 |
| I love it, but not everybody's happy |
I have been concerned about the probability of a schism in the American
Church for over thirty-five years. While
the first ten years or so after the Council seemed to shine favorably on a
unified Church moving to implement the conciliar decrees, cracks started
appearing somewhat late in the pontificate of Paul VI. There certainly was tremendous disappointment
on the left with Humanae Vitae, but
that didn’t show any fissures in the fabric of the Church. Yes there were people—including many
priests—who voiced their dissent to the Pope’s conclusions and it did turn out to
be the first warning shot across the progressive bow that all might not go as the
liberals had hoped for in John XXIII’s aggiornamento.
There were priests suspended for refusing to support the encyclical and there
were many angry married Catholics who had been looking for an acceptable
solution to the challenges of family planning, but no one was talking about leaving the
Church for some alternative Catholicism. But then the revised liturgy of the
1970 Missal—the Novus Ordo Missae—became
as significant an issue for conservatives as Humanae Vitae had been for the left, but again no one, at least in
a serious and credible position, was talking about leaving the Church or
creating a parallel Catholicism. In 1970,
the year that Paul VI promulgated the new rites, a French bishop, Marcel Lefebvre, who had also
served as the General Superior of the Spiritans (Holy Ghosts Fathers),
organized a “pious union” of priests and seminarians to maintain the
traditional doctrines and liturgy which Lefebvre saw as under attack by the
very sort of “modernist” theologians and clergy that Pius X had condemned in
the 1907 decree Lamentabili Sane Exitu,
and Encyclical of the same year, Pascendi
Domini Gregis. Nevertheless,
Lefebvre had confidence in the Church that it would regain its even keel and
not abandon its historic orthodoxy.
Lefebvre had had several reservations about the teachings of the
Second Vatican Council, in particular Nostra
Aetate (on non-Christian religions), Unitatis
Reintegratio (Christian Ecumenism), and Dignitatis
Humanae (the right of religious freedom).
While he voted against these decrees, he did sign them once they had
passed. He seems to have later regretted
this choice but he also seems honestly to have believed that the Holy Spirit
was guiding the Church and would right the course as time went on. This was not an unreasonable hope as Pope
John Paul II and Benedict XVI did significantly change the ways in which
several of the Conciliar decrees have been interpreted at the time of the
Council and by the Council Fathers, though not to the extent that Archbishop
Lefebvre would have had it.
Let me say—in the interest of full disclosure—that my own opinion is
that despite all the talk about a “hermeneutic of continuity” several of the
Conciliar decrees—including the three above named—represent a break with the
previous magisterium. I personally don’t
think that is a bad thing, but I do believe to claim some sort of magisterial
continuity on the questions of religious freedom, ecumenism, and inter-religious
dialogue is nothing less than just downright duplicitous.
There were some who from the beginning saw this break in continuity. A
seminary dropout from Seattle, Francis Schuckhardt, who was very active in the
Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima—a very conservative association of people in
the Catholic Church, though one safely within the bounds of Catholic
magisterial authority—was convinced that the Council was heretical and went
around the United States warning Catholics of what he perceived to be the "heresies" found in the Conciliar
documents. Schuckhardt built a following
and founded a religious community of priest, brothers, and sisters called the
Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen.
He had the canonical permission of the Bishop of Boise—in whose diocese
he lived at the time—to establish this new community. (Ironically this
permission was the sort of freedom given to Bishops after the Second Vatican
Council to establish such communities ad
experimentum.) Remember that at this point, Schuckhardt was a layman. About
the same time he established his new religious order, Francis Schuckhardt became convinced that Paul VI was a heretic
and that Vatican II was a “false Council.”
He claimed that a heretic could not hold the papal office and that when
a pope went into heresy, he was automatically deprived of his office. This stance separated him from the Catholic
Church. Schuckhardt would go on to get
himself ordained priest and then consecrated a bishop by Daniel Q. Brown who
himself was a layman and had been ordained and consecrated by Hubert Rogers, an
“Old Catholic” bishop whose orders trace back to the Union of Utrecht and
through them to the Old Catholic Church of the Netherlands that went into
schism with the 1723 illicit episcopal consecration of Cornelius van Steenoven. (I don’t want to go too far down this path or we
will get sidetracked from our main focus—but I do promise to return at some
future point about the Old Catholic Successions and Schisms. It is sort of an ecclesiastical version of a
Chinese Fire Drill.) Suffice it now to
say that Schuckhardt stood in a historic apostolic succession. I personally won’t say “valid” though most
Catholics would. My reservations are
twofold. First I am not sure what
“valid” means when we talk about sacraments; I think that it implies our
imposing some degree of objectivity that permits us to tie God’s hands. Remember, I am a historian and not a
theologian, but I think the “valid” thing has somewhat expired as an effective
argument and we need a new category to understand the sacraments and the way
they work. Just saying; again I am not a
theologian. Secondly, while matter and
form may have been there in these ordinations—and intention to pass on the
apostolic succession in the office of priest or bishop (depending on to which
office the candidate is being ordained)—when a “sacrament” is celebrated
with the intention of fracturing the unity of the Church…. Well, I just
wonder. Again, not a theologian but I think
the theologians need to do some remodeling of the arguments here. Just saying.
Over the decades since Schuckardt’s renouncing the papacy as sede vacante, that is there being no
(valid) sitting pope, sede vacantism has spread among the ultra-kooks in the
katholic korral. Some groups like
Schuckhardt’s Congregation of Mary Immaculate or a particularly peculiar group
(of 2 monks with a handful of followers) known as Holy Family Monastery in
Fillmore NY, or Bishop Daniel Dolan (a Lefebvrist run-away) claim that because
Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and now Francis were
"heretics," there is no true pope and the see is empty (sede vacante). Some
sede-vacantists push the claim of heresy/invalidity back to include John
XXIII. There are also small groups known
as “conclavists” who have decided to fill this supposedly vacant papal office
by having conclaves to elect a new pope. A Kansas whack-job named David Bawden,
aka “Pope Michael” who was elected “Pope” in 1990 by a conclave of six people
(including his mother and father) to fill the chair of Peter left vacant by the
aforementioned heretical popes, has a few dozen followers. Bawden is not the only person who claimed a
conclave to elect him pope to fill the empty seat. The late Lucien Pulvermacher, a former
Capuchin Franciscan friar disgruntled with Vatican II, was elected in the ballroom
of a rural Montana hotel in 1998 and took the name Pius XIII. (Some votes were phoned in, a progressive
move way beyond the official Catholic Church.)
There are several other conclavist claimants in Europe and South
America. I had a maiden grandaunt who
thought she was Empress of Austria. This sort of thing happens even in good
families.
All these various groups—the Congregation of Mary Immaculate People,
the Holy Family Monastery folk, the Pope-in-Kansas crowd don’t add up to much
over a thousand people. Even the
Lefebvrist faction, the Society of Saint Pius X, are really not a force to be
contended with seriously, having perhaps 20,000 followers in the United States
and perhaps another 30,000 worldwide. With Pope Francis in the Chair of Peter,
the left seems mollified. Actually they
seem delighted as many felt they were being edged out of the Church in the
previous two papacies. (Indeed there were a small number of people who went
into groups that formally rejected Church authority such as Spiritus Christi
Church or Holy Wisdom Monastery or the Catholic Church of the Beatitudes in
Santa Barbara, and a much larger number—in the hundreds of thousands who joined
Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist and other congregations because they had
grown disillusioned with a Catholicism they perceived as having backed away
from the Second Vatican Council.) But after
the pax benedictina there are
grumblings on the right again as there were in the days of Paul VI. Will it come to schism? I would think probably not in the formal
sense of a mass movement to an alternative Catholicism, but marginal groups
like the Society of Saint Pius X and the more moderate schismatic networks that
maintain the old rite and the old catechism will probably draw several thousand
of the more neo-traditionalist crowd that find Francis’s directions increasingly
troubling. If Pope Francis makes any
move limiting the pre-conciliar rites, or permits local bishops to suppress the
TLM, that number would be considerably higher though there are probably less
that 200,000 American Catholics who regularly attend the Tridentine Mass. A more serious threat would be any
significant change on the status of the divorced and remarried. That would be a huge opportunity for the sede vacante groups which I would not be
surprised to see triple in size—or even more.
I plan to continue
this question of the growing tension between the Catholic Right and the
Catholic Left in a few more postings and in particular to look at how Pope
Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI laid the groundwork—unwittingly—for
the divide
No comments:
Post a Comment