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This is the last day before the main event and furious desperate letters are going over and back between Econe and Rome but it looks like it will go ahead without Papal approval. Just to rehash some of the points again:
It seems to me that the big picture here is the very Catholic, very old and very holy, doctrine of obedience to proper ecclesiastical authority. The SSPX recognise Pope Leo XIV as the legitimate Pope, he has said they should not appoint these new four bishops but they are doing this anyway. That is the big moral question we have to talk about, forget legalisms and states of emergency etc etc. The point is that there have always been complications in the doctrine of obedience which come in here, e.g.:
Never an absolute doctrine of obedience
A simple analogy might explain this. Imagine an idealistic guy who is sent to journalism school for two years, where he is taught proper journalism, i.e. always check your sources and get and articulate the alternative point of view etc etc. Then he gets a job on a newspaper and writes an article according to these principles and the editor takes him aside and tells him to rewrite it in a crooked way. He tries to protest about what he is taught but the editor tells him the facts of life, he pays his wages and when he says ‘do this’ you just ‘do it’ alright and to blazes with all that nice theory. If that is how things develop then you can see how absolute obedience will actually destroy ones conscience and one’s own responsibility to do the right thing.
Priests for example spend seven years in seminary trying to develop an informed conscience so that they can then strive to tell right from wrong, but if they develop as their only true practical doctrine, obedience in everything to bishops or abbots or Rome, then what actually were they really learning? Another way to look at it is that you have to answer to God for your actions on earth, you have to take responsibility for them, so you cannot just cross your arms before Our Lord and reply thats nothing to do with me, above my pay grade, I just did what the bishop told me to do etc etc. In otherwords you cannot have an ecclesiastical equivalent of the Nuremburg trial, I was only following orders!
Obedience means different things at different levels
That analogy from the army might also help us further here, an institution with a big sense of obedience. Compare if you will, the different levels of obedience which apply there to the different ranks. Compare a new recruit who is told by his sergeant to peel the potatoes and he goes off on a rant about not giving in to absolute authority etc etc. Do you have any sympathy for him, should he just peel the potatoes and put up with it? But now compare that to a high up general that is asked to move his 100,000s of troops forward in some battle, where he might think they are going to get slaughtered. Does he just follow that order blindly or will he insist on talking to his boss and only when he is satisfied as to the reasons behind the order will he obey it. In practice I think thats how it works in most armies.
Now think about the current leaders of the SSPX. They have about a million souls to worry about and I think over a thousand people in religious life (priests, seminarians, brothers and sisters) and countless churches and numerous schools and seminaries. They get down the line, eventually from Rome, don’t do these consecrations, even though they and Rome know that all of that structure of the SSPX will die soon enough for the want of bishops. Are they entitled to know the reasons why they are to get no bishops, is it good enough for Rome to click its fingers and expect everybody to hop without any real effort to explain why in half a century of discussions they couldn’t agree to provide bishops to the order?
If you have grave doubts about your superior, that impacts your obedience decision
Its well known in theology and in religious orders, that you should obey your superior even where, sometimes anyway, you think its the wrong step or if indeed it actually is the wrong step. So for example I would say a given priest should normally do whatever his bishop asks, but lets throw a serious analogy at that priest, say the bishop has asked him to sell off the parish church, owned by the parish for centuries, and give him all the money from the sale.
Thats a big ask and I believe any honest and holy priest would have to pause before such an order. But it seems to me that his view of the bishop should come into it, at an extreme point anyway. So the priest might have a range of possible responses, he might just agree that its the right decision, then he obviously should just do it, he might think its the wrong decision but he knows the bishop is under enormous financial pressure and just sees no other way out, in otherwords he sees his bishop trying to do the right thing and hence maybe he should obey, but picture the scene if he happens to know his bishop is best buddies with all the local building developers who coveted the place where the church is for years. What should he do if he believes his bishop to be a crook like that, does he close his mind to that fact and just obey as he has been taught to do? I think not.
So that overall view of where we are in our understanding of the current Vatican, does come into this. The Vatican says to the SSPX “just don’t do these consecrations and we will discuss the matter and we are sure it will work out” and you will get your bishops. Do you believe them? Do you think the Vatican are lying about that? You cannot close your ears to such questions, yes the Catholic Church is owned by Our Lord and He will prevail in the long run, but the Avignon Papacy and Napoleon’s imprisonment of the Pope, just to take two issues, show that in the short term the Vatican can do the wrong thing, and be captured by the crooked political forces of the day.
The modern Vatican has shown again and again how much they favour the crooked Globalist/Occult agenda, whether it be the Climate Change hoax, mass immigration, LGBT, Covid, you name it. We cannot close our minds or ears to this, its very hard to believe that they have any real sympathy for the SSPX and, I would suggest, in fact want to destroy them, as is pretty explicitly laid out in the document Traditionis Custodes and its accompanying letter, with respect to the other traditional orders at any rate. So no I don’t believe the modern Vatican is sincere here and I think one’s view of this should come into the question of obedience, at this extreme level in any case.
Just a few thoughts anyway, and its why I support these consecrations.
It seems to me that the big picture here is the very Catholic, very old and very holy, doctrine of obedience to proper ecclesiastical authority. The SSPX recognise Pope Leo XIV as the legitimate Pope, he has said they should not appoint these new four bishops but they are doing this anyway. That is the big moral question we have to talk about, forget legalisms and states of emergency etc etc. The point is that there have always been complications in the doctrine of obedience which come in here, e.g.:
Never an absolute doctrine of obedience
A simple analogy might explain this. Imagine an idealistic guy who is sent to journalism school for two years, where he is taught proper journalism, i.e. always check your sources and get and articulate the alternative point of view etc etc. Then he gets a job on a newspaper and writes an article according to these principles and the editor takes him aside and tells him to rewrite it in a crooked way. He tries to protest about what he is taught but the editor tells him the facts of life, he pays his wages and when he says ‘do this’ you just ‘do it’ alright and to blazes with all that nice theory. If that is how things develop then you can see how absolute obedience will actually destroy ones conscience and one’s own responsibility to do the right thing.
Priests for example spend seven years in seminary trying to develop an informed conscience so that they can then strive to tell right from wrong, but if they develop as their only true practical doctrine, obedience in everything to bishops or abbots or Rome, then what actually were they really learning? Another way to look at it is that you have to answer to God for your actions on earth, you have to take responsibility for them, so you cannot just cross your arms before Our Lord and reply thats nothing to do with me, above my pay grade, I just did what the bishop told me to do etc etc. In otherwords you cannot have an ecclesiastical equivalent of the Nuremburg trial, I was only following orders!
Obedience means different things at different levels
That analogy from the army might also help us further here, an institution with a big sense of obedience. Compare if you will, the different levels of obedience which apply there to the different ranks. Compare a new recruit who is told by his sergeant to peel the potatoes and he goes off on a rant about not giving in to absolute authority etc etc. Do you have any sympathy for him, should he just peel the potatoes and put up with it? But now compare that to a high up general that is asked to move his 100,000s of troops forward in some battle, where he might think they are going to get slaughtered. Does he just follow that order blindly or will he insist on talking to his boss and only when he is satisfied as to the reasons behind the order will he obey it. In practice I think thats how it works in most armies.
Now think about the current leaders of the SSPX. They have about a million souls to worry about and I think over a thousand people in religious life (priests, seminarians, brothers and sisters) and countless churches and numerous schools and seminaries. They get down the line, eventually from Rome, don’t do these consecrations, even though they and Rome know that all of that structure of the SSPX will die soon enough for the want of bishops. Are they entitled to know the reasons why they are to get no bishops, is it good enough for Rome to click its fingers and expect everybody to hop without any real effort to explain why in half a century of discussions they couldn’t agree to provide bishops to the order?
If you have grave doubts about your superior, that impacts your obedience decision
Its well known in theology and in religious orders, that you should obey your superior even where, sometimes anyway, you think its the wrong step or if indeed it actually is the wrong step. So for example I would say a given priest should normally do whatever his bishop asks, but lets throw a serious analogy at that priest, say the bishop has asked him to sell off the parish church, owned by the parish for centuries, and give him all the money from the sale.
Thats a big ask and I believe any honest and holy priest would have to pause before such an order. But it seems to me that his view of the bishop should come into it, at an extreme point anyway. So the priest might have a range of possible responses, he might just agree that its the right decision, then he obviously should just do it, he might think its the wrong decision but he knows the bishop is under enormous financial pressure and just sees no other way out, in otherwords he sees his bishop trying to do the right thing and hence maybe he should obey, but picture the scene if he happens to know his bishop is best buddies with all the local building developers who coveted the place where the church is for years. What should he do if he believes his bishop to be a crook like that, does he close his mind to that fact and just obey as he has been taught to do? I think not.
So that overall view of where we are in our understanding of the current Vatican, does come into this. The Vatican says to the SSPX “just don’t do these consecrations and we will discuss the matter and we are sure it will work out” and you will get your bishops. Do you believe them? Do you think the Vatican are lying about that? You cannot close your ears to such questions, yes the Catholic Church is owned by Our Lord and He will prevail in the long run, but the Avignon Papacy and Napoleon’s imprisonment of the Pope, just to take two issues, show that in the short term the Vatican can do the wrong thing, and be captured by the crooked political forces of the day.
The modern Vatican has shown again and again how much they favour the crooked Globalist/Occult agenda, whether it be the Climate Change hoax, mass immigration, LGBT, Covid, you name it. We cannot close our minds or ears to this, its very hard to believe that they have any real sympathy for the SSPX and, I would suggest, in fact want to destroy them, as is pretty explicitly laid out in the document Traditionis Custodes and its accompanying letter, with respect to the other traditional orders at any rate. So no I don’t believe the modern Vatican is sincere here and I think one’s view of this should come into the question of obedience, at this extreme level in any case.
Just a few thoughts anyway, and its why I support these consecrations.
