Observe the cardinal virtue of temperance. Many of the most seemingly zealous partisans on both left and right are not within the band of temperance. At a typical Trad parish, it takes a generation for large families to start to produce those temperant people. You see very many young people coming up who are obviously very normal. It took a generation of often intemperate people to produce them. Give it time.
Weigel is wrapped up in the idea that VII and its reforms were a great renewal for the Church, although the evidence shows the exact opposite. And such charity, to want to keep brothers in Christ outside the Church’s visible structures.
I know this isn’t a Christian thing to say, but I hope he chokes on a filet of fish sandwich(it being Friday and all).
I think that the real issue with the SSPX is that they operate as a parallel Church, without any connection to, or approval from, the diocesan Bishop. This is in contrast to the personal prelature Opus Dei. The new marriage procedure may be an attempt to integrate the SSPX with their bishops.
“Weigel certainly does not show any signs of having considered the more recent work on Dignitatis humanae by scholars such as Prof. Thomas Pink.”
I wonder if the author - who sees “the sharp distinctions between Dignitatis humanae and the teachings of Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII, and other good and holy popes” - has considered the work of Prof. Pink’s, who sees no such distinctions: “Was Dignitatis Humanae a contradiction of previous doctrine? Not so, in fact. [...] According to Leo XIII, the state should indeed protect Catholicism through law—but only as the Church’s agent, acting on her authority. This duty, an obligation on Christian rulers to the Church based on their baptism, always presupposed that the state was indeed Christian—that it existed, at least in public aspiration, as a community of the baptized. Only if the state had this publicly Christian identity and allegiance would its rulers be morally in a position to lend the state’s coercive power to support the Church. But in the modern world states no longer have this religious identity, and are secular in make-up and aspiration. That means they can no longer act as agents of the Church. But then they must lack all authority in matters of religion, even a borrowed authority delegated to them from the Church. [...] Once it is secularized and detached from acting on the authority of the Church, the state entirely lacks competent authority to coerce us in matters of religion; and so our human dignity gives us a right not to be coerced religiously by the state—exactly as Dignitatis Humanae says.” - https://www.religiousfreedominstitute.org/cornerstone/2016/7/26/xii6em5xd7y1v70gfkc1me7fu1z7wa
Impossible to believe that they could be bolder?
I suspect there were quite a few who would have said something similar before Francis was elected.