Press review: Bishop Fellay’s meeting with Cardinal Levada on June 13, 2012
On the day after the conversation of Bishop Bernard Fellay, Superior General of the Society of Saint Pius X, with Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in the afternoon on June 13, 2012, the General House of the Society published a communiqué which reads: “During this meeting, Bishop Fellay listened to explanations and further details from Cardinal Levada, to whom he presented the situation of the Society of Saint Pius X and spelled out the doctrinal difficulties posed by the Second Vatican Council and the Novus Ordo Missae. The desire for additional clarifications could result in a new phase of discussions.”
Several observers understood that the doctrinal problems had been at the center of the exchange. Jean-Marie Guénois wrote in the June 14 issue of Le Figaro: “The roadblock is still the question of the Second Vatican Council. This Council was the cause of the rupture at the time and remains the source of intense differences. They are well-known: the Lefebvrists in particular refuse to abandon the Mass in Latin according to the old rite (which however was reestablished in 2007 as the “extraordinary” form by Benedict XVI) but they also reject the opening up of the Catholic Church to the world and interreligious dialogue. The unknown factor, on the other hand—which is key to these negotiations—is the extent to which Rome will grant the Lefebvrists, in this case, freedom to criticize the Second Vatican Council. The news agency Apic entitled its June 15 dispatch “Vatican II and the Novus Ordo Missae, a hindrance to canonical recognition”. And the website Summorum Pontificum wondered that same day: “A personal prelature, but for when?” It proposed the following analysis: “(Bishop Fellay) returned to Menzingen this Thursday with the new document in hand. According to several sources, it is alleged that this document did not correspond to what had been expected and that several important modifications had been made to it…. That being the case, Bishop Fellay could therefore not sign this “doctrinally modified” document, and hence the report announced in the two communiqués, one from the Holy See and then the one from the Society of Saint Pius X for non-members…. It could be that there was friction within the Curia itself, even though for the moment there is no serious evidence to confirm that line of speculation. For his part, Bishop Fellay, faithful to the course that he has adopted, is resolved to renounce nothing doctrinally (now it would seem that some difficulties of a doctrinal nature had been added at the last moment), and he will continue his reflection and consultation, within the framework of the general chapter and certainly more widely as well.
In the interview that he had granted to DICI on June 8 of this year, five days after his meeting with Cardinal Levada, Bishop Fellay had declared: “Can we be silent when faced with these problems” that remain, such as ecumenism or religious liberty? Indicating that he saw these problems as the cause for the “silent apostasy” observed by John Paul II himself, he added: “If we want to make the treasure of Tradition fruitful for the good of souls, we must speak and act. We need this twofold freedom of speech and action.”
Explanatory hypotheses
Did this reminder about the freedom necessary for the good of the Church disturb the Roman authorities? No one knows, since the conversation on June 13 has not been the object of any indiscretion. Still, even before that meeting two journalists with different views provided a similar analysis that may be part of an explanation today. On May 10, when an exchange of private correspondence between Bishop Fellay and the three other bishops of the Society had just been published on the Internet, Patrice de Plunkett, who is hardly suspected of excessive sympathy with the Society of Saint Pius X, asserted on his blog, in language for which he himself must take responsibility: “The Tissier-Gallareta-Williamson letter (sic) refuses in advance any agreement with Rome. There is nothing original in it: this is the rhetoric of schism with its battle cries and its phantasms…. Aberrant, but utterly unambiguous. The Fellay letter (sic) is much more nuanced. Let us cite paragraph 8 from it, which calls for a dialectical movement within the Church against a Council of the Church:
‘This new movement, which began at least ten years ago, has been growing. It has reached a good number (still a minority) of young priests, seminarians, and even includes a small number of young bishops who clearly stand out from their predecessors, who confide in us their sympathy and support, but who are still pretty well stifled by the dominant line in the hierarchy in favor of Vatican II. This hierarchy is losing speed. This perception is not an illusion, and it shows that it is no longer illusory for us to contemplate an ‘intramural’ struggle, the difficulty of which we are not unaware.’
[Plunkett continues:] “Therefore, if words have any meaning:
- Bishop Fellay still rejects the Second Vatican Council as a whole (to which Benedict XVI is deeply attached in a hermeneutic of continuity);
- Bishop Fellay claims to have (as point man for opponents of Vatican II) some support of a segment of the official clergy, including some ‘young bishops’;
- Bishop Fellay wants to mobilize this segment of the clergy against ‘the dominant line in the hierarchy in favor of Vatican II’;
- for these reasons, Bishop Fellay now contemplates the possibility of making the Lefebvrist battle an ‘intramural’ (sic) one, against Vatican II as a whole and in its particulars.”
At the same time, concerning that same exchange of letters between the bishops, Marco Bongi, an Italian journalist who is close to the Society of Saint Pius X and conducted a widely-noted interview with Father Davide Pagliarani in 2011 (see DICI no. 239 dated August 13, 2011), published this commentary: “I think that, despite appearances, Bishop Fellay is the one who is proving to be more combative and less accommodating. Let me explain: the three bishops, even though they propose in words a fight to the finish and refuse to make any concession to the Modernist ‘enemy’, would prefer in practice to keep their troops strictly inside the barracks; pugnacious speeches, ‘shooting-range’ exercises, grand maneuvers on the meadow in front of the seminary in Ecône, but in practice no overt conflict. They will never dirty their hands with gunpowder on a real battlefield. This is apparently a proud, combative position but in reality a rather convenient one. On the other hand, Bishop Fellay, with the flair of a strategist, gauges that the moment has come to confront the adversary openly and that, in a pitched battle, they might discover some news, unsuspected allies who would have a hard time finding us as long as we remained shut up in the barracks.” Here, too, we will let the author of this commentary take the responsibility for his martial comparison. Have the Roman authorities adopted it? We cannot say so in the absence of any serious information. Other websites advance the quite plausible but unverified hypothesis that pressures are being exerted by the bishops’ conferences, by non-Catholic authorities, or even by some European governments…. Are these pressures invincible? The outcome will tell.
When the Sedevacantists Inform the Progressivists
In the meantime, it is interesting to notice the marked preference of progressivist papers, for example, La Vie, an ex-Catholic paper, for sedevacantist websites. Natalia Trouiller relates, on June 15 in her “Christian morning hour”, everything against Bishop Fellay on these websites. Is this prudent? The following fact will show that it is not.
On May 2, 2012, this morning show entitled one of its notes: “SSPX: A Priest Resigns”; the priest in question is an Argentinian priest, Gabriel Grosso. The Swiss press agency Apic republished this information on May 7 with this more explicit title: “Argentina: An SSPX Priest Resigns Because of the Return towards Rome”. The French translation of Fr. Grosso’s resignation letter, addressed in Spanish to Fr. Christian Bouchacourt, district superior of South America, can be found on a French sedevacantist website, dated April 30, 2012, with the indication that the original was published on an Argentinian sedevacantist website on April 23, 2012. Curiously, this letter was available on a French website as early as August 2011. How to explain this mystery?
A simple question put to Fr. Bouchacourt would have allowed Natalia Trouiller to learn that Fr. Grosso’s letter dates from July 2011. The two French and Argentinian websites took this letter form last year, without giving its date, in order to be able to say: “April 30, 2012 – another priest leaves the SSPX…” And Apic comments: “...on the eve of a possible agreement with the Vatican. Besides the verbal disputes, the latest episode to date is the resignation in late April of Fr. Gabriel Grosso, an Argentinian priest of the SSPX district of South America.”
Who is Fr. Gabriel Grosso? – A religious of the Society of the Divine Word, he spent one year with the Good Shepherd Institute in Santiago, Chili. Then, in 2009, he came closer to the Society of St. Pius X, where he worked as an associate, but never wished to make a commitment. He did not therefore resign; he let Fr. Bouchacourt know that he was putting an end to his collaboration, in his letter dated July 30, 2011, in which he wrote, among other things: “(…) These considerations, along with many others, distance me from the Society; for while according to you and your confreres, such sermons frighten the faithful, in my opinion, we must rather teach that: ‘When therefore you shall see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place: he that readeth let him understand. Then they that are in Judea, let them flee to the mountains.’ (Matt 24 :15-16) » He then announced that he would be retiring to his parents’ home.
On June 8, the weekly paper Rivarol, after opening its columns to Fr. Francesco Ricossa, an Italian « non una cum » priest, (that is, he does not mention the Pope’s name in his Mass), published an interview with Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais. The text recalled that Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre addressed a long article to this paper in 1968. It is worth our while to reread some lines of this text, where the missionary prelate denounced, right after the Council, what he called ‘collegialism’: “This collegialism also finds itself within dioceses, parishes, religious congregations, and all the Church communities, to such an extent that the exercise of any government becomes impossible: the authority is constantly checked. (…) Thus is dialectic introduced into the Church by collegialism or democratization, and in consequence come division, unease, and lack of unity and charity. The Church’s enemies can rejoice at this weakening in the Magisterium and in the collegialized government. (…) Realism, common sense, and most of all the grace of the Holy Ghost will help to give back to the Church that which has always made its strength and its adaptation: apostles of the Magisterium and of personal government, acting according to the norms of prudence and the gift of counsel.” (Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, “A Little Light on the Present Crisis in the Church”, Rivarol, March 7, 1968)
How To Write History
In APic’s June 6, 2012 edition, Cardinal Henri Schwery, who was bishop of Sion (Switzerland) at the time of the consecrations in 1988, relates in his way with his own words, his relations at the time with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre: “In early May 1988, I received a phone call from Cardinal Ratzinger asking me to come to Rome the next day to note that the commission (which included Fr. Bernard Tissier de Mallerais and Fr. Patrice Laroche of the SSPX, Ed.) had submitted its conclusions to the Pope, who had accepted them, and that the document had been submitted to Archbishop Lefebvre who had signed it that very day. I then asked him if Archbishop Lefebvre was still in Rome and if he knew his address. When he answered yes, I reacted with: “Then all is lost!” – “Why?” – “Because all his staff is there. And every time Archbishop Lefebvre has promised me anything, he has changed his mind the next day after consulting his close collaborators, especially Fr. Schmidberger.” Cardinal Ratzinger stopped me very seriously: “You should not be pessimistic. Come tomorrow. It’s signed. I have also called the presidents of the German and French Bishops’ Conferences.” So I showed up in Rome the next day around 10 a.m. The cardinal had rather a long face. And he explained to me that he had told the presidents of the French and German Bishops’ Conferences not to come, for unfortunately Archbishop Lefebvre had phoned during the evening to say that he withdrew his signature. Alas!”
Fr. Emmanuel du Chalard, an eye-witness, when questioned by DICI, made these rectifications: “Fr. Schmidberger was not in Albano for the May 5 signature. There were only Fr. Tissier de Mallerais and Fr. Laroche. After Mass on May 6 and before breakfast, Archbishop Lefebvre wrote his letter to Cardinal Ratzinger and asked me to carry it to the cardinal.” Bishop Tissier de Mallerais, in his brilliant biography of Archbishop Lefebvre, quotes this confidence made by the founder of Ecône to one of his chauffers: “If you only knew what a night I spent the evening after I signed that famous agreement! Oh! How I longed for morning to come so that I could give Fr. du Chalard the letter of retraction that I had prepared during the night.” “The next day,” he continued, “after Mass and prime, he went to finish his letter and showed the envelope to Fr. du Chalard at breakfast.” Then, concerning the decision to proceed with the episcopal consecrations, Bishop Tissier de Mallerais writes: “He would make this decision all alone. The Vatican would believe him to be a ‘prisoner of those around him’ and would send to him in Ecône, on the eve of the consecrations, a huge Mercedes to rescue him from his so-called jailers. ‘It is astonishing,’ he would say, ‘that they are always talking about those around me, when I am the one who encouraged those around me all the way to the consecrations.’ It is true: neither the tenacious Schmidberger nor the boiling Aulagnier pushed for them.” (in Marcel Lefebvre, A Life, Clovis 2002, p. 584, 589)
(Sources: Le Figaro/La Vie/Apic/Rivarol/various blogs/private sources – DICI#257, June 22, 2012)
