From the
archives - Published from 1982-96, Fidelity magazine was the predecessor of Culture Wars.
The Society of St. Pius
X Gets Sick
by Thomas W. Case
From the October 1992 issue of Fidelity magazine
Since
the excommunication of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre on July 1, 1988, the Society of
St. Pius X (SSPX) has moved further and further into a posture of shoring up
its existence as a separate church. Now that its leader has gone to his reward,
the Society is a body without a head, and so obeys the law of separation:
schism breeds further schism, charity is lost in rancor, and the end is chaos.
Especially in the United States, unanimity has never been a characteristic of
the Society. But before we get into this discussion, we should say something
about the history of the Society in general, since with Archbishop Marcel
Lefebvre we have a serious and relatively respected protest movement. It is a
movement that kept communion with the Church through 20 years of struggle and
diplomacy, before going into formal schism on June 30, 1988.
But the fact that it did
go into formal schism, just on the verge of an accommodation with Rome,
illustrates a kind of general law about schism itself. It is the problem of
egoism. Once you have taken a stand in opposition to authority, once you build
churches, once you have properties and benefactors and mortgages, once you pour
into your people a crusading, persecuted spirit and become a kind of god to
your world-wide flock once all of this has happened, it is tremendously
difficult to bow your head again to the institution you have fought for so
long, with the added humiliation of losing all your property and your power. It
is why the Old Catholics, for example, still exist as varied dots of egoism
after a century and a half, or why the Anglican Church still exists as a husk
without a doctrine after four centuries.
Protest movements of any
kind, once they build a separate church, take on a life of their own, even
though it is a half life. Almost never do they climb back into the Church
(unless they are coerced, and that kind of stuff went out after the horrors of
the Thirty Years War). Instead, the first infidelity makes the next one that
much easier, until in the end you have ex-Lefebvrite and sede vacantist Father
Sanborn with his own tiny sect in Michigan or ex-Lefebvrite Father Clarence
Kelly forming his own Society of Pius V, or ex-Lefebvrite, ex-Kellyite Father
(now Thuc line Bishop, 1996) Dolan hooking up with the Mount St. Michael cult
in Spokane, Washington.
Marcel Lefebvre was born
in Tourcoing, France in 1905. He was ordained in 1929 and joined the Holy
Ghost Fathers in 1932. The order sent him to the French colony of Gabon in
Africa as a missionary, and on September 18, 1947, he was made a bishop. The
next year Pope Plus XII made him apostolic delegate for all of French-speaking
Africa. His driving interests according to the official (SSPX) biography: a
crusading anti-communist spirit and a resolve to end religious ignorance.
During his African tour of duty, he created 21 new dioceses, built seminaries and
schools and printing presses, and ordained a good many native priests. It was a
huge accomplishment. In 1955, he was made Archbishop of Dakar, and in 1959 he
returned to France.
Two continuing events
apparently accounted for Lefebvre's eventually establishing his own priestly
society. First, he was elected superior general of the Holy Ghost Fathers in
1962. In that capacity, he sent promising young men for seminary training to
Rome. The French Seminary in Rome became progressively more modernist after the
Second Vatican Council, and complaints from his protegees came back to him with
increasing frequency. The other concern was in the Council itself. Lefebvre had
been appointed to the commission that wrote the papally approved documents,
originally presented to the Council for deliberation. Every one of these
documents was thrown out in the first Council session. Soon afterwards,
Lefebvre "publicly expressed astonishment at the presence on
sub-commissions of modernist theologians like Kung, Rahner, Congar and
Schillebeeckx.
The alleged modernist
takeover, or near takeover, of the Council, and later on, the "spirit of
the Council," as revealed in the French Seminary in Rome, moved him at
last to found "an International House of St. Pius X" at Fribourg, Switzerland
on June 6, 1969.
A year later, the new
Society moved to Econe, and in November 1970, the "Priestly Society of St.
Pius X" was established canonically under the jurisdiction of Msgr.
Charriere in the Diocese of Fribourg.
But the honeymoon
between the Church and the Society was short-lived. Pressure from Cardinal
Villot, Vatican Secretary of State and spokesman for the (mostly liberal)
French bishops, as well as a general clash of ideology between tradition and
aggiornamento, brought things to a head in 1975. Lefebvre was called to Rome
and informally tried by a papal commission; he was forbidden to ordain any more
priests, and told he must close the seminary and disband the Society.
The Archbishop refused,
claiming he had been made victim of an irregular canonical procedure. He
ordained some priests in June 1976; he was suspended by Paul VI a month later.
From this point on he and his priests acted without faculties. Some may think
this a technical point, but it is sure that since 1976 there has been a very
controversial situation in the Society regarding the validity of confessions
and marriages.
In his sermon,
"Twenty Years of Struggle," during a retreat in 1986, the Archbishop
anxiously argues his rights: "But we did not stop there [ordaining
priests] with our apparently illegal actions with regards to the particulars of
the law, such as the hearing of confessions, [or] the blessing of marriages
performed in our presence in the dioceses. Many of the things which we have
accomplished are of themselves and strictly speaking against the letter of the
law, but why do we do these things? Quite simply because we believed that which
was undertaken against us was illegal and that they did not have the right to
suppress our Order."
There matters stood
until the election of Pope John Paul II in 1978, after which relations between
Rome and the Archbishop warmed considerably. Right away negotiations began with
the view to regularizing the Society. But throughout the succeeding 10 years,
intransigent positions bedeviled the diplomacy and finally resulted in formal
schism. There is no space here to go into all that passed between Rome and
Lefebvre until the summer of 1988.
A few points only will
be covered. A conciliatory letter from the Archbishop to John Paul II dated March
8, 1980, contains Lefebvre's assurance that he agrees with the pope's
declaration that the Council "must be understood in the light of all Holy
tradition, and that, though he has reservations about the Novus Ordo Mass, I
have never said that it is in itself invalid or heretical."
The same two points
appear in Lefebvre's letter to Cardinal Ratzinger on April 17, 1985, where a
declaration of reconciliation is agreed upon: "We have always accepted and
now declare that we accept the texts of the Council, according to the criterion
of tradition, that is, according to the traditional Magisterium of the Church.
We have never affirmed and do not now affirm that the New Order of Mass,
celebrated according to the rite indicated in the Roman edition, is of itself
invalid and heretical."
Lefebvre goes on to
"explicate" the declaration before appending his signature:
(1) the Vatican II Declaration on Religious Liberty is contrary to the
Magisterium of the Church, and should undergo a total revision; (2) the
liturgical reform has been influenced by Ecumenism with the Protestants, and is
by this fact a very grave danger for the Catholic faith, [so] we ask that this
reform be entirely revised so that it restores Catholic dogmas to their former
honored status, along the lines of the immemorial Mass; (3) Communism and
socialism must be formally condemned, and "Catholic states must be
encouraged to recognize the Catholic religion as the only of official
religion...."
On May 29, 1985,
Cardinal Ratzinger replied that Lefebvre's "explications" in
effect contradict the original declaration which of course they do. In fact, it
takes considerable effrontery for Lefebvre to first say that the Novus Ordo
Mass is valid and the Conciliar documents are acceptable in the light of tradition,
and then demand a return to the old Mass and a massive revision of a Conciliar
document. Less than a year later on January 20, 1986 in yet another letter,
Ratzinger insists on fidelity to the Council: "Of course you can
express your anxiety over certain interpretations that may have been given to
various texts of the Council; you may also legitimately criticize such
interpretations. But it is not possible for you to call into question the
authentic doctrine of the ecumenical Second Vatican Council, the texts of which
are magisterial and enjoy the highest doctrinal authority."
The line is drawn at the
point of accepting or rejecting the Conciliar documents (however they are
interpreted). But while this high diplomacy is going on, the Archbishop's true
state of mind is a little more unfriendly. Nine days after receiving
Ratzinger's letter, perhaps stung by the Cardinal's reply, Lefebvre writes a
letter to the editor of the Journals Itineraires and Present:
"The plan announced
in the documents of the Masonic Alta Vendita and published on Pius IX's orders,
is becoming a reality day by day beneath our very eyes. Last week I was in
Rome, at the summons of Cardinal Gagnon, who handed me the enclosed letter
[from Ratzinger, quoted above]. A very well organized network is in control
of all the Curia's activity, inside and outside the Curia itself."
"The Pope is an
instrument of this mafia which he put in place and with which he sympathizes.
We may hope for no reaction to come from him, on the contrary. The announcement
of the meeting of world religions decided on by him for the month of October in
Assisi, is the culminating imposture and the supreme insult to Our Lord. Rome
is no longer Catholic Rome. The prophecies of Our Lady of LaSalette and of Leo
XIII in his exorcism are coming about: Where the seat of blessed Peter and the
chair of truth was set up for a light to enlighten all nations, there they have
established the throne of the abomination of their wickedness so that having
struck the Shepherd they may scatter the flock in turn...."
"You will see,
in the reply to our letter [again, that reply of Jan. 20 quoted above], that
Cardinal Ratzinger is striving once more to make Vatican II into a dogma. We
are dealing with people who have no notion of Truth. We shall from now on be
more and more obliged to act on the assumption that this new Conciliar Church
is no longer Catholic." (Letter to Mr. Madiran, Jan. 29, 1986).
The accusation that John
Paul is an instrument of a Masonic mafia "which he put in place"
seemed to leave no ground for accommodation. After the Assisi conference of
October 1986 (which the pope proclaimed was solely a prayerful convocation for
world peace and had absolutely no bearing on the supreme truth of the Catholic
Faith), the attacks from the St. Pius and other traditional groups were a
constant barrage zeroing in on this "blasphemous event."
Lefebvre's deep distrust
of Rome could have only gotten deeper, and the diplomacy of the last days
before the excommunication should be seen in this light. In fact the Archbishop
had been preparing the ground for consecrating new bishops for some time. In
1974, he had told a confidante (now an ex-Lefebvrite priest) that he would
never consecrate a bishop, "for this would mean I would do what Martin
Luther did, and I would lose the Holy Ghost." But by 1983 he was in
the United States, sounding out his priests on the possibility of consecrating
bishops. He asked each in turn for his view on the subject. Those Society superiors
who had objected to what he and they knew would be a formally schismatic act,
in a year's time were all removed from their positions. They were replaced by
those priests who had gone along with the idea.
The groundwork was
carefully laid among believers. At St. Mary's Academy in St. Mary's, Kansas
every child and adult underwent a mandatory new "catechism" under the
auspices of Society priests 1.5 years before the consecrations. They learned
that following a false authority was evil; that the pope had lost any legal
authority; that the schism and excommunication that were sure to follow the
consecrations were not really schism and not really excommunication. How
far-reaching was this new "catechism?" If variations of it were
imposed on all believers in 1986 and 1987, it would account for the fact that
so few people left the Society in the summer of 1988. On May 5, 1988, Lefebvre
signed an accord with Rome that in principle gave the Archbishop most of what
he wanted. He could have a bishop and thus provide for the Society's
continuance after his death. The Society priests could say the Tridentine Mass.
The suspension was lifted, and the Society could once again legally ordain its
own clergy. Once again Lefebvre accepted the Vatican Council, "as
interpreted by tradition," and the New Mass as "valid"
if not welcome.
According to an
interview in 30 Days (July, August 1988), during the May 5 meeting Lefebvre
asked Cardinal Ratzinger when a bishop could be consecrated. June 30? No, that
would be too soon, says Ratzinger. August 15? No, perhaps in November. (All of
this is Lefebvre's version of events.) Later that day, the Archbishop decides
that Rome is playing games: he'll never get a bishop. So he shoots off a letter
to Ratzinger on May 6 threatening to go ahead and appoint a bishop on June 30,
with or without Rome's mandate. On May 24 Rome said, in effect, "Okay.
you can consecrate a bishop on August 15." But now (on June 2),
Lefebvre rejected the concord entirely. On June 30 he consecrated four bishops,
and on July 1 he and his bishops were formally excommunicated.
What had happened to
ruin the proceedings on the verge of success? One thing about this matter of
bishops is usually not explained. Some time around the May 5-6 disaster, Lefebvre
had presented the names of potential bishops, and Rome had demurred. The
selection of bishops is a touchy subject. With papal approval, it is perfectly
legitimate. Without papal approval, it is a schismatic act and an
excommunicable offense.
The real problem of the
bishops, in this instance, was not when, but who? Who would be acceptable to
the pope? Presumably the priests who eventually were chosen as bishops were on
the list presented by Lefebvre.
Rome knew who these men
were, and knew they held the same views Lefebvre did in his more incautious
moments: the New Mass is blasphemous, the Council is heretical the popes that
approve the Council are heretical, and maybe they are not popes at all.
Whatever the
deliberations, it is certain that Rome had an extensive dossier on the men
favored for consecration. And that is why the pope reserves to himself the
right of approval and why it is such a grave act to consecrate a bishop without
it. It is no technical matter, but a measure to protect the Faith. How could
Rome ever approve a bishop who really believed that the pope was a tool of the
Freemasons?
In truth, Pope John Paul
would probably never have approved a bishop Lefebvre had chosen, and by the
same token Lefebvre probably could never have been saddled with a bishop John
Paul had chosen. (But now we will never know.) It goes right back to the deep
division over the Faith, and the two unresolved questions: is the New Mass
invalid, and are the Vatican II documents heretical?
Another revelation of
what went on in and around the secret negotiations of 1988: at one point
Lefebvre demanded as part of the accord that an the world's Catholic
traditionalists (those who wanted the old Mass) would have to become members of
the Society. It was an absurd demand, impossible to fulfill even if it had been
granted, but it speaks to the condition of Lefebvre's (now feverish?) mind.
Apparently in the last few years of his life Marcel Lefebvre was not always
clearheaded. He was unmercifully manipulated by his lieutenants, Fathers Franz
Schmidberger (superior general of the Society), Richard Williamson, and the
others. When he returned from Rome after signing the May 5 accord, these
bishops-to-be, perhaps seeing their bishoprics about to go down the drain, told
the Archbishop that if he did not repudiate the accord with Rome the Society
would split apart at the seams. There were too many in the Society (meaning
Williamson and Company) who simply had no trust in Rome at all. Under that
pressure, the Archbishop changed his mind and hardened his position against all
possible future diplomacy with the Vatican. This was his state of mind in
mid-June: "I entered these negotiations because Rome's reactions in the
second half of last year had raised in me a faint hope that these churchmen had
changed. They have not changed, except for the worse. Look at Casaroli in
Moscow! They have spiritual AIDS, they have no grace, their immunity defense
system is gone. I do not think one can say that Rome has not lost the Faith. As
for an eventual excommunication, its disagreeableness diminishes with time."
(Private talks quoted in Williamson's Letter from Winona, Aug. 1, 1988).
And so the new church
was born, by a willful man who had created a monster he could not in the end
control, either as that monster infected his followers or as it infected his
own mind.
Among Pius X defenders,
it is now common to refuse to admit that Lefebvre had gone into schism, or that
he had really been excommunicated. Lefebvre historian Michael Davies, who at
first denounced the June 30 consecrations, now defends them in a disappointing
article (Angelus, December 1990). It is disappointing because Davies, for all
his knowledge and intellect, descends to a swamp of special pleading to
convince readers that 1) there was no schism, and, 2) there was no
excommunication.
Sliding around the facts
of schism and excommunication are typical for defenders of a group in schism.
The same arguments were heard in the Schism of Utrecht, in the establishment of
the Old Catholics, and during the creation of Protestant churches in the 16th
century. Always a higher law is appealed to so that a specific law can be
circumvented:
According to Martin
Luther, "These [church laws] hold good only so long as they are
not injurious to Christianity and the laws of God. Therefore, if the Pope
deserves punishment, these laws cease to bind us, since Christendom would
suffer."
According to Marcel
Lefebvre, "In the Church there is no law or jurisdiction which can
impose on a Christian a diminution of his faith. All the faithful can and
should resist whatever interferes with their faith.... If they are forced with
an order putting their faith in danger of corruption, there is an overriding
duty to disobey."
Davies forgets that
beyond canon law and the thoughts of Canonists interpreting that law, and
beyond the thoughts of pundits interpreting the thoughts of the canonists is
the court of last resort, which is none other than the Vicar of Christ.
Is there any hope that
the Society will return as a whole to the Church, i.e., besides the many
individuals priests and seminarians who have gone over to Rome? It doesn't look
like it.
The new counter-church
propels its own existence by turning up the heat on the "Conciliar"
Church. In a "Letter to Friends" - of Feb. 12, 1989, Superior General
Schmidberger reveals a threefold "foreign occupation" of the
Church. First is the pope himself, "a prisoner of modern philosophy and
modernistic theology. Second is Cardinal Ratzinger and others close to the pope
who share his beliefs. Third is the conscious and determined conspiracy of the
forces of Gnosticism, Theosophy. and Esoterism, headed by the Illuminati and
the Freemasons, and allied with Marxist infiltration."
Well, if the Masons
and/or the Illuminati run the show, then there is nothing to be gained by
dealing with Rome. It's no good making a pact with the devil. It might be said
in passing that diabolizing your opponent is at one and the same time to give
him superhuman powers, and to provide yourself with an excuse for severing any
and an connections with him.
According to Martin
Luther, "The Church of Rome, formerly the most holy of all churches,
has become . . . the very kingdom of sin, death and hell; so that not even the
Antichrist, if he were to come, could desire any addition to its wickedness."
According to Marcel
Lefebvre, in his Aug. 29, 1987. letter to the four bishops-to-be, "The
See of Peter and posts of authority in Rome being occupied by Antichrists, the
destruction of the Kingdom of Our Lord is being rapidly carried out even within
His Mystical Body here below."
The point of such
anathemas is that attempts to reform the Church from inside are futile; it is
too late: and so we (Luther, Lefebvre) must go our own way and build our own
true Catholic Church.
Followers of Lefebvre
say that he was a saint. They point out that if not for the Society of St. Pius
X, there would be no Ecclesia Dei. There would be no opportunity for Catholics
to return to the old rite as they now have the increasing opportunity to do. Perhaps.
But if an accord had been reached, an internal reform might have been more
readily accomplished.
All that power and
enthusiasm working inside the Church might have accomplished much more much
quicker. But, once again, we will never know.
If Lefebvre was a saint,
he was crafty and vacillating as well. He was crafty in polling Pius X
superiors around the world and then getting rid of those who opposed the idea
of his consecrating bishops. He was crafty in delaying the consecrations a year
for mercenary reasons. It seems that Richard Williamson's new seminary in
Winona, Minnesota, was just getting off the ground, and Williamson warned
Lefebvre that the benefactor about to purchase the property for the seminary
would withdraw his offer if he knew about any projected consecrations.
The benefactor was
apparently one of those conservative Lefebvrites, who was no schismatic and
would not risk "losing the Holy Ghost." So Lefebvre agreed to
delay the consecrations a year until the property was secured.
Was Lefebvre a sede
vacantist? It seems that it depended on his mood, or on the audience he was
addressing. In 1980 he wrote to the Holy Father and protested, "I have
no hesitation regarding the legitimacy or the validity of Your election. I have
already had to condemn these ideas and I continue to do so in the face of some
seminarians who allow themselves to be influenced by ecclesiastics outside the
Fraternity." But in his various tours, the ex-Lefebvrite priest
informs me, he would speak a "faithful-to-the-pope" line to
conservative Catholics, and a suggestively sede vacantist line when talking to
radical traditionalists. Like any politician, he played to the audience.
But he threw caution to
the winds in the preface of his 1987 letter to the four bishops-to-be. Here he
calls the pope an Antichrist, which is a vivid way -of saying the papal seat is
empty. Moreover, there exists an audiocassette tape of a Lefebvre sermon given
shortly after John Paul II's 1986 Assisi peace convocation. Basing his charges on
that ecumenical gathering, the archbishop says, "I think that when a
Pope or bishop honors God in this non-Catholic way, they have the intention of
going to God as a non-Catholic, thereby renouncing the Catholic faith. Never
has it happened in the Church before that he who sits on the throne of Peter
has participated in the cult of false gods. Are we then obliged to believe that
this Pope is not Pope? Because it seems impossible that a Pope could be a
public and formal heretic."
The sede vacantist
question brings us back to the United States. Three previously Lefebvrite
priests, Fathers Cekada, Dolan and Sanborn, have now split from the Pius V
Society, which Fr. Kelly had formed when he broke with Lefebvre, to become
involved in varying degrees with the cult at Mount St. Michael, whose pretense
to Catholicism rests on its connection to the Bishop Thuc (of South Vietnam)
lineage. As Lefebvrite seminarians proposed for the priesthood back in the
1970s, these three encountered opposition because of their openly expressed
sede vacantism. A delegation of American priests warned Lefebvre.
But the Archbishop.
knowing their standpoint ordained them anyway. Then, in 1983, Lefebvre used
that excuse, sede vacantism, to kick Fr. Kelly and the others out of the
Society. The accusation must have rung hollow, given Lefebvre's own leanings.
Especially since Richard Williamson, openly a sede vacantist as a seminarian at
Econe, was later made bishop for North America.
The real reason for
Kelly's ouster was his greed and power-mongering, and Williamson's enmity.
Kelly and Cekada had put their own names on a lot of Pius X property deeds in
the Cincinnati area. There are strong hints that Kelly wanted to take over the
whole Society in the United States. Williamson, who eventually came out on top,
had bad-mouthed Kelly as long ago as the early 70s, when the two of them walked
the seminary grounds at Econe. Now Kelly has his own little sect in Oyster Bay,
N.Y., along with a few Pius V Society chapels dotted around the country. Many of
these are engaged in property litigation, since they were originally owned by
the Society of St. Pius X.
Another mini-schism has
just occurred in the SSPX. Bishop Williamson, a friend of Tridentine Rite
Conference Fathers LeBlanc and Wickens, wanted to attend their Tridentine Rite
Conference (TRC) meeting last year (1991) in New Jersey. He was to accept an
award from the new pan-traditionalist lobby on behalf of Marcel Lefebvre.
Father Terence Finnegan, a Lefebvrite priest at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in
Phoenix, got wind of the project and protested first to Williamson and then to
Fr. Schmidberger in Germany. Finnegan's major concern was to protect the
orthodoxy of the Society; he knew all about the TRC and its involvement with
the odder sorts of schismatics and heretics, with the scurrilous Order of St.
John, with irregular Feeneyite (Jansenist) sects, and with sede vacantists like
Dan Jones in Colorado.
Finnegan was also
increasingly distressed at the strange doctrines coming from the mouth of
Richard Williamson. After a feverish exchange of letters between Finnegan and
Father Peter Scott (pro-forma superior of the SSPX in North America), between
Schmidberger and Scott, and between Scott and Williamson, Williamson was told
not to attend the TRC convention. By this time Williamson was seething.
Finnegan was called to Europe for an interview with Schmidberger. Finnegan
again warned Schmidberger that Williamson was ruining the Society in the United
States because of the latter's incautious associations and intemperate
statements. For his troubles, Fr. Finnegan was told he would be transferred.
The choices were Ireland and South Africa. Finnegan refused, and on April 8,
1992, he was dismissed from the Society. Our Lady of Sorrows in Phoenix now has
a new Lefebvrite priest and a flock of about 80 believers; leftovers from
Finnegan's tenure. Fr. Finnegan now says Mass in a private home, and on Sundays
rents a hall. He brought with him the great majority of his former flock,
amounting to some 200 fiercely devoted followers.
That is the significant
fact. When this mini-schism occurred, the great majority of believers dissolved
their union with the SSPX and followed their local leader into another independent
Catholic status. This kind of thing can only happen over and over again when
there is no central authority providing a sanctified unity. In other words,
without a pope there is only self-will, and devotion to one strong personality
or another.
Other Pius X parishes
(technically, missions) around the country have recently been squeezed out or
isolated. In Post Falls, Idaho, the parish pastured by Father Rizzo has been
the site of a battle royal over the sin of "Americanism." As this contention
between American patriots and European fascists is ripping the Society apart,
we will explore its ramifications later on when we talk about the politics of
the SSPX. Fr. Rizzo has since been transferred to England. His associate
pastor, Father Hunter, wrote a book defending the origin of the U.S.
Government, and denying the Society's charge that it was all one, big Masonic
plot. Fathers Schmidberger and Scott refuse to allow the book to be published.
A new (foreign) priest will soon arrive in Post Falls to take charge of the
600-member congregation and teach them the One True Political Faith. Fr. Hunter
says the congregation is demoralized and worried about what is soon to descend
upon them.
In Campbell, California,
the faithful are up in arms over the ill-considered funding of a retreat house
out of mission funds that were intended for a new chapel and school. Violence
on the church steps and criminal litigation is the upshot. The parish priest,
Father Foley, has been condemned, slandered from the pulpit by U.S. Superior
Fr. Scott and Bishop Williamson, and removed to Sacramento. Early this year,
Foley was told to report to a mission in Minnesota. Instead, he left the
Society and took a portion of the faithful with him. Now he says Mass in a
private home in Walnut Creek, California. The underlying cause of the brouhaha
is local displeasure over imperious control from the Society superiors. Wealthy
benefactors who thought they were contributing to the creation of a parish
instead see their chapel sold, their Mass schedules limited, and their money
spent on an inaccessible mountaintop haven for Society bigwigs.
In Omaha, Nebraska, a
former Society parish of about 50 people now attends an indult Mass. The people
were tired of hearing their patriotism indicted as a sin, and especially
dismayed by the "Gestapo tactics" imposed on their kids at St. Mary's
under the dictatorship of Father Ramon Angles, about which more later. These
concerns underlay the decision by Fr. Scott to tell the folks in Omaha that "due
to the shortage of priests," they would no longer have a Society priest
say Mass for them. Letters passed back and forth, Fr. Scott said there had been
a misunderstanding, "a priest would be provided on certain occasions,"
and all would be well. But by that time the parishioners had enough.
In Phoenix, in Omaha, in
Campbell, California, and in Post Falls, Idaho, a variety of causes has brought
schism or division to the SSPX. These four cases are only the tip of the
iceberg.
American priests, and
Americans, have been mistrusted from the start by their elite European masters.
Intelligent, discerning American priests, those with minds of their own, have
been expelled or transferred abroad, leaving Williamson's foreign-born lackeys
in charge of an increasingly demoralized laity.
Are Richard Williamson
and his cohorts wrecking the SSPX by they hateful and dim-witted opinions and
their denigration of American institutions? First, we should recall the twofold
theology of the Society: it is faithful to Rome (no matter what Rome thinks),
or Rome is the seat of the anti- Christ and the SSPX is the last repository of
the true faith. Williamson's recent talks more and more support the latter
view.
In his December 1, 1991 Letter from Winona, Williamson decries
Cardinal Silvio Oddi's (reported) statement that the Vatican is ignoring the
Society since the death of Lefebvre in March. Williamson doesn't believe Oddi. After
all, "Rome cannot help keeping watch on the Society, or on any coherent
group with large numbers of Catholics keeping the faith. The reason is not hard
to find, such groups are the main obstacle to the advance of the Antichrist....
The One Worlders owed it to themselves to infiltrate Rome and harness it to the
purposes of the anti-Christ. This with Vatican II they largely succeeded in
doing.... To sweep all Catholics into the clutches of the One World Government,
to switch them from followers of Christ into followers of the Anti-Christ,
Rome, must deceive them....In this process. it is vital that the people should
be persuaded that Catholicism is only what Rome says it is . . . [but]
another form of Catholicism than that of 'Rome' is, after all, possible."
Given this malice, there
is little hope for a reconciliation with Rome on any grounds. So it comes as no
surprise to hear (from an ex-Lefebvrite priest whom we shall call "Father
Abel") that Williamson from his early days in Econe has been a sede
vacantist, that he has often said "there is no pope," and that
today, in Winona, he teaches that the real Society position is that there is no
pope, "but that because of the controversy this issue causes, we deny
this position in public." If there is no pope and Rome's program is
the program of the anti-Christ, and only the SSPX keeps the faith alive, then
another Williamson teaching follows: "If you are not in the Society,
you are not in the Church." This is also taught to the seminarians at
Winona and the faithful at St. Mary's. Moreover, since Williamson holds the
literal interpretation of the doctrine that there is no salvation outside the
Church, it follows that there is no salvation outside the Society.
Which brings into focus
the strange statement in the October 1, 1991. Letter concerning "the
needs of hundreds of millions of souls in danger of eternal damnation throughout
the English-speaking world." In the Letter, Williamson complains that
only 18 new seminarians came to Winona in 1991, a small number considering all
those souls who need saving. As for non-Christians, there is no hope at all. In
the Winona publication Verbum (Winter 1992), he declares, though for dramatic
purposes he lets an imaginary priest speak for him, that "other
religions will only lead souls to Hell." No wonder he gets along with
the Tridentine Rite Conference Feeneyites so well.
Williamson's salvation
doctrine is even narrower than that. "Fr, Abel" has often heard the
bishop claim that women are only good for drudge work and breeding, and that no
woman can be saved. Hearing women's confessions is therefore a waste of time.
Retreats for women are
worse than useless. There can be no forgiveness for the daughters of Eve.
"What about the Virgin Mary?" asks "Fr. Abel. "That's
her problem," says Bishop Williamson.
If Williamson's
salvation doctrine is a little cockeyed, his doctrine concerning the Jews is
also. Since Catholics hold a wide spectrum of beliefs concerning relations with
Judaism, it will be best to juxtapose the Church s statements with those of the
bishop. The reader may then deliberate on how far the one view deviates from
the other. The Church believes that Christ, who is our peace, has through His
cross reconciled Jews and Gentiles and made them one in Himself (cf. Eph.
2:14-16).
According to Nostra
Aetate, the Vatican II Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to
Non-Christian Religions promulgated on October 28, 1965, "Even
though the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the
death of Christ (. John 19:6), neither all Jews indiscriminately at that
time, nor Jews today, can be charged with the crimes committed during His
passion. It is true that the Church is the new people of God, yet the Jews
should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed as if this followed from holy
Scripture. Consequently, all must take care, lest in catechizing or in
preaching the Word of God, they teach anything which is not in accord with the
truth of the Gospel message or the spirit of Christ."
According to Richard
Williamson's February 1, 1991, Letter from Winona, "Until [the
Jews] re-discover their true Messianic vocation [by conversion to
Christ], they may be expected to continue fanatically agitating, in
accordance with their false messianic vocation of Jewish world-dominion, to
prepare the Anti-Christ's throne in Jerusalem. So we may fear their continuing
to play their major part in the agitation of the East and in the corruption of
the West. Here the wise Catholic will remember that, again, the ex-Christian
nations have only their own Liberalism to blame for avowing free circulation
within Christendom to the enemies of Christ.... Remembering also that Annas and
Caiaphas induced but never obliged Judas to betray Jesus, and that the
Apostle's betrayal was a crime far worse than the Jews deicide, he will look at
the state of the Catholic Church today and see why the enemies of Christendom
are being given so much power...."
In 1989, Williamson
delivered some speeches in Canada that caused some consternation, and got him
investigated for possible hate crimes by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In
Sherbrooke, Quebec, he said, "there was not one Jew killed in the gas
chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies. The Jews created the Holocaust so we
would prostrate ourselves on our knees before them and approve of their new
State of Israel.... Jews made up the Holocaust, Protestants get their orders
from the devil, and the Vatican has sold its soul to liberalism."
Later he defended these
statements, stating that "I was attacking the enemies of our Lord Jesus
Christ, and that includes Jews, as well as Communists and Freemasons."
Williamson returned to
the United States before the investigation of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
got off the ground, but now the Pius X publications Verbum, Angelus
and Williamson's monthly Letter are banned in Canada. A Letter from Winona
(Nov. 3, 1991) quotes from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a scurrilous
document purportedly written by Jews, describing a Jewish master plan to take
over the world. The document keeps popping up in Jew-hating circles as if it
were a newly discovered proof of Jewish malice. It is actually a piece of
disinformation written by a Russian in the employ of the Czar's Secret Police,
and has been known to be a fraud by all serious historians for nearly a
century.
Along with many
crack-pot historical revisionists, Williamson subscribes to the big lie that
Hitler had no intention, nor much success if he did have the intention of
exterminating the Jewish race in Europe. To believe that, you would have to
believe in an impossibly far-ranging conspiracy of U.S. Army soldiers and officers;
French and English soldiers and others; numerous investigating commissions,
hundreds of thousands of faked reports, faked death camp records; faked
photographs; faked testimonies; and faked dead bodies. It is an insane hatred
that causes such fervid denial of historical fact, and which bestows an utterly
superhuman power on diabolical conspirators (Jews, Illuminati, Masons) thought
to be responsible for everything that has gone wrong in the history of the
world.
Williamson is probably
less controversial for his religious anti-Semitism among American members of
the Society of St. Pius X, than for his nutty attacks on the U.S. Constitution
and Government.
In one of his Letters
(July 1, 1991), he decides that the Constitutional principles of Liberty, Equality
and Democracy are responsible for abortion. A taste: "Democracy, we,
the people, are sovereign, so if our laws have approved of abortion, then what
can be wrong with it?" This idiocy is hardly worth a response. If
democracy is to blame for abortion, on what shall we blame abortion in Hungary,
in the Soviet Union or in China? A venomous Zeitgeist can overwhelm a
dictatorship as easily as a democracy, actually in the United States we have a
constitutional republic, and in a country where the people have some voice in
their government, it is easier finally to overturn that Zeitgeist.
The critique of American
institutions does not stop with the denigration of our type of government. For
several years, an attack on the U.S. Constitution, the Founding Fathers and the
"Americanist heresy" has demoralized Pius X members and
brought many of them to the point of rebellion. The Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution are branded as imbued with the doctrines of Freemasonry.
The First Amendment is attacked for "religious indifferentism,"
because it did not provide for the establishment of the Catholic Church.
Patriots are attacked as giving their first loyalty to their country instead of
the Catholic Church. These attacks come from the Frenchman Father Jean-Luc
Lafitte in Ridge field, Connecticut; the Spaniard Fr. Angles at St. Mary's; the
Australian Fr. Scott at SSPX headquarters in St. Louis; and the Englishman
Bishop Williamson at Winona. There is not one American in a position of power
in the Society in the United States.
Fr. Lafitte raves
against "Americanists" through his Letters from the St Ignatius
Retreat House in Ridgefield. Under the heading "To idolize Our Country,"
he says: "This serious sin, opposed to the First and Fourth
Commandment, is more and more frequent in the mind of many of our parishioners;
by it, we worship our Country, our Constitution, putting our Country above the
Ten Commandments of God. [It is] an infamy and a mortal sin."
Later in this Letter
(Number 18, May 15, 1991) Lafitte attacks the John Birch Society as "an
Americanist organization whose doctrine is in many points in open contradiction
with the traditional doctrine of the Catholic Church." The list of
charges against the John Birch Society is long, but most importantly it seems
the organization isn't anti-Semitic enough: "[It] refuses to understand
the Jewish conspiracy behind the revolution. (It is proven that the Jewish
leaders have always been heading the revolution through Freemasonry and
Communism.)" Along the same lines, the John Birch Society is indicted
for its 1990 Resolution that its members should "Join a church or
synagogue: this country was founded on the Judeo-Christian ethic." Fr.
Lafitte claims that "this is pure Indifferentism; furthermore I am
curious to know how the Jewish ethic, which killed Our Lord Jesus Christ and
the Catholic ethic, which worships Him, can be put on the same table."
If Jesus Christ had been
born an American in 1700, and some Americans had engineered his crucifixion by
the ruling British Government in 1733, Fr. Lafitte would accuse every American
today of holding an "ethic which killed Our Lord Jesus Christ."
He nearly does so in any case with his vitriolic condemnation of American
nationalism. The practical problem of this exaggerated attack (by foreign
leaders) on the John Birch Society and on American patriotism in general is
that the majority of Pius X members in this country are extremely patriotic,
and many are, or have been, members of the John Birch Society. Nor do people of
any nationality like to hear their country run down by foreigners. One
disgusted SSPX member told me that the Society seems intent on shooting itself
in the foot.
The truth is that the
Founding Fathers were not engaged in a Masonic plot to spread religious indifferentism:
they were faced with a situation where many of the former colonies already had
state-established Protestant churches of different communions. The new colonial
government could not have favored one or another (Congregationalist, Quaker,
Episcopal, etc.) denomination, nor the Catholic Church, without committing
suicide at its very beginning. The Catholics in this country are indeed lucky
that no national church was established. For such a national church might have
been "indifferently" Protestant, but it would never have been
Catholic, and certainly would have persecuted Catholics. The First Amendment to
the Constitution should be considered as providential for Catholics. Without
it, we would never have been allowed to build churches, schools, monasteries
and convents; promote the Catholic truth; or make our presence felt politically
and socially.
Williamson, according to
Fr. Abel, blames America for ever separating from the British Empire. (In which
case we would have an established Anglican Church?) He also calls Indians (from
India) "wogs," and believes that subcontinent should also
have remained under British domination. He blames Americans for the
unemployment problem in England. As good colonials, we should devote our wealth
and industry to the English overlords.
The bishop's attacks on
Rome and on the United States have become more and more unfettered. This year
he spoke to a group of the faithful in Colorado. He said that "this
pope is making Rome the spearhead of the 'All Religions Church.'" He said
that this "New World Church will then use the power of the State
against the Society. It will be in perfect sync with the New World Order C then
the police win come for you and me."
Well, the police may
come for Richard Williamson and hand him over for deportation proceedings; for
just afterwards, he said: "President Bush is a terrible traitor to this
country. He is doing everything he can to dismantle the U.S. A. and integrate
it into Russia and the New World Order, to the benefit of the Anti-Christ and
to the absolute destruction of all that's best in the U.S.A."
Is it an exaggeration to
say that this is the speech of a cult leader verging on paranoia? First he says
"they" are going to come down on us, and a moment later he
gives a reason why "they" might indeed come down on him. It
won't be because his speech might be considered an incitement to political
violence, and thus make him persona non grata to the Justice Department, but
because "they" are the anti-Christ, necessarily out to
persecute the last remnant of true believers.
Extremist politics
flourishes at the Pius X Academy (the K-12 boarding school) and at the college
in St. Mary's, Kansas. Since 1989, Fr. Ramon Angles has been rector of the
combined institutions. The children in St. Mary's Academy learn to hate the
American form of government. American icons are mocked. The Statue of Liberty
is ridiculed as "a French prostitute." The only good
government, the only Catholic government, is monarchy.
Democracy is evil. But
Fr. Angles carries the critique further. It seems that good government comes to
fruition in the anti-Semitic dictatorship of Nazi Germany. In an absurd
transformation of good and evil, the mass murderer, demon worshiping,
anti-Catholic, Adolf Hitler is metamorphosed into a type of Christian King. Fr.
Angles has an apartment full of Nazi paraphernalia which he shows to favored
boys. He shows them the Nazi ceremonial daggers worn by officers of the Third
Reich. He is proud of the vintage Mercedes owned by his family, which once was
owned by Adolf Hitler. A one-time student at the academy was favored by a
special meeting with Fr. Angles a couple of years ago. In his private room on
campus, Angles treated him and a friend to a pizza and a showing of the Nazi
propaganda film, Triumph of the Will.
He played the film back,
stopping it in places, commenting with fervor and reading from the stack of
Hitler speech transcripts he had at his side. Leni Riefenstahl, the film's
producer and a chief propagandist for the Third Reich, is still alive and
resides in South America. Fr. Angles visits her often (he informs his
students), and boasts of the association.
St. Mary's, Kansas, is a
town driven by fear and controversy. When one father of a student at the
academy talked of "Gestapo tactics," he meant that a moral
tyranny rules the campus, that children are intimidated, brow-beaten, and
informed upon by other children belonging to a perfectionist cadre called the
Children of Mary. He means that people who disagree with Fr. Angles or cross
him in any way are condemned from the pulpit, shunned and even physically
threatened. Thirteen Academy students were expelled or suspended in the
academic year 1990-91 for various imperfections in themselves or in their
parents. Another 37 were withdrawn by distraught or shunned parents. A
grandmother was refused Communion because her daughter had been shunned. A
child was forced to kneel in the snow in the dead of winter for an hour as
punishment for some minor infraction. Informants tell Fr. Angles if they spot a
Society woman wearing pants in town. She and her family are then condemned from
the pulpit. Children are taught to follow the rule of the priests and not their
parents. If they follow their parents' authority instead, they are told that
they are going to hell. They are told that their parents have satanic
minds."
If you have read
previous articles describing pernicious cults, you will recognize all the marks
of a cult in the fortress at St. Mary's. A 10-year-old boy was brought to the
clinic for a checkup. The doctor told the mother, "if I thought it
would do any good, I'd turn you in for child abuse if you send that boy back to
St. Mary's." The parents removed the boy from St. Mary's and placed
him in public school, even though the priests taught the children that a child
sent to public school would go to hell.
Psychological tests
given public school entrants revealed a boy so traumatized that he was judged
unable to function in a classroom setting. The family has now left the Society
and left town.
Sandy Cossette's
daughter planned to marry a young man from town who was not a Society member.
She was denounced publicly from the pulpit. Her family was shunned. Now that
family, still living in the town, is condemned to hell, according to the
priests at St. Mary's. This type of supernatural sanction, perpetrated on
strongly faithful Catholics, who know there is a heaven and a hell, and who
have been taught that "Father is always right," is what brings
St. Mary's right into line with the Moonies, the Hare Krishnas, the cult at
Mount St. Michael, and all the other destructive cults that wield the stick of
damnation over their flocks. "Outside the Society, there is no
salvation," and anyone who crosses Fr. Angles is outside the Society.
It is no wonder that one priest formerly associated with the Society describes
St. Mary's as "a Jonestown waiting to happen."
A few members in the
growing army of the ostracized, sick and tired of being threatened by Fr.
Angles, have bought guns to protect their families. Meanwhile, a stalwart in
the pro-Angles faction says that if criticism continues, "there will be
blood on the streets of St. Mary's."
How have things comes to
this pass? Not too long ago, a woman who had dared criticize Fr. Angles had an
accident and went to the hospital. When she returned, she found her house had
been burnt to the ground. There is no evidence that Fr. Angles and his henchmen
were responsible, but they take a kind of spiritual credit for it. A woman
caught wearing slacks received a letter from the administration saying "anyone
who crosses Fr. Angles meets with tragedy," a reference to the house
burning. This is the message that comes from the pulpit and spreads across the
town to breed fear and, increasingly, a kind of desperate rage.
A couple months ago, a
crony of Fr. Angles purchased a shipment of 15 or 20 SKS (Chinese) automatic
rifles from a local gun dealer. An observer tells me that these guns are
reappearing, one by one, in the hands of devoted Society members in the town.
Not long ago, a friend went target shooting out by the Kansas river and ran
into a bunch of these amateur marksmen trying to hone their skills. St. Mary's
is not a happy town. It is a town face-to-face with the possibility of
bloodshed.
The rehabilitation of
Adolf Hitler is not just an aberration of Fr. Angles. The first American priest
ordained into the Society of St. Pius X was one Father Gregory Post. One day,
he took a plane flight and arrived at the San Jose, California, airport dressed
in the fun regalia of an SS German army officer, complete with helmet, boots
and swastika arm band. San Jose Pius X members who picked him up at the airport
were indignant, and the then district superior of the society had to fly out to
San Jose to reprimand the priest and cool off the situation.
There is a virulent
sickness of hatred and Hitlerism running through the traditional Catholic
movement. Why these folks have taken on the clothes of the very devil they
detest is a matter for God to sort out. The strain runs through the Society of
St. Pius X in France, whose priests see Marshall Petain as a hero and his
pro-Nazi Vichy government of World War II as a paragon of virtue.
Catholic traditionalism
as a whole in France is imbued with extreme right-wing politics. On the one
side is the historical dream of a restored Catholic Monarchy, allied with
pro-Hitler, anti-Semitic fascism. On the other side is Communism, liberalism
democracy, the French Revolution, the Resistance and the Free French of World
War II, and Charles de Gaulle. And this odd alliance of past Catholic glory and
present right-wing extremism in politics finds a home in the special education
program offered at St. Mary's Academy.
Both in France and in
the United States, there is a question in traditional Catholic movements whether
religion is informing politics or the other way around. Early in this century,
the anti-Semitic Action Française supported the Catholic Church as a bastion
against liberalism and socialism, but many in the Action Française were simply
right-wing atheists who used the Church for their own purposes. Many of the
priests in the United States who were to form the kernel of the traditionalist
sectarians were originally members of the Orthodox Roman Catholic Movement
(ORCM). The ORCM was founded and run by Father Francis E. Fenton, who was also
on the governing board of the John Birch Society. Now defunct as an
organization, it was ripped apart by internal dissension, the ORCM's paranoid
notions of wholesale Communist infiltration of U.S. Government and educational
structures still motivates many in the traditional movement. Fenton is now a
sede vacantist, while the John Birch Society has been branded an Americanist
heresy by the leaders of the Society of St. Pius X. In sectarian movements,
political or religious, your closest allies soon become your most dangerous
enemies. Exaggerated political fears are often a deeper credo for some people
than is the belief in God.
Impugning a person's
religion because of his politics is a bad business, except when the religion
disappears beneath the politics. This point was reached on the left when parish
priests in Nicaragua took up arms for the Sandinistas, and when liberation
theologians stole Catholic forms and rites and attached them to Marxist
sacraments of revolutionary violence. It is reached on the right when children
are taught that Adolph Hitler was a kind of saint and that his "Final
Solution, if there ever was such a program, was an appropriate Christian
solution to the 'Jewish Problem.'" With virulent anti-Semitism taught
at St. Mary's and Winona, with other deranged doctrines concerning the U.S.
Government and the Bill of Rights, with the belief that an women are damned
eternally, it is no doubt true that Richard Williamson and his clique are
ruining the Society.
But it might be truer to
say that the Society as a whole is ruining Catholicism in its members. I've
talked to several Pius X parishioners locally. After 10 or 20 years of
propaganda, most are so imbued with a hatred for Rome that they seem content to
remain forever in schism. They don't realize it, but they have found their
identity as new Protestants.
To say "Protestant"
in this connection is to say that the Society is preparing to complete its
schism by establishing a fully separate church. How will this come about?
Williamson suggests the way in a bulletin of October 1, 1989: "In the
1970s He [God] inspired an archbishop [Lefebvre] to give the
laity a fresh start of priests, and in the late 1980s fresh bishops. There is
no way all these can give themselves a new Pope, but if they stay with the
Truth, God will finally give them a Pope of Truth. Within the Truth is within
the Church, and without the Truth is without the Church."
The letter is certainly
suggestive. Williamson is now (1992) strenuously lobbying for Fr.
Schmidberger's position as superior general of the order (Note: he lost the
vote in 1993 to Bernard Fellay; one of the Society's excommunicated bishops),
and may succeed to that status in the next convocation. Will the convocation
end up turning into a Papal Conclave? Will the pope of Truth descend from
heaven? Will it be Williamson?
It will have been a
meteoric rise for the Englishman. A student of languages at Cambridge, he was
baptized at Econe in 1973. Three years later he was ordained a priest, and in
1988 he was consecrated a bishop. Will he soon join the club of anti-Popes that
decorate the lunatic fringe of Catholicism?
My sense is that most
Catholics in this country who deserted the Church for the Society of St. Pius X
or other disobedient movements were not deeply concerned about any alleged
invalidity of the Novus Ordo Mass or with conjectures of heresy in Vatican II
documents. They were just looking for a place to pray. It was, and always is, a
matter of lex orandi, lex credendi. Probably they are right in thinking
that in the Old Mass there was a sense of mystery lacking in even the most
reverently said New Mass. And there were, and continue to be, deplorable abuses
of the New Mass in many parish churches around the world.
But now there is an
opportunity to be both in the Church and to participate in the Old Mass. One
hates to pop the bubble regarding Marcel Lefebvre's movement, since many pious
Catholics revere him as a saint. Continue to revere him as a saint, if you
must, but please come back to the Church. The more of you who come back, the
sooner recalcitrant bishops will be forced to allow the indult Mass in their
dioceses. If you stay outside, you will most likely divide and re-divide, and
drink the gall of hatred poured out from the pulpit, and die alone and
loveless.
A coda to all that has been said here comes from The Belief of Catholics,
by Ronald Knox: "To believe in Catholic doctrines without believing in
the existence of that infallible authority which guarantees them all is to
hold, not the Catholic faith, but a series of speculative opinions. It is the
first infidelity that counts."
Readers’ responses to The
Society of St. Pius X Gets Sick appeared in the December
1992 and February
1993 editions of Fidelity.
Index of SSPX articles
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