasniewski will discuss, part 1 here) there is a current of traditionalism prominent in Anglophone countries that does not challenge Vatican II’s textual ambiguities or innovations, and in crucial areas agrees with them. It makes its stand on ritual issues, basing itself on a new, anti-papal ecclesiology that obtained semi-official status at Vatican II.
This views the Roman liturgy as the ultimate expression of a collective, mythical folk tradition to be guarded by a collegiality of ordinaries autonomous of Rome (who are, ironically and by definition, not the Bishop of Rome).
The publication One Peter Five for example (unfortunately heavily involved with Peter Kwasniewski, Morello and Lazu Kmita), outlines the “non-negotiables of the trad movement”, but omits a rejection of the textual doctrinal issues in the Novus Ordo and of the textual problems of Vatican II.
Instead, “traditionalism” is founded on a neo-Gallicanist/Jansenist rejection of true papal authority, ridiculed as “uberultramontanism”.
Incredibly, 1P5 misunderstands and contradicts Pope St Pius V’s declaration in Quo Primum:
“It is most becoming that there be in the Church only one appropriate manner of reciting the Psalms and only one rite for the celebration of Mass”.
1P5 asserts that “Protestantism” produced the “situation where virtually the entire Latin Church celebrates the rite of the city of Rome [the situation “suffered” by Catholics for most of the last millennium]. It is not traditional for the Bishop of Rome to attempt to make the entire world his own diocese and his own rite, so that every local bishop becomes the vicar of the Roman Pontiff in their governance and ritual”. (Bishops Against Bishops).
But it is traditional, and exactly what Pius V ordained (apart from the exceptions he specified) and the Latin Church accepted. Nor did Pope Pius V force the Latin world to use the Roman liturgy, that had happened voluntarily long before. Shockingly, this article appears to deny the authority of Pius V over the Roman liturgy, repeating the anti-traditional, anti-Catholic Gallican argument.
Unfortunately, the “bishops against bishops” talk is more than a strategy to encourage traditionally-minded prelates to speak out; it is a new form of Church organisation. It seeks comfort in a fictitious herd mind: caucuses of bishops in parliament fighting out the direction of the Church.
The flaw with this is that average bishops today are even less like the Apostles than recent Popes are like Saint Peter, and the union of dwarves will not amount to a giant, let alone supplant the Church’s divine constitution. Among the thousands of ordinaries of today, where is the resolute traditional “caucus”?
It’s encouraging to see bishops that do act and no doubt this will increase. But ideas are still all over the place in so many cases. Bishop Robert Barron for example, who is articulate and smart, relentlessly defends Rene Gerard, who was more than a little heretical (Gerard taught that the first humans arose from animals through a “founding murder”, civilisation also arises through such “murder”; sacrifice in religion is an evil and therefore Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews should never have been included in the Bible etc.) Will a hundred Bishop Barrons help solve the crisis? This is very doubtful.
But Archbishop Lefebvre did not innovate; fully conscious of Pope Paul VI’s implication in the process he deplored, he serenely continued the age-old veneration for the government and jurisdiction of the Church established by Christ, enthusiastically sanctioned by the sensus fidei always:
“the Sovereign Pontiff has rendered himself powerless… Yet the Successor of Peter and he alone can save the Church”;
“Let the Holy Father surround himself with strong defenders of the faith: let him appoint them to the important dioceses. Let him by documents of outstanding importance proclaim the truth, search out error without fear of contradictions, without fear of schisms, without fear of calling in question the pastoral dispositions of the Council.
Let the Holy Father deign: to encourage the bishops to correct faith and morals, each individually in his respective diocese as it behoves every good pastor to uphold the courageous bishops, to urge them to reform their seminaries and to restore them to the study of St. Thomas; to encourage superiors general to maintain in novitiates and communities the fundamental principles of all Christian asceticism, and above all, obedience; to encourage the development of Catholic schools, a press informed by sound doctrine, associations of Christian families; and finally, to rebuke the instigators of errors and reduce them to silence. The Wednesday allocutions cannot replace encyclicals, decrees and letters to the bishops”.
It’s worth quoting Archbishop Lefebvre’s letter at length because it illustrates so well the traditional Catholic view of the mission of the papacy and its relation to the rest of the hierarchy. It also demonstrates very well the Archbishop’s optimistic and constructive character: no matter the circumstances, he is always thinking of a way forward.
This way forward is still possible now, and only requires changes of heart and will at the centre of the Church. Catholics don’t need Gallicanism or civilian “due process” to see the Church fully regain its nerve at the centre; it’s promised by the Church’s divine constitution.
by Vinicius. Vinicius is a Melbourne-based historian-researcher focussing on early modernity as the Christian Western alternative to ideological, Enlightenment modernity.
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