The Problem
God’s way is rarely the easy way. Here is an email from a reader of these “Comments,” elaborating on a point raised here often but that cannot be raised too often, because it lies at the heart of the problem and danger for the Society of St Pius X since 2012 and for the foreseeable future: the down-grading of doctrine. Here is what he writes, abbreviated and edited as usual for these “Comments”:—
When I think about the Society’s 2012 switch from doctrine before practice to practice before doctrine, ending in a secret agreement with things going unsaid but no less agreed, I do believe that the SSPX Headquarters have been behaving like the Communists whose tactic it was, in post-war France, to say to Catholics, “ Look, you want to help the working class just like we do, but you have the Faith, whereas we are atheists. Let us leave to one side questions of doctrine. You let us keep our Marxist ideology, and we will not ask you to abandon your Faith. Let us just act together to relieve the workers’ misery and to give back a bit of hope to the victims of modern society.” And by this means the large number of worker-priests who had consented to lead the lives of factory workers were turned into Marxists. The reason was, as St Augustine said, that if I do not act as I think I will end up thinking as I act. Pius XII forbade the worker-priest experiment to continue, but only after many priests had been lost to the priesthood. And the future Paul VI in Rome and the Archbishop of Paris rivalled with one another in undermining Pius XII’s ruling, because already then they believed more in action than in doctrine.
Thus the Society switch in 2012 from doctrine to action has not ceased to produce bitter fruits. When one hears people remarking that Rome is no longer requiring the Society to give up anything at all, that is sheer foolishness. Benedict XVI saw clearly what was at stake when he explained to modernists worried about Rome and the Society getting back together, that a practical agreement would so change the atmosphere as to put an end to the Society’s criticism of Rome without any further special intervention being needed on Rome’s part. The example of the Traditional Congregations that have since 1970 made agreements with Rome proves his point. As for the Society, it is now caught with both feet in this trap.
The Popes’ teaching, the voice of reason, experience itself, might all just as well have gone for nothing. And all these priests and laymen formed in Catholic Tradition now have the most terrible prejudice of all – the mindset of somebody who knows, but thinks it best to relativise, or leave to one side, what he knows.
What matters now is not waiting to see what Rome will or won’t do to stop Tradition. The real enemy is not outside the Society. What matters is to understand that, with regard to Rome, by claiming from Rome a normalisation, or recognition, or regularisation (call it what you like!), the Society is in fact accepting the Romans in their present wretched state, and is thereby compromising its own integrity. This behaviour shows that the Society has swallowed the modernist poison, which just like a cancer is now spreading within the Society all the time.
Dear Society priests, this excellent analysis warns you of your own very real and present danger. The Society’s real enemy is not only within. It is within your leaders. It is the self-righteous delusion that contact with the criminal or deluded modernists ruling the Church in Rome is not only not dangerous, but is positively advantageous to the Universal Church. However, if any of these modernists in charge of God’s Church are genuinely deluded, can you think that God is not offering them all graces necessary to see their fruits as they are, i.e. the radical destruction of His Church? In which case, how many of them can be genuinely deluded? In which case, what business do your leaders have to be mixing and planning with them? God told Lot to get out of Sodom, and not look back! You must, for your own salvation and that of your flock, take whatever steps are necessary to insulate yourselves from the mafia not only in Rome, but also in Menzingen unless it changes course! May God be with you.
Kyrie eleison.
