John L. writes:
As another practicing Traditionalist Catholic reader, I wanted to comment on the lifting of the excommunications of the bishops of the Society of St. Pius X. I don’t think you have quite realized what a victory and hope and joy this is for all traditionalists of whatever religious persuasion. A friend of mine, Hilary Jane White, describes it well on her blog, Orwell’s Picnic, which I quote:
OK kids, I’m going to tell you, using small words, what this is about.
The Catholic Church has been lying down and licking the boots of the poofs, the abortionists and secularists for the last forty years. We’ve gone from being the scourge of heretics and terror of Islams to the Lehmann/Daneels circus sideshow who have no more care for the great churches and cathedrals of Europe than to let them be used as mosques, toilets and venues for pornography.
At the same time, almost no one is in the pews on Sundays.
Now that there is a very large likelihood that upwards of two or three million real Catholics are suddenly going to be filling those pews with themselves and their enormous tribes of well-catechised and well-behaved children, the enemies of the Church know that they have lost the war.
The bishops who spoke below, know that they are about to be replaced, that their decrepit day-glo-flower dreams of taking over the Church and running it as a hippie commune, as robust forty years later as the music of Peter Paul and Mary, are crumbling. And the men who are going to replace them are going to have to be…shall we say, rather different sort of men.
The party, in other words, is over.
In terms of the Church’s internal politics, this is like the breach of a dam. It means a whole bunch of very traditionally-minded people will be reintegrated into the official legal and political structures of the Catholic Church.
The Society demanded three conditions before reconciliation: the freeing of the Tridentine Mass, the lifting of the excommunications, and the right to criticize Vatican II. The key thing, not mentioned of course in any media, is that the Vatican has agreed to the last condition.
Their bishops and priests will be free to make all the traditional arguments against the Modernist embrace of secularism and ecumenism. The liberals inside the Church, according to the same instinct as we see in secular liberals, have up to now forbidden debate and criticism of their position. They can do so no longer.
Thus, the Roman Catholic Church, one of the most important institutions of the West, has been launched on a course which will lead, inevitably to my mind, to her rejection of the liberal pseudo-Christianity of recent decades and her re-embrace of traditional view points.