Exkommunikation oder Kommunikation? Der Weg der Kirche nach dem II. Vatikanum und die Pius–Brüder (review)

The schism created by the decision of the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre to ordain four bishops for his Society of St. Pius X (SPPX) on June 30, 1988, without papal permission is little understood in the United States. Americans mostly assume that the split arose from a quarrel over liturgy: the insistence of the SPPX that the unreformed Tridentine rite is the only valid form of the Mass. The meticulous analysis of the schism by the five authors of this work shows that this assumption is a vast oversimplification.

Far more important for the SSPX than the liturgy is the society’s rejection of central statements of the Second Vatican Council. A 1997 catechism issued by the SSPX identifies the issues with admirable clarity:

Q. What are the principal errors of Vatican II?

A. The two most pernicious errors of the Council are [its statements about] religious freedom and ecumenism . . . to which we must add its teaching about episcopal collegiality.

Q. How does the contemporary crisis in the Church differ from other Church crises?

A. The present crisis differs from all others in that it has been caused by the highest authorities in the Church, who promote it and resist all countermeasures.

Q. How must we judge the Assisi religious meeting on Oct. 27, 1986 [at which Pope John Paul II invited representatives of the world religions to pray for peace]?

A. The meeting was an unprecedented scandal leading souls astray, and a violation of God’s First Commandment.

(Ctd. by Hünermann, p. 208).

Behind these breathtaking statements is the belief that the source of all evil in the modern world is the French Revolution, which overthrew right order, based on the sovereignty of God, and substituted the humanistic trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Stoutly resisted by the Catholic Church during the long nineteenth century, these pernicious principles were accepted (the SSPX insists) by the Second Vatican Council through its proclamation of religious liberty, ecumenism, and collegiality.

Unsurprisingly, the SSPX’s appeal to tradition seldom goes beyond the statements of nineteenth-century popes, although there are also occasional citations from the Council of Trent—oblivious of Trent’s statement that its dogmatic decrees were designed not to state the whole corpus of Catholic belief, but rather “to refute the errors of our times” (ad condemnandos errores nostri temporis; Denzinger, no. 1763). As the authors of this book point out repeatedly, citations from scripture are rare. This rigid understanding of tradition is oblivious, too, of Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman’s dictum “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”¹

In an effort to heal the schism, Pope Benedict XVI has permitted wider use of the Tridentine Mass and lifted the excommunication that the four SSPX bishops incurred automatically (latae sententiae) by accepting episcopal ordination without papal permission. The authors point out that this was done despite the lack of any expression of regret for the schismatic ordination by any of the four. The SSPX has responded with statements interpreting these measures not as an expression of unprecedented generosity by the pope, but as a tacit acknowledgment that its views are correct.

Still lacking, it tells us, is a correction of the errors of the Second Vatican Council. Without that, it insists, it must continue to go its own way, confident that in so doing, it alone is the true representative of the Church founded by Jesus Christ.