Eleison Comments - Number CDLXVII (467)

Derail Drive

The Society is sinking, not yet sunk.

Pray for its leaders reeling, as though drunk.

A number of Catholics who love the Church and understand what the Society of St Pius X could and should be doing for it, were encouraged by recent words of one of its bishops. They thought that maybe yet it can be pulled back from the brink of an agreement by which it would put itself under the control of some of the Church’s (objectively) worst enemies in all its history – the neo-modernist officials of today’s Rome. Indeed there were many good things said by Bishop de Galarreta in his Ordinations sermon on June 3 at the last priestly Ordinations to be held in Winona, Minnesota, before its move to Virginia, but no friend of the Catholic Faith should raise his hopes too high.

His sermon began by connecting the Catholic priesthood to Our Lord Jesus Christ as the one and only Way, Truth and Life. But, he went on, there is today in the Church a relativism in doctrine which opens the door to relativism in morals and to such scandals as the recent Roman Synod’s even just considering the giving of Holy Communion to couples divorced and “remarried.” The bishop said these scandals were rooted in Vatican II, and he castigated the Council as being a bad tree of which they are merely the logical bad fruit. Now Mgr Pozzo raised hopes several weeks ago that the Society in order to obtain official recognition from Rome might not have to accept the Council, but the Bishop rightly pointed out that both Pope Francis and Cardinal Mueller have since dashed such hopes, by making clear that their recognition of the Society will still require that acceptance.

The Bishop concluded, “Therefore it is also clear that the (Society’s) fight continues. As our Superior General, Bishop Fellay, has said, if we have to choose between faith and a compromise, the choice is already made – no compromise.” 

Fighting words, but the Bishop immediately added a possible escape-hatch of a kind familiar to us from him: “God may certainly change the circumstances and put us in a different situation, which is what we all hope for.” For could not “changed circumstances” include some clever understanding agreeable to both Rome and the Superior General, which the latter would accept? (Nor was it any use Bishop de Galarreta’s quoting just beforehand words of the Superior General against his own policy, because his own words do not normally pin down this Superior General.)

What strongly suggests that the fighting words do not in fact correspond to the Superior General’s own intentions is the speed with which the text including them was taken down (to be doctored or trashed?) so soon after it was put up on the official website of the Society in the USA. What lesser official of the Society could have given the order virtually to disown words of one of its own bishops? Such an idea is rather confirmed by a conference given on June 5 by the Society’s second-in-command to parishioners of the Society’s church in Houston, TX, and not since disowned by Headquarters (comments in italics):—

Fr Pfluger said that there is nothing wrong in going with Rome (illusion); that the Society will go as it is (illusion): that we must move with the times, and now is the time to be in Rome (illusion); that Archbishop Lefebvre also contradicted himself many times in his time (illusion – see June 11’s “Eleison Comments”), and finally that here and now we must trust Bishop Fellay (after all his “terminological inexactitudes”? – illusion!). But the Society’s First Assistant is more than free to say such things, because they are faithful to the Society’s drive at the very top to put itself under Roman control.

In conclusion, dear readers, for the sake of all the good that the true Society could and should be doing for the Universal Church, by all means pray for a miracle to derail that drive towards Rome, and put any pressure you can on Superiors taking part in the end of June meeting (not yet a General Chapter, but preparing the fatal one) that they make themselves the instruments of God in the derailing of that drive.

Kyrie eleison.