[american colleen]

"I come to the conclusion that, canonically speaking, he's [Lefebvre's]not guilty of a schismatic act punishable by canon law. He's guilty of an act of disobedience to the Pope, but he did it in such a way that he could avail himself of a provision of the law that would prevent him from being automatically excommunicated (latae sententiae) for this act." (Latin Mass Magazine, Fall, 1995)

Now, that's something to be proud of!

[ultima ratio]

I say again, you're over your head.

[ultima ratio]

When you sarcastically suggest that Archbishop Lefebvre's use of a canon law provision to get around excommunication was somehow not something he should have been proud of, you again show you don't understand the situation. What he did was honorable. Why? Because he refused to obey an order which would have destroyed traditional Catholicism. Since you see it only from the perspective of disobedience, and not from the perspective of the emergency caused by a frontal assault on Catholic tradition, you can't see the nobility of his action. Not all disobedience is bad. Obedience should be in service to the faith. If it instead harms the faith, it is false and should be shunned.

About vocations before Vatican II--another point you think I've exaggerated. Back in the fifties my father attended a Jesuit novitiate-juniorate in Pennsylvania. The vocations from a SINGLE province--MD and PA--filled the house with hundreds of straight young men in their late teens and early twenties. And that was just one province of one order in a given year. Nor were they scraping the bottom of the barrel to fill up the place. On the contrary, standards were extremely rigorous intellectually and morally. The Jesuits especially were tough to get into. Many young men of promise were turned away. Compare this with the Jesuits today--a handful of vocations, maybe five or six, for the WHOLE COUNTRY, too many of them gay.