Calling Catholics to a Higher Standard

by Fr. Roger Landry - March 20, 2009

On March 10, Pope Benedict sent the bishops of the world a letter (see p. 18) clarifying his January 21 gesture of reconciliation toward the four validly but illicitly ordained bishops of the Society of St. Pius X. He noted his action had caused a "great uproar" and unleashed an "avalanche of protests," leading to a situation that was "more heated than any we have seen for a long time." Many interpreted the move, he said, as the "antithesis" of reconciliation, because it seemed to "repudiate" the long-fought reconciliation between Christians and Jews. Many Catholics, he continued, felt the need or saw an opportunity to attack him with "open hostility," such that he felt he received greater understanding from Jewish leaders than many within the Church. He said that the whole episode exposed a "bitterness" that "laid bare wounds deeper than the present moment."

With characteristically humility, Pope Benedict first admitted the "mistakes" he made and the lessons he had consequently learned. The first mishap, which he "deeply deplored," was not to do his homework on Bishop Richard Williamson and to anticipate how Williamson's revisionist anti-Semitic statements would transform Benedict's "discreet gesture of mercy" to four excommunicated bishops into an act of embracing Williamson's indefensible ideas. The almost 82-year old pontiff admitted that "consulting the information available on the internet would have made it possible to perceive the problem early on," and resolved that "in the future in the Holy See we will have to pay greater attention to that source of news."

He also confessed that he "deeply regretted" that he did not clearly and adequately explain the extent and limits of his January 21 lifting of the excommunications, which facilitated misunderstandings. Several commentators had accused Pope Benedict of "wanting to turn back the clock to the time before the [Second Vatican] Council" by his lifting the excommunication on the four bishops, since the Society does not embrace several of the teachings of the Council. Three times in his letter he emphasized that the move affected individuals on a disciplinary level rather than the Society as a whole on the doctrinal level. He lifted the ecclesiastical penalty of excommunication in order to make it easier for the bishops — and with them, it would be hoped, the members of the Society — to return to union with the Church, but he stressed that this does not mean that there has been any accord with the Society on the teachings of the Second Vatican Council that the Society calls into question. "The Church's teaching authority cannot be frozen in the year 1962," Benedict stated, adding that "this must be quite clear to the Society." In order to demonstrate that the issues that need to be resolved before the Society can receive any recognition in the Church are doctrinal by nature, he said that he was joining the Ecclesia Dei Commission, which deals with the Society, to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

After candidly and sincerely confessing the results of his own examination of conscience, however, the Holy Father then gave the world, and particularly Catholics who had criticized the gesture, questions for an examination of their own. He had previously mentioned that the whole acerbic episode had "laid bare wounds deeper than those of the present moment." One of those deep lacerations in the Church has come from those who look at the Second Vatican Council as a rupture rather than a continuation of the two thousand year history of the Church. Those who under the guise of a mythical "spirit of Vatican II" reject what came before the Council were among those most critical of the Pope's gesture of reconciliation, because for them the Society of St. Pius X embodies the preconciliar mindset and practices that they have long considered anathema. After reiterating the necessity for the Society to accept the authority of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, the Pope challenged the Society's fiercest Catholic critics: "Those who put themselves forward as great defenders of the Council," he said, "also need to be reminded that Vatican II embraces the entire doctrinal history of the Church. Anyone who wishes to be obedient to the Council has to accept the faith professed over the centuries, and cannot sever the roots from which the tree draws its life." In other words, if the Society can justly be faulted for not accepting the authority of the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, in the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, some of its critics can be faulted for not accepting the authority of the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, in all twenty previous Councils.

The next point of examination was far more serious: he questioned whether some of the critics really desire reconciliation and unity. The Church's highest priority, he says, is to "make God present in this world and to show men and women the way to … the God who spoke on Sinai, … the God whose face we recognize … in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen." In order to accomplish this goal, however, the Church must be united because — the Pope says echoing Jesus in John 17 — disunity "calls into question the credibility of their talk of God."

"Was it, and is it, truly wrong in this case," the Pope asks about Bishop Williamson, "to meet half-way the brother who 'has something against you' and to seek reconciliation?" About the Society as a whole, he continues, "Can we simply exclude them, as representatives of a radical fringe, from our pursuit of reconciliation and unity? … Should not the great Church allow herself to be generous … and be capable of overlooking various faults and making every effort to open up broader vistas?"

The Pope says Williamson and the Society may be just the latest example of a disturbing and sinful modern trend. Even in the Church, he says, "one gets the impression that our society needs to have at least one group to which no tolerance may be shown, which one can easily attack and hate. And should someone dare to approach them — in this case the Pope — he too loses any right to tolerance; he too can be treated hatefully, without misgiving or restraint." Some groups, in other words, are treated as undeserving of forgiveness. The Pope could have reminded everyone of Jesus' parable that since God has forgiven us debts we could never repay, we must be willing to forgive others their smaller debts to us, no matter how despicable their sins (Mt 18:21-35). The Pope recalls St. Paul's warning to the Galatians that if we do not love our neighbor as ourselves, but "bite and devour one another" we will be "consumed by one another" (Gal 5:13-15) and adds, "sad to say, this 'biting and devouring' also exists in the Church today."

May the members of the Church who responded to Pope Benedict's gesture of reconciliation with hostility, biting and devouring, learn from his example of humble repentance and make a confession of their own.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.