Posted on 08/16/2005 8:50:57 AM PDT by Mershon
Bishop Williamson should be booted "upstairs" to work in the Vatican, where he can be kept on a short leash. Make him a consultor to the CDF.
"I don't believe anyone has accused SSPX of being heretical.
The Feeneyites have."
I stand corrected.
would you like a little poison with your cupcake?
Thank you for the thoughtful and courteous reply.
I have only been to one SSPX mass. Most of what I think I know about them, I learned here, so I will defer to your superior knowledge of the people involved.
I am only trying to deal with troubling issues; I have no emotional investment in defending the SSPX, nor, as many here seem to have, in painting them as villains.
That said, I want to reply to a few specifics in your post.
"The word "heresy" has been used with astonishing frequency in connection to the person of the late Holy Father."
There are, I think, several troubling things. On this forum we have often been treated to pictures of the late Holy Father kissing a Koran and presiding at a Mass where the "lector" is a well-endowed woman with her udders hanging out.
Two other troubling questions are, why did he succeed as a cleric under the communists, and why didn't he don a flamethrower and burn the homos out of the seminaries and the priesthood?
Charity, as you may have divined, is not my strong suit, but to extend a bit of it to people who call that "heresy," don't you think they may have a point?
"I would argue strongly that is manifestly inferior. But that is not the same thing as rejecting it as heretical and invalid."
Suppose a person were out to hurt the Church. He needs to show some restraint, lest his motives become too obvious. Therefore, instead of introducing temple prostitutes and drunkenness as features of the mass, he merely introduces a manifestly inferior mass that, while valid, will nonetheless result in many souls being lost, because as spiritual food it is simply inadequate. Is heresy the wrong word for that?
"A pope who orders you to sell church offices or demand money for the sacraments should indeed be ignored and even publicly denounced."
What about a pope who sends you bishops who send you predatory homosexuals (sorry for the redundancy) for priests, and insist on women lectors, altar girlies, faith-killer ditties instead of the magnificent music of the Church, wreckovation of lovely Churches, clown masses, invalid matter, liturgical dancing, and on and on and on...
What about a Holy Father who gives Phoney Mahoney a red hat?
You can argue that he didn't know. I would reply that he had a responsibility to know, and that the Holy Spirit would certainly have helped him find out.
"unless obedience to the order would constitute a grave sin or a danger to the faith, one should still obey it."
You're right. But many of us feel that we are on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, who am I to challenge even the humblest parish priest? On the other, there are things that seem to cry out to be challenged.
Frankly, I think that many of the masses I've attended have constituted a danger to the faith.
The Pope is the Head of the Church. How, then, could the Church be an authority superior to the Pope?
To understand her regime, you have only to look at her beginnings. She did not emerge from any collectivity or community whatever. She was formed around Jesus Christ her Head, her Ruler, from whom all her life, perfection and power came to her. You have not chosen me, He said, but I have chosen you. Thus from the birth of the Church her constitution clearly appears. Authority does not reside in the community; it never passes, as in the civil order, from the community to one or to several heads. By its very nature, and from the very outset, it resides in a single recognizable prince. Since this prince is the Lord Jesus, who is to live and to reign yesterday, today, and for ever, it results that in natural right it was for Him and not for the ecclesiastical community to choose for Himself a vicar, whose role it would not be to represent the ecclesiastical community, born to obey not to command; but to represent a Prince, the natural Lord of this community. That, then, was what Our Lord Himself deigned to do when, having risen, before ascending to heaven, He chose, as St. John tells us, the Apostle Peter alone for His Vicar. And just as in natural right the Prince of the Church does not draw His authority from the Church, so neither does His Vicar, who depends upon Him and not upon the Church. (Cardinal Cajetan, Apologia de Comparata Auctoritate Papae et Concilii, cap. i, nos. 450-452)
"The Pope is the Head of the Church. How, then, could the Church be an authority superior to the Pope?"
He is a steward, not a potentate.
When I say "the Church" I am including the Church in its existence as the supernatural bride of Christ, as well as the Deposit of Faith.
If we accept your position, then we are left with the proposition that a Pope could order us all to worship Gaea as the Supreme Being through ritual prostitution and drunkenness.
Amen, brother. The schism breeds madness. Even many of those in the sspx camp concede Williamson is a crank. Not gerard p. though.
One of those four men Lefebvre ordained, the English born Bishop Richard Williamson, has arguably become the most notorious of his class. Besides performing his duties at the Society's seminary in Winona, Minnesota, Williamson has apparently had time to establish some connections with some, shall we say, interesting groups of people.
An advertisement appearing in the January 1993 issue of the Researcher newsletter, for example, enthusiastically announces the release of the first of a projected series of videos entitled Christian Separatists and Traditionalists. The 50-minute color video is "partly an interview with and partly a lecture by Bishop Richard N. Williamson of the Roman Catholic Society of St. Pius X given in Syracuse, New York, apparently sometime around the latter part of 1992. The author of the ad first attempts to assuage the fears of any anti-Catholic Nazis who might be reading it:
"Diehard anti-Catholics will groan and imagine this is a tape full of direction about Catholic piety (there is some), "Popery" and the usual church support for the system. Ah, but this is a churchman with a difference! In the late 1980s, Bishop Williamson spoke in Quebec where he told a packed church that Ernst Zundel was right! (The Zionist-controlled satrapy of Canada tried to have him permanently barred for that). Next Bishop Williamson invited battling barrister Doug Christie to St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Winona, Minnesota to give an address. This is no ordinary bishop!"
For the uninitiated, Ernst Zundel is a German-born Canadian immigrant who, according to the Anti-Defamation League, acts as a commercial artist when he is not serving as a Nazi apologist. According to the ADL, Zundel has written such books as Secret Nazi Polar Expeditions and The Hitler We Loved and Why. One of his main theses is, of course, that the stories of the Holocaust are simply untrue.
The ADL notes that Zundel was charged in 1985 under a provision of the Criminal Code of Canada prohibiting individuals from "knowingly publishing false news that caused or was likely to cause damage to social or racial tolerance." Another Canadian revisionist, high school teacher James Keegstra, was accused in 1985 of "willfully promoting hatred towards a definable group, i.e., the Jewish people." Both defendants were successfully represented in court by attorney Douglas Christie, who was featured as a guest speaker at the institute for Historical Review's Seventh International Revisionist Conference in February 1986.
Since 1981, according to the Anti-Defamation League's 1993 book Hitler's Apologists, the IHR Conventions have provided an annual forum for revisionist historians to come together and present papers challenging the veracity of the Holocaust. One of the featured speakers at a recent IHR convention was Ditlieb Felderer of Sweden who asserts that Anne Frank's diary is a hoax. Felderer was convicted in May 1983 by a Swedish court for distributing anti-Semitic hate mail, including locks of hair and pieces of fat which he claimed belonged to Holocaust victims.
The IHR's Eleventh Revisionist Conference took place in October 1992 in the Los Angeles area. According to the ADL, the IHR's "George Orwell Free Speech" award was presented to the "neo-Hitlerian" Ewald Athans, who accepted it on behalf of Ernst Zundel, who reportedly had been denied entry into the United States. Also appearing as a speaker at this same conference was none other than Wolf Rudiger Hess, the son of Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess. Another interesting note: the July 1989 IHR Newsletter reported that Dr. Boyd Cathey, a former priest with the Society of St. Pius X and erstwhile professor at the Society's seminary in Ridgefield, Connecticut, was the latest addition to its Editorial Advisory Committee.
Judging from the friendly tone of the ad in the Researcher as well as from his invitation to Christie to speak at his seminary, it appears that Bishop Williamson shares at least the historical perspective of these men. Arriving at such a conclusion is not difficult when one reads the panegyrical concluding lines from the Researcher ad: On the video [Williamson] even predicts, in line with a prophecy of La Salette that Rome will become the seat of the Anti-Christ.... If we had even one Protestant bishop of a church congregation the size of the Society of St. Pius X that spoke and acted as Bishop Williamson does, our cause would be far advanced."
It seems fairly certain that no one at the Institute for Historical Review would fault Williamson for not trying his hardest to advance the standard of the historical revisionists. After his address in Quebec in 1989, the IHR Newsletter proudly reported that Bishop Williamson had been subsequently harassed by "Jewish groups, abetted by 'interfaith groups' and the local Catholic hierarchy (Bishop Williams [Sic] movement is considered schismatic by the current Catholic hierarchy), [who] not merely denounced the bishop but set the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on his trail, since the interfaith posse deemed the bishop to have violated Canada's 'hate laws' which have already been applied against James Keegstra and others to good effect."
The idea of Bishop Williamson having to flee "the interfaith posse" provokes an interesting image. An excommunicated Catholic bishop on the run from the Canadian Mounties, his fine, white-laced surplice blowing about him as he flees for the American border, a modern-day martyr for truth, at least in the eyes of the revisionists. Frenzied crowds of swastika-toting skinheads wildly cheer him on, while St. Thomas Aquinas, from his heavenly vantage point, prayerfully pulls for the cops.
* I think it's a good idea for you to go to AngelQueen. Birds of a feather and all that..
But, you, and other extremists, hated the Pope and he tried to serve you while Jesus was hated by those He came to serve so I think you are PROVING, not disproving, the Holy Writ you cite.
*Yes; some of them. Each of my neighbor is a Jew. I have yet to witness them conspiring to kill me.
I am a communicant at a huge Parish. Among other communicants are, as of last count, 10 Jewish converts, four of whom have the name Abraham. Ought I be worried they converted to destroy from within?
BTW, how sucessful is your loving approach to your Jewish brothers and sisters in leading to their conversions? How many Jews have joined your outfit? (by their fruits and all that..)
Sort of like two friends who fight because one commits adultery with the other's wife. The adulterer says, "Let's stop this fighting. I'll shake your hand on the condition that I get to keep diddling your wife." Then the wronged husband is castigated for declining.
* At the normative Mass, the reedeemed stand with Christ around the altar offering the Sacrifice of the New Covenant and that is considerd by you analagous to adultry.
Additional proof schism leads to madness
LOl touche
Maybe he had the good sense to desire avoid being seen as a frequenter of Traditio :)
"Additional proof schism leads to madness"
Actually, what we learn from this exchange is that you lack the normal human capacity for abstract thinking, but are overstocked when it comes to malice.
No one owns lies. Lies are not literary works. Lies aren't fiction.
Fiction is presented as such by the authors precisely to avoid it being seen as lies instead.
This is especially so with purported works of history. A purported work of history full of lies is neither history nor fiction, but simply lies.
If one lifts lies from another source and repeats them, one simply becomes a liar, plain and simple. Its no different than spreading outrageous false rumors one has heard by word of mouth, which is called slanderous gossip. Just because someone told you outrageous lies and you didn't bother to chec their veracity does not relieve you of guilt in lying.
Which of those things is not true?
"He was a student of the heretical existentialist Jacques Maritain. "
Maritain was not a heretic.
And so many of the Schismatics hate the Catholic Mass so much there's no way they'd go for it.
Well, I will continue to pray for Christian unity.
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