In her recent Substack article, A Textbook Case of the Displacement of Judgment: The Diocese of Cubao on the SSPX, an author writing by the name of Katharia evaluated a pastoral letter from the Diocese of Cubao regarding the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) to demonstrate a concept that she summarized as follows:
“To better express the absurdity of the situation, we summarize it as such—a dispute exists over whether an authority itself has erred, but instead of adjudicating that dispute, the authority simply cites itself as the reason it cannot have erred, then proceeds to punish those who challenge it.”
Katharia supports the SSPX’s positions, but here the argument is simply that there is an all-important question of whether the authority of the Catholic Church has erred in fundamental ways since Vatican II; and she contends that it is absurd to attempt to answer that question by pointing to the authority’s claim that it cannot err.
The Vatican’s punishment demonstrates that it considers the real sin of the SSPX to be its adherence to what the Church taught prior to Vatican II.
Elsewhere in her article, Katharia acknowledges that in ordinary times we never need to consider this question of whether authority (particularly the pope) has erred:
“In ordinary times, Catholics should be able to simply trust that the hierarchy is guarding and preserving the deposit of Faith. But the last sixty years have not been ordinary times.”
For serious Catholics, two questions follow from this observation: are we permitted (or perhaps even required) to alter our normal obedience to authority outside of ordinary times? And are we in ordinary times today?
To help us answer these questions, we can turn to St. Paul, who warned us about a time in which Christians would turn away from the truth:
“For there shall be a time when they will not endure sound doctrine; but, according to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears: And will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables.” (2 Timothy 4:3-4)
Here, St. Paul is giving us an example of what it would be like to live outside of “ordinary times.” While St. Paul did not explicitly say that Christians should not follow those who no longer endure sound doctrine, it is obvious that we should not. St. Paul offered no caveat about Christians needing to believe the fables if they were presented by the highest authorities. Indeed, in his letter to the Galatians, St. Paul seemed to make it clear that we must always choose truth over any authority other than God Himself:
“But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema. As we said before, so now I say again: If any one preach to you a gospel, besides that which you have received, let him be anathema. For do I now persuade men, or God? Or do I seek to please men? If I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.” (Galatians 1:8-10)
The measure is not who is preaching the gospel but the gospel itself. Over the centuries, the Church has of course expounded upon this (as we see from the words of the First Vatican Council below), but it is fascinating that St. Paul identified the real conflict involved in considering a new gospel: will we choose to please God or men? And St. Paul said this conflict would exist in connection with “any one” who would attempt to preach the new gospel, even if it was St. Paul himself or an angel from heaven.
The measure is not who preaches the Gospel—but whether the Gospel being preached is the one handed down by Christ.
If we reflect on these words from St. Paul, we can also see that he is not speaking solely about a debate between those who side with unadulterated truth and those who side with an authority that attempts to offer a compromised version of the truth. There is another party involved: God. Even though discussions about our religion should naturally revolve around our thoughts about God, there is a sense in which debates about the crisis in the Church tend to veer into realms that exclude real considerations about God. Even those defending immutable truth can be susceptible to this.
And so it is useful to really focus on thinking about the current crisis, and the issues raised by Katharia’s article, in terms of how our views of the crisis implicitly reflect differing viewpoints about God. To do this, we can consider the two sides of the debate: those who side with the SSPX, and those who believe that we must always side with Catholic authority, particularly the pope.
The SSPX Position and God’s Will
As a basis for evaluating the SSPX position, we can recall one passage from Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s famous 1974 Declaration:
“This Reformation, born of Liberalism and Modernism, is poisoned through and through; it derives from heresy and ends in heresy, even if all its acts are not formally heretical. It is therefore impossible for any conscientious and faithful Catholic to espouse this Reformation or to submit to it in any way whatsoever. The only attitude of faithfulness to the Church and Catholic doctrine, in view of our salvation, is a categorical refusal to accept this Reformation. That is why, without any spirit of rebellion, bitterness or resentment, we pursue our work of forming priests, with the timeless Magisterium as our guide. We are persuaded that we can render no greater service to the Holy Catholic Church, to the Sovereign Pontiff and to posterity.”
From these words, it is clear that we must always side with God’s immutable truth. Archbishop Lefebvre was quite aware that Catholic teaching could develop, but he knew that such development must conform to the holy guidance set forth by the First Vatican Council:
“For the doctrine of the faith which God has revealed is put forward not as some philosophical discovery capable of being perfected by human intelligence, but as a divine deposit committed to the spouse of Christ to be faithfully protected and infallibly promulgated. Hence, too, that meaning of the sacred dogmas is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by holy mother church, and there must never be any abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding. ‘May understanding, knowledge, and wisdom increase as ages and centuries roll along, and greatly and vigorously flourish, in each and all, in the individual and the whole church: but this only in its own proper kind, that is to say, in the same doctrine, the same sense, and the same understanding.’”
The quotation in the latter part of this statement is from St. Vincent of Lerins and provides the proper understanding of how Catholic doctrine can legitimately develop over time. Thus, doctrine can be more fully understood and explicated, but any purported development of Catholic doctrine would be false if it attempted to change the sense or understanding of what the Church had always taught. Moreover, any false development of doctrine would be contrary to God’s will. Accordingly, as with St. Paul, Archbishop Lefebvre knew that he could reject any attempts to present a new gospel, which would include any purported development of Catholic doctrine that deviated from this understanding from Vatican I.
The punishments of the SSPX serve as the finishing touch on the nearly completed Synodal Church.
At this point, it is appropriate to address a typical objection from the SSPX’s opponents, who tell us that neither Vatican II nor the post-conciliar popes have asked Catholics to believe anything that conflicts with the Vatican I understanding of proper doctrinal development. While we can adequately rebut this assertion by mentioning Amoris Laetitia (allowing Communion for the divorced and remarried), Fiducia Supplicans (authorizing the blessing of same-sex couples), and the Synod on Synodality (establishing a Synodal Church that stands in opposition to the Catholic Church), the recent punishments of the SSPX provide us with another response. As we have seen, the Vatican’s punishment demonstrates that it considers the real sin of the SSPX to be its adherence to what the Church taught prior to Vatican II. But if the Church’s teachings since Vatican II had simply developed in the manner required by Vatican I, there would be no difficulty at all. In other words, the only reason the Vatican condemns the SSPX for adhering to pre-Vatican II doctrinal understandings is that those understandings are no longer tolerated by the Vatican today.
So, by condemning the SSPX primarily for its doctrine rather than simply for consecrating bishops without approval, the Vatican has effectively admitted that they have deviated from the proper development of doctrine. Thus, we are outside of ordinary times, and the holy wisdom of St. Paul from above should govern. Accordingly, Archbishop Lefebvre’s 1974 Declaration represents a truly Catholic response to the crisis.
Even so, Archbishop Lefebvre and the SSPX obviously understood that the disorder in the Church was a deeply problematic mystery that only God could fully comprehend. For the SSPX, that mystery can be characterized by questions related to why God is permitting the crisis and when He will resolve it. Conversely, the SSPX sees no mystery about whether or not Catholics should continue to follow what the Church has always taught. The SSPX has always been firmly convinced that God wills that we resist the unholy innovations coming from the Vatican.
The SSPX’s Opponents and God’s Will
Whereas the SSPX sees the mystery of the current crisis in terms of questions about why God is permitting it, those who oppose the SSPX generally face other questions due to their need to follow Rome even when it deviates from Catholic teaching. Judging by what appears to be a very limited recognition of this reality among the SSPX’s opponents, it is useful to explore the questions that ought to be asked by those who believe that God wills that we follow the Vatican today:
- Why did God want the Vatican to eliminate the Traditional Latin Mass and replace it with a Mass that has for sixty years led to widespread apostasy and countless sacrileges and blasphemies?
- Why does God want Catholics to believe that the Church’s moral teaching is now effectively optional, as we learn both from the Vatican’s refusal to correct longstanding abuses and its current “accompaniment” of souls who refuse to abandon their sinful lifestyles?
- Why does God approve of the Vatican’s active promotion of homosexuality, especially through Fiducia Supplicans, the Synod on Synodality, and Leo’s apparent preference for promoting homosexual clergy to high positions in the Church?
- Why has God willed for the Vatican to throw the Church’s doctrines into such a state of confusion that we no longer know whether we really even need to be Catholic to please Him and save our souls?
- Why is it God’s will for the Vatican to praise and honor essentially all religious beliefs and yet persecute Traditional Catholics because they hold the beliefs that were taught prior to the Council?
- Why did God will for the Vatican to create a new church — the Synodal Church — which seeks to discover religious truth by “listening to” the People of God to see where the “spirit” is leading?
- Why has God willed for the post-conciliar Vatican to completely disregard the warnings of the pre-Vatican II popes even when it has become clear that those popes were correct in denouncing the errors that Rome promotes today?
All of this seems unambiguously offensive to God, so how can we say it is God’s will for Catholics to follow and support the Vatican in its continuous promotion of these unholy calamities? Wouldn’t it be the case that Catholics should instead do all they can to oppose these offenses against God?
If the Church’s post-conciliar teaching were merely a legitimate development, fidelity to pre-conciliar doctrine would never have become a crime.
To put all of this in perspective, we can adapt Katharia’s summary of the current absurdity to an image of the Vatican’s efforts to build the Synodal Church. For decades, the Vatican has been using the blueprints of Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium to lay the foundation for the Synodal Church and begin erecting the hideous structure we see today. Men like Archbishop Lefebvre had recognized how offensive this structure would be to God and tried to warn others. But the guardians of the Vatican II revolution insisted that Catholics have no right to question the progressive architects — our task is simply to obey.
Year by year, the structure has become more and more offensive to God, but the architects and their defenders have continued to insist that true Catholicism means that we trust that “the spirit” is guiding the project. Many Catholics of good will can see that none of their favorite saints would recognize the Synodal project as Catholic, but they meekly endure, trusting that God wants them to follow the architects. So the building continued.
Now, in a certain sense, the punishments of the SSPX serve as a finishing touch on the nearly completed Synodal Church. Unlike other structures, the Synodal Church is not complete unless those who occupy it positively reject what the SSPX represents: the backward and rigid refusal to “listen to” those who tell us that doctrine comes from man or can change in ways that contradict what it has always been. So the SSPX has been excommunicated because it refuses to pretend that the Synodal abomination is from God. Meanwhile, those who denounce the “schismatic SSPX” assure us that God has truly built this monstrosity even though it has Satan’s name all over it. Alas, as with the Pharisees, blindness begets blindness and is often accompanied by persecution of those seeking to do God’s will. Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!
