Lefebvre - Coward or Idiot?

Now that Bishop Williamson has been excluded from the SSPX, it appears as most had anticipated, that he will become the DE-facto Bishop of the independent priests who at least claim to not hold the sedevacantist viewpoint.  That is, of course, merely a matter of semantics since to say that one should not accept recognition by the Vicar of Christ until he repents, nullifies the Council and its documents, and perhaps is conditionally re-consecrated a Bishop using the Traditional books by at least two Bishops who have also been so consecrated is, in my view, a very convenient albeit stealth version of sedevacantism.  For if the Pope is only the Pope by virtue of the apartment he occupies in the Vatican then he is indeed not the Vicar of Christ.  The argument against a recognition, under any conditions, is that His Excellency is afraid that he will be forced to become a Protestant (again) as will be the same with all priests and traditional bishops.  Apparently, within months of a recognition by Rome, the SSPX will be fraught with liturgical dancing, a new hybrid Mass, luminous mysteries, and lay Eucharistic ministers. By some accounts, this has apparently already happened.

Certainly the small group of priests and the laity that are providing financial support need a Bishop for certain sacraments, Chrism, etc.  His Excellency will fill that role and will probably settle down in the Washington, DC area and will once again be on the road rallying against the Superior General and showing his Twin Towers Conspiracy video.  Hopefully, His Excellency will forget the latter and focus on the faith for he is so good and clear when he does that. Much to the dismay of His Excellency and his new followers, one would imagine, is the admonition by the other two SSPX Bishops who have now both publicly declared their support for the Superior General’s judgment while still declaring that the defunct or at least seriously delayed recognition of the SSPX by the Pope was not something that they favored, at least in the form that it took in the Spring of 2012.  From the perspective of Bishop Fellay, what began as a no-strings-attached agreement became an unpalatable compromise of the faith.

And so, in His Excellency’s latest Eleison Comments, he harkens once again back to how the good Archbishop felt about the Council which is apparent in most of his writings.  His Excellency’s followers have created a “Traditio”-styled website (even copying the Traditio moniker ‘from the fathers’) complete with articles and rantings in 26pt font and videos on who really blew up the twin towers.  Now, more important than preaching on the nature of sin and the disorder of the Pauline Mass, they preach on sinfulness of Bishop Fellay purportedly retaining a Jewish attorney.  You will not see articles on the fact that the Archbishop, in the company of then Father Williamson, expelled four of the top ranking priests in the United States for merely disobeying a request to celebrate the Mass according to the 1962 Book.  Nor will you find any discussion of the fact that after years of ministry and just two years before he died, the Archbishop signed an agreement with Rome.  Nor will you find mention of the fact that the Archbishop said, on the day of Bishop Williamson’s consecration, that were the Pope to send him a document that agreed to the Archbishop’s demand for the consecration of the four bishops, he would postpone the consecrations until August 15^th as originally discussed with Cardinal Ratzinger.  What you will find are articles on how the documents of the Second Vatican Council are heretical and how Bishop Fellay is the illegitimate leader of the SSPX.

So here is the dilemma that none of the members of ‘la resistance’ will touch with a ten foot pole.  Why did Archbishop Lefebvre, De Castro Mayer, Cdls Siri, and Ottaviani and the balance of the Coetus not, on the day following the close of the council in 1965 and then everyday for the rest of their lives proclaim that they had just taken part in the most sinful undertaking against the church in modern times? Why did they not from every pulpit and in every means at their disposal condemn what they had just participated in and urge the faithful to ignore it?  Why did they not rue the fact from day one that they signed the freshly inked documents? They clearly knew every last word of every document.  There are only a few possible answers. The first is that for all of their bluster, they were all cowards.  Perhaps they feared retribution?  The other possibility is that they were spiritual idiots compared to the modernist who penned the documents.  In other words, they would not know a heresy if it bit them on their red buttons.  It has to be one of these.  Either they did not recognize a heresy when they saw it or they recognized it and decided to let the church flounder under it.  Which was it, do you think?

The answer is clearly presented in the Tissier biography of the Archbishop.  His Excellency Bishop Williamson and all those opposed to the judgments of Bishop Fellay would do well to (re-)read  it.  In February of 1966, the Archbishop informed his colleagues in the Coetus that he proposed to publish a “combative, multilingual interepiscopal bulletin of information and analysis which will help the bishops to take practical measures against progressivism and in favor of a sound interpretation of the Council”.  He was encouraged in this effort by Cardinals Ottaviani and Siri and supported by the generous gift of a lay benefactor.  There was no talk or professed opinion by any of these that the conciliar documents contained heresy.  They reserved that charge against the newly published (Dutch) Catholic catechism.  In the Archbishop’s own words, the Council that he was a Father of and of whose documents he signed, was flawed in many ways and the Archbishop documents his objections concerning these flaws in his many recorded interventions during the various sessions.

If the Archbishop and the Coetus had a fault, it was that they were at least too naive to understand the ingrained nature of modernism in the Catholic hierarchy of 1965 and the destruction of the priestly formation which was well underway by that time.  The Archbishop felt that Pope Paul VI was surrounded by modernists and that he would eventually be rid of them and replace them with more orthodox priests.

The Archbishop and his conservative conspirators were neither heretics nor idiots.  They were Princes of the Church who knew a heresy when they saw it and would not be part of a promulgation of it.  They knew heresy and they did not see it in the documents but all condemned the heresy that has resulted in the New Mass, the new catechism, and in the faith as a result of the post-conciliar liberal mindset.