The much anticipated Pentecostal reconciliation announcement whereby the Pope rolls out the red carpet for the SSPX has obviously been delayed. Most pundits anticipated it. I even had a (non-monetary) bet riding on it happening before the end of May. But May came and went and no announcement was forthcoming from the Vatican. Why?
Well the Pope hasn’t consulted your humble servant on the matter but I would bet that these things played a part:
- 1) The Vati-leaks scandal has perhaps influenced the delay more than any other reason. By all accounts, this has been a huge distraction for the Pope and his closest advisers. Perhaps some high Curial prelates are complicit in this affair and we have only seen the tip of the iceberg. Apparently, the Pope is not merely angry but rather somewhat beside himself. The secular arena has called on the Pope to resign, dissolve the Curia and the College of Cardinals, and hold elections to form a new government. Whether the calls for the Pope’s resignation come from within or without the church is not as important as the realization by some Vaticanistas that an important Vatican II chicken has come home to roost. That is the transformation of the hierarchy of the church into a democratic system of government . This might also be surprising to the neo-sedevacantist, Hans Kung, who recently described the SSPX as ultra-democratic(?). A democratically elected hierarchy would be a welcome development in the eyes of the ADL (who I am sure can manipulate Nostra Aetate into a justification for the ADL to have a vote) and a preponderance of Germanic Bishops, but terrifying to the old power holders resident in the Vatican City.
- 2) The letter of the three SSPX Bishops has probably forced the Pope to consider how to handle an SSPX schism. It would not benefit the situation to regularize half of the SSPX. This most certainly has caused someone to go back to the drawing board and determine what the response would be to this eventuality. Perhaps Bishop Fellay has been discreetly requested to clean it up. The Vatican response appears to be “we’ll deal with that if it happens”.
- 3) Bishop Fellay has spent time in Rome recently. There is the possibility that the details are still being finessed. Perhaps the letter of the bishops has led Bishop Fellay to insist on some points that previously were details that would be left for later resolution? Perhaps the relationship to the local diocesan Bishops is still not at a comfortable point from Bishop Fellay’s perspective.
- 4) The Pope is not concerned with the objections of traditional sedevacantists to a regularization. They have for some time determined that the pope is an imposter and the visible church he pretends to head is the anti-church and the visible church now exists at Mt. St. Michaels, or Round Top, or St. Gertrudes, or Holy Family Monastery, or wherever Pope Michael is. Among these, the thing they consistently believe is that their visible church is mutually exclusive of the other sedevacantist visible churches. However, he may (unfortunately) be somewhat attentive to the rantings of neo-sedevacantists like Hans Kung who, while still in somewhat of a tenuous “communion” with the Pope, has been in complete schism from the Roman Catholic Church for decades.
Add to those a June meeting with the State of Israel concerning the treatment of churches in the Holy Land, the baying of the association of feminist nuns both in the US and in Germany who complain that they have been unfairly saddled with the wrong set of genitalia, and the latest tired ravings of the Pope’s old buddy, Hans Kung who joins Pope Michael and friends in the sedevacantist group, and , well, its no wonder that the Pope will probably slip off to Castel Gandolfo, let fly a series of declarations, and then take the phone off the hook.
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