The Theological Stakes of the Vatican-SSPX Impasse
On February 2, the Superior General of the traditionalist Catholic group the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), Fr. Fr. Davide Pagliarani, made the startling announcement that the Society would consecrate two new bishops on July 1 of this year, without the approval of the Vatican. The Society’s rationale for the decision is that the group faces a pastoral emergency—two of the Society’s four original bishops have died, and the remaining two are aging (67 and 69 years old, respectively), placing the SSPX’s long-term continuity in doubt.
The SSPX’s founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, himself consecrated those four original bishops without Pope John Paul II’s permission on June 30, 1988, a move John Paul called a “schismatic act.” The Vatican announced the following day, July 1, that Lefebvre and the four bishops had automatically incurred excommunication for their actions. The decision by Pagliarani and the current SSPX to undertake the new consecrations on the anniversary of that excommunication is highly provocative.
Lefebvre founded the SSPX in 1970 as a haven for priests who were skeptical of the Second Vatican Council’s teachings on issues like religious liberty, ecumenism, and dialogue with non-Christian religions and who opposed the Vatican II Mass implemented in 1970 in light of the council’s teachings. The Society was suppressed by Pope Paul VI in 1975 as the group’s opposition to the council became apparent. From that point forward, the SSPX has operated with an “irregular canonical status,” meaning that the Society lacks canonical status in the Catholic Church and its priests cannot licitly administer the sacraments (although Pope Francis permitted SSPX priests to hear confessions in 2015 and to perform weddings in 2017).
Pope John Paul II attempted to avoid the illicit episcopal consecrations in 1988 by offering to recognize the SSPX as a clerical society of apostolic life if Lefebvre signed a “Protocol” affirming the Society’s submission to the Church’s Magisterium and recognizing the validity of the Vatican II Mass. Lefebvre at first signed the agreement but later reneged, going forward with the consecrations.
Pope Benedict XVI made a second attempt at rapprochement with the SSPX in 2009, lifting the excommunications of the four bishops consecrated by Lefebvre in 1988 (Lefebvre himself had died in 1991) as a gesture of good will. This proved immensely controversial, not least because one of the four bishops, Richard Williamson, had made antisemitic remarks and denied the Holocaust. The reconciliation of the SSPX with the Church, however, would also require acceptance of Vatican II’s teachings and the post-conciliar Mass, so in 2011 the Vatican presented to the SSPX’s Superior General, Bishop Bernard Fellay, a “doctrinal preamble” to reconciliation for his consideration. After some back and forth, Fellay rejected the doctrinal preamble in 2012 and proposed his own version, which the Vatican found unacceptable. Since then, Vatican dialogue with the SSPX has remained largely dormant until recently.
As Mike Lewis points out at Where Peter Is, after Paglariani was selected as the new Superior General of the SSPX in 2018, the group has been more explicit about rejecting the teachings of Vatican II and the subsequent popes, making reconciliation with the Vatican even more difficult. Even so, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, the prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) met with Paglariani on February 12, and afterwards the DDF issued a statement explaining that the Vatican was willing to engage in a theological dialogue with the SSPX to clarify outstanding questions on magisterial authority and Vatican II’s teachings, and to potentially re-open the door to canonical recognition. The DDF also stated that going forward with the July 1 consecrations would “constitute a decisive rupture of ecclesial communion (schism)” and foreclose further dialogue. Six days later, Pagliarani announced that the SSPX had rejected the Vatican’s proposal and would move forward with the consecrations.
At every juncture, the Vatican has been willing to reconcile with the SSPX and grant it canonical status on the condition of acknowledging the authority of Vatican II’s teachings, but in each instance the SSPX has ultimately refused to accept that condition.
Even though the SSPX’s rejection of the teachings of Vatican II is central to its rupture with the broader Catholic Church, the periodic dialogue between the SSPX and the Vatican has not primarily focused on specific issues like religious liberty, ecumenism, and interreligious dialogue, but rather on questions of magisterial authority and the assent the faithful owe to the Church’s teachings.
For example, the 1988 Protocol which Archbishop Lefebvre first signed but later rejected did not require Lefebvre and the SSPX to affirm the specific teachings of Vatican II and the subsequent popes on religious liberty, ecumenism, and interreligious dialogue. Indeed, the Protocol suggests that the Vatican was willing to tolerate a certain amount of doubt or questioning as long as there is ongoing study of the issues:
Regarding certain points taught by the Second Vatican Council or concerning subsequent reforms of the liturgy and law which appear difficult to reconcile with tradition, we commit ourselves to a positive attitude of study and of communication with the Apostolic See, avoiding all polemics.
At the same time, the Protocol does require Lefebvre and the SSPX to assent to the teachings on magisterial authority found in the Vatican II document Lumen Gentium, particularly paragraph 25. The relevant passage reads:
In matters of faith and morals, the bishops speak in the name of Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a religious assent. This religious submission of mind and will must be shown in a special way to the authentic magisterium of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra; that is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will. His mind and will in the matter may be known either from the character of the documents, from his frequent repetition of the same doctrine, or from his manner of speaking.
The paragraph goes on to describe situations in which the bishops (either gathered at an ecumenical council or through their ongoing teaching) or the pope formally define a doctrine concerning faith and morals, but the above cited passage teaches that even when a doctrine is not being formally defined, the faithful are still obligated to offer their “religious assent” or “religious submission of mind and will.”
This proved to be a bridge too far for the SSPX because agreeing to this stipulation would mean they had to offer “religious assent” not only to the teachings of Vatican II, but also to the subsequent popes’ interpretations of those teachings, which represent the “authentic magisterium” of the Church.
Still, the 1988 Protocol’s concession that teachings of Vatican II “which appear [to whom?-MS] difficult to reconcile with tradition” require “a positive attitude of study” but not necessarily affirmation appears, on the surface, incongruent with its insistence on “religious submission of mind and will” to even non-definitive teachings of the Magisterium.
A handful of documents produced by the Vatican in the following decade help explain how to reconcile this apparent tension. These documents were written to address circumstances unrelated to the SSPX, but they nevertheless help shed light on the Vatican’s response to the SSPX over the years. In 1989, the Vatican published a new Profession of Faith to be used when individuals take on various positions of authority in the Church. The Profession of Faith adds to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed a section affirming the individual’s assent to the Church’s teachings, which are distinguished according to their level of authority as defined in Lumen Gentium #25:
With firm faith, I also believe everything contained in the word of God, whether written or handed down in Tradition, which the Church, either by a solemn judgment or by the ordinary and universal Magisterium, sets forth to be believed as divinely revealed.
I also firmly accept and hold each and everything definitively proposed by the Church regarding teaching on faith and morals.
Moreover, I adhere with religious submission of will and intellect to the teachings which either the Roman Pontiff or the College of Bishops enunciate when they exercise their authentic Magisterium, even if they do not intend to proclaim these teachings by a definitive act.
A year later, the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith released the Instruction Donum Veritatis, “On the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian.” This document was intended as a response to the significant changes to the theological profession since Vatican II and to growing dissent from magisterial teachings among theologians. The first section of Donum Veritatis offers a reflection on the theological vocation in historical context, and the second section provides the doctrinal foundations for the Church’s Magisterium. In the third section, the document reiterates the three levels of magisterial authority affirmed in Lumen Gentium and repeated in the Profession of Faith and the corresponding levels of assent required of the faithful (##23-24).
Then, in perhaps the most significant section of the document, the CDF explains the appropriate posture of a theologian who questions a certain aspect of magisterial teaching. This section uses language reminiscent of the 1988 Protocol. For example:
The willingness to submit loyally to the teaching of the Magisterium on matters per se not irreformable must be the rule. It can happen, however, that a theologian may, according to the case, raise questions regarding the timeliness, the form, or even the contents of magisterial interventions. (#24)
In such a situation, the theologian must remain loyal to the Church’s magisterial authority and be committed to studying the issue:
[T]here should never be a diminishment of that fundamental openness loyally to accept the teaching of the Magisterium as is fitting for every believer by reason of the obedience of faith. The theologian will strive then to understand this teaching in its contents, arguments, and purposes. This will mean an intense and patient reflection on his [sic] part and a readiness, if need be, to revise his own opinions and examine the objections which his colleagues might offer him. (#29)
And like the 1988 Protocol, the CDF Instruction advises the theologian to seek dialogue and avoid polemics:
In cases like these, the theologian should avoid turning to the “mass media”, but have recourse to the responsible authority, for it is not by seeking to exert the pressure of public opinion that one contributes to the clarification of doctrinal issues and renders service to the truth. (#30)
The Instruction, therefore, suggests that questioning certain aspects of the Church’s non-definitive teachings can be compatible with a “religious submission of mind and will” if it is done with humility and a willingness to commit to ongoing study.
In 1998, Pope John Paul II issued the apostolic letter Ad Tuendam Fidem (second document on page) which inserts the aforementioned distinctions of levels of assent into the 1983 Code of Canon Law (see Can. 750-754). And finally, the CDF released a commentary (third document on page) on the Profession of Faith, issued alongside Ad Tuendam Fidem and offering a further explanation of the different levels of magisterial teaching and examples of each. Strangely, however, the commentary does not provide examples of non-definitive magisterial teachings, the sorts of teachings that are presumably in dispute in the dialogue between the Vatican and the SSPX.
Although the text of the 2011 doctrinal preamble proposed by the Vatican and ultimately rejected by Bishop Fellay the following year has never been published, we can get an idea of its likely contents from the 1988 Protocol and these subsequent Vatican documents, as well as Bishop Fellay’s revised version of the preamble. The later Vatican documents also shed light on what the Vatican likely found objectionable about Fellay’s version of the doctrinal preamble. For example, he writes:
Tradition is the living transmission of revelation “usque ad nos” [“even to us”] and the Church in its doctrine, in its life and in its liturgy perpetuates and transmits to all generations what this is and what She believes. Tradition progresses in the Church with the assistance of the Holy Ghost, not as a contrary novelty, but through a better understanding of the Deposit of the Faith.
On the surface, this passage may seem consistent with the teachings of Vatican II on the development of doctrine (for example, Dei Verbum #8). When Fellay comments on the impossibility of a “contrary novelty,” however, he cites the First Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution Dei Filius, which states:
[T]hat 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. (ch. 4, #14)
But note that here Dei Filius is referring to dogmas, those teachings which the Magisterium has infallibly taught to be divinely revealed. Fellay, however, is implicitly applying this standard of continuity to all the Church’s teachings, including those that are not definitive. As the CDF’s 1990 Instruction points out, time and study sometimes show that corrections are necessary to the formulation of the Church’s teachings in a way that may suggest the reversal of a prior teaching:
The theologian knows that some judgments of the Magisterium could be justified at the time in which they were made, because while the pronouncements contained true assertions and others which were not sure, both types were inextricably connected. Only time has permitted discernment and, after deeper study, the attainment of true doctrinal progress. (#24)
More importantly, Bishop Fellay states in his revised doctrinal preamble:
The entire tradition of Catholic Faith must be the criterion and guide in understanding the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, which, in turn, enlightens – in other words deepens and subsequently makes explicit – certain aspects of the life and doctrine of the Church implicitly present within itself or not yet conceptually formulated.
He then applies this hermeneutic to the teachings in dispute:
The affirmations of the Second Vatican Council and of the later Pontifical Magisterium relating to the relationship between the Church and the non-Catholic Christian confessions, as well as the social duty of religion and the right to religious liberty, whose formulation is with difficulty reconcilable with prior doctrinal affirmations from the Magisterium, must be understood in the light of the whole, uninterrupted Tradition, in a manner coherent with the truths previously taught by the Magisterium of the Church, without accepting any interpretation of these affirmations whatsoever that would expose Catholic doctrine to opposition or rupture with Tradition and with this Magisterium.
Fellay here asserts that present Church teachings must be interpreted in a way consistent with what has been taught in the past (and implying that if that is impossible, those more recent teachings should be rejected). Vatican II, on the other hand, teaches that it is the “living teaching office of the Church” that has the authority to authentically interpret the Word of God expressed in Scripture and Tradition (Dei Verbum, #10), and therefore to determine what authentically belongs to Tradition and what were contingent teachings.
The crux of the matter has always been, as every pope since Paul VI has pointed out, the proper understanding of Tradition. As Paul VI wrote in a 1976 letter to Lefebvre:
A fortiori, a single bishop without a canonical mission does not have in actu expedito ad agendum, the faculty of deciding in general what the rule of faith is or of determining what tradition is. In practice you are claiming that you alone are the judge of what tradition embraces.
You say that you are subject to the Church and faithful to tradition by the sole fact that you obey certain norms of the past that were decreed by the predecessor of him to whom God has today conferred the powers given to Peter. That is to say, on this point also, the concept of “tradition” that you invoke is distorted.
Tradition is not a rigid and dead notion, a fact of a certain static sort which at a given moment of history blocks the life of this active organism which is the Church, that is, the mystical body of Christ. It is up to the pope and to councils to exercise judgment in order to discern in the traditions of the Church that which cannot be renounced without infidelity to the Lord and to the Holy Spirit—the deposit of faith—and that which, on the contrary, can and must be adapted to facilitate the prayer and the mission of the Church throughout a variety of times and places, in order better to translate the divine message into the language of today and better to communicate it, without an unwarranted surrender of principles.
Fellay’s statements cited above, far from approaching recent magisterial teaching with deference, also presume from the get-go that the teachings of the recent popes on religious liberty, ecumenism, and interreligious dialogue are in error, a nonstarter for the Vatican. And little has changed in the SSPX’s viewpoint since then. As Lewis notes, although one must always hold out hope for reconciliation, it was nearly inevitable that the SSPX would reject a rapprochement with the Vatican.
Although the recent popes have held the line on affirming the understanding of Tradition outlined by Pope Paul VI in the above-cited letter and insisting on the pivotal role of Vatican II in the development of the Church’s Tradition, it is nevertheless remarkable that on multiple occasions in its dealings with the SSPX, the Vatican has not insisted on assent to the teachings of Vatican II and subsequent popes on religious liberty, ecumenism, and interreligious dialogue, but simply on a commitment to further study on those issues with a due regard for the Magisterium’s authority.
It is one thing, however, to admit the right of a theologian to question aspects of magisterial teaching, but entirely another to canonically recognize a fraternal society of priests for whom calling into question the teachings of an ecumenical council and the validity of the current form of the Church’s liturgy is central to its identity. Despite the Vatican’s intentions, this seems to suggest that Vatican II’s teachings are doubtful or may someday be reversed. I could be persuaded otherwise, but I believe this way of proceeding in pursuit of reconciliation with those Catholics who question the legitimacy of Vatican II’s teachings and the Vatican II Mass has unintentionally compounded the problem, but I will return to that point in a later article.
Of Interest…
- Vatican II’s document on interreligious dialogue, Nostra Aetate, states that Christians and Muslims should “work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom” (#3). Writing for America, former Window Light podcast guest Jordan Denari Duffner suggests that the confluence of Lent and Ramadan (both seasons started in the same week this year) offers an opportunity for Catholics and Muslims to not only engage in dialogue, but also to collaborate to combat persistent Islamophobia. She also notes the efforts of Catholic and Muslim leaders in the US to work together in support of immigrants.
- Last week I mentioned that Catholic social teaching has long insisted that the migration issue requires international cooperation. That same week, eleven representatives of the bishops’ conferences of Canada, the United States, and Latin America and the Caribbean demonstrated that cooperative spirit, meeting for three days in Tampa, Florida to develop a coordinated response on migration and other issues facing the region. In a joint statement, they affirmed that “we do not represent isolated Churches or fragmented realities, but rather one Church on pilgrimage throughout the Americas.” On the migration issue, they stated that “no migrant is a stranger to the Church,” and they committed to strengthening the Church’s “continental coordination” to better advocate for migrants and to meet their pastoral needs. They also affirmed that “We recognize the responsibility of States to regulate migration and ensure the common good; however, we reiterate that all legislation must place at its center the inalienable dignity of the human person and the respect that person deserves.”
- Last month, I criticized some comments from President Donald Trump and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller on the nature of power and the national interest in relation to a potential invasion of Greenland. In a recent syndicated column published in Catholic newspapers across the US, Catholic author George Weigel raised similar concerns about the direction of Trump administration foreign policy. Weigel is perhaps best known for his advocacy for the Iraq War in 2003 and more recently for his skepticism toward the Synod on Synodality. Although Weigel stretched the Church’s just-war doctrine to argue for a war that was ultimately immoral, he has always insisted that international relations are governed by a moral order and that US foreign policy should be guided by moral considerations, and it is good to see him holding firm to those principles.
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