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You may believe "leftists" did them dirt and poisoned relations with the Holy See, but the truth is worse: the Holy See itself had rejected traditional Catholicism--and was determined to obliterate its practices, including any traces of its classical theology as well as its liturgy, its devotions, its art and architecture, its music, even its memory--and it has done this until its own bizarre innovations have come to a dead end, leading to nothing but failure on every front. Only now, after its reign of terror, is it beginning to question its own misapplied hostility to Catholic tradition.

It still is astonishing to consider, for instance, that in the midst of several decades of corruption and dissent in most North American and European seminaries, the Vatican has only seen fit to clamp down on one--the quietly devout and orthodox Econe of the SSPX. It did everything it could to shut that good seminary down, even in the face of copious reports of its decency and orthodoxy. There have been many such anomalies. Recently, Rome refused to accept the resignation of Abp. Weakland when he turned 75--despite behind-the-scenes complaints from the faithful concerning his unorthodoxy. It was only after a love letter was published by the media proving the Archbishop had carried on a gay affair with a priest and had misappropriated diocesan funds to hush him up, that the Vatican finally asked for the resignation--and did so with dispatch. But it still backs people like this to the hilt. It supports Mahony unconditionally and has even awarded the red hat to Germany's Kasper, despite that man's unorthodox public expressions of doubt about the Resurrection and the divinity of Christ.

It is only by looking at the tolerance the Vatican shows to such unorthodox individuals that the treatment of Abp. Lefebvre begins to come into perspective. This was a man, after all, who had spent his life among the poor in Africa and whose orthodoxy was beyond doubt. He wished only to preserve the Econe and protect liturgical tradition from its predators. Why such a heavy hand in dealing with him? It surely makes one wonder. This is still a Church that is weeding-out seminarians who are suspected of saying the rosary or who make secret visits to the Blessed Sacrament.

I myself can see first-hand the goodness of SSPX priests, their devotion to the faith--and how they have been persecuted. And yet they are excellent priests. Our priest must travel across three states every single Sunday to say Masses and hear confessions at various chapels. He grabs his meals on the fly--and it is this way all week for most of these men. Yet their homilies on the Gospels are thoughtful and well-prepared, their spiritual direction is solid, and their work with the kids is outstanding. And still they are being persecuted while their counterparts on the left are tolerated.

I think the SSPX does many good things. It also does many suspect things, like setting itself up as an authority in annulments.

What it boils down to is this: the consecrations were a grave breach of church discipline.

I understand that the SSPX saw them as necessary and I appreciate their reasons.

The fact is that the leftists wreckers in the Church have done everything with plausible deniability and have shied away from such open and definitive breaches with the Holy See. In the case of Kasper, we have a man who has never formally published or declared his heterodoxy. He has only made suggestive statements and written things that could be interpreted into an orthodox sense. He also carefully cemented his influence in the Church in Germany until he had the majority of the German clergy and episcopate clamoring for his Cardinalate.

I agree with you that Kasper is probably a heretic.

The SSPX did not use such underhanded tactics: they simply said "you told us to do x but we need to do y, so we will do y."

The problem now is that Williamson, again an individual who has never been in a normal canonical relationship with the Holy See, has gone beyond the pragmatic action of Abp. Lefebvre.

Williamson is now demanding that the Holy See acknowledge the consecrations as licit - which they were not as a matter of objective historical fact. That is purely so Williamson can score a debating point and so that he can claim a See for himself as a licitly consecrated bishop.

Williamson's desire to be the boss and his overweening personal ambition have little to do with Abp. Lefebvre's reluctant decision to consecrate him.

... the Holy See itself had rejected traditional Catholicism--and was determined to obliterate its practices, including any traces of its classical theology...

LOL It is somehow, oddly, comforting to see how little things have changed...

Excerpt from Fides et Ratio:

The enduring originality of the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas

43. A quite special place in this long development belongs to Saint Thomas, not only because of what he taught but also because of the dialogue which he undertook with the Arab and Jewish thought of his time. In an age when Christian thinkers were rediscovering the treasures of ancient philosophy, and more particularly of Aristotle, Thomas had the great merit of giving pride of place to the harmony which exists between faith and reason. Both the light of reason and the light of faith come from God, he argued; hence there can be no contradiction between them.44

More radically, Thomas recognized that nature, philosophy's proper concern, could contribute to the understanding of divine Revelation. Faith therefore has no fear of reason, but seeks it out and has trust in it. Just as grace builds on nature and brings it to fulfilment,45 so faith builds upon and perfects reason. Illumined by faith, reason is set free from the fragility and limitations deriving from the disobedience of sin and finds the strength required to rise to the knowledge of the Triune God. Although he made much of the supernatural character of faith, the Angelic Doctor did not overlook the importance of its reasonableness; indeed he was able to plumb the depths and explain the meaning of this reasonableness. Faith is in a sense an “exercise of thought”; and human reason is neither annulled nor debased in assenting to the contents of faith, which are in any case attained by way of free and informed choice.46

This is why the Church has been justified in consistently proposing Saint Thomas as a master of thought and a model of the right way to do theology. In this connection, I would recall what my Predecessor, the Servant of God Paul VI, wrote on the occasion of the seventh centenary of the death of the Angelic Doctor: “Without doubt, Thomas possessed supremely the courage of the truth, a freedom of spirit in confronting new problems, the intellectual honesty of those who allow Christianity to be contaminated neither by secular philosophy nor by a prejudiced rejection of it. He passed therefore into the history of Christian thought as a pioneer of the new path of philosophy and universal culture. The key point and almost the kernel of the solution which, with all the brilliance of his prophetic intuition, he gave to the new encounter of faith and reason was a reconciliation between the secularity of the world and the radicality of the Gospel, thus avoiding the unnatural tendency to negate the world and its values while at the same time keeping faith with the supreme and inexorable demands of the supernatural order”.47

44. Another of the great insights of Saint Thomas was his perception of the role of the Holy Spirit in the process by which knowledge matures into wisdom. From the first pages of his Summa Theologiae,48 Aquinas was keen to show the primacy of the wisdom which is the gift of the Holy Spirit and which opens the way to a knowledge of divine realities. His theology allows us to understand what is distinctive of wisdom in its close link with faith and knowledge of the divine. This wisdom comes to know by way of connaturality; it presupposes faith and eventually formulates its right judgement on the basis of the truth of faith itself: “The wisdom named among the gifts of the Holy Spirit is distinct from the wisdom found among the intellectual virtues. This second wisdom is acquired through study, but the first 'comes from on high', as Saint James puts it. This also distinguishes it from faith, since faith accepts divine truth as it is. But the gift of wisdom enables judgement according to divine truth”.49

Yet the priority accorded this wisdom does not lead the Angelic Doctor to overlook the presence of two other complementary forms of wisdom—philosophical wisdom, which is based upon the capacity of the intellect, for all its natural limitations, to explore reality, and theological wisdom, which is based upon Revelation and which explores the contents of faith, entering the very mystery of God.

Profoundly convinced that “whatever its source, truth is of the Holy Spirit” (omne verum a quocumque dicatur a Spiritu Sancto est) 50 Saint Thomas was impartial in his love of truth. He sought truth wherever it might be found and gave consummate demonstration of its universality. In him, the Church's Magisterium has seen and recognized the passion for truth; and, precisely because it stays consistently within the horizon of universal, objective and transcendent truth, his thought scales “heights unthinkable to human intelligence”.51 Rightly, then, he may be called an “apostle of the truth”.52 Looking unreservedly to truth, the realism of Thomas could recognize the objectivity of truth and produce not merely a philosophy of “what seems to be” but a philosophy of “what is”.