Brooks Robinson

This is awful. Some lay Catholics are now going to have to choose between adhering to Catholic Tradition but being excommunicated, or being in Communion with Rome but embracing modernism. No one should be forced into this situation.

Today, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith released what is required for clerics to reconcile to the Church. As part of that process, clerics have to make the same profession of faith all clerics make prior to ordination, and all persons make before holding any legitimate office. Additionally, they must profess to adhere to what seem to me be MINIMAL points: 1) Fidelity to the Catholic Church, the Roman Pontiff, and to refrain from every public declaration that is opposed to his person or to the Magisterium. (The document cites Canon 1373 and 1365 on this—it’s something we all adhere to!) 2) To accept the doctrine taught in Lumen Gentium no. 25 concerning the magisterium of the Church and the adherence due to it. * Note that Lumen Gentium 25 entails the distinction between infallible and non-infallible teachings and how each calls for some type of adherence. 3) To FOLLOW A POSITIVE LINE OF INTERPRETATION regarding certain doctrines taught by Vatican II and regarding later reforms of the liturgy or canon law “which may appear difficult to reconcile with previous declarations of the Magisterium.” To follow a positive line of interpretation is precisely so “no one separates it from the rest of the sacred patrimony of the Church’s doctrine.” * Note that this is what I’ve often called the principle of charity and intellectual benefit of the doubt that we’re supposed to give the magisterium, the bishops, and the certainly the pope. Some people have called it “pope-splaining” I have called it trying to understand what’s being taught. * Also note this endorses the hermeneutic of continuity. Vatican II can’t be separated from the patrimony of the Church. 4) To declare the VALIDITY of the Mass and Sacraments celebrated with the intention of doing what the Church does, according to the rights found in the typical editions of the Roman Missal and the Rituals issued by Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II. * Don’t be telling people they’re not valid, even if you yourself are attached to the older form! That’s it, and that’s all… Other steps include, of course, finding a bishop willing to take responsibility for you at least experimentally for a year.

The only thing that functionally makes the Roman Catholic Church “one” is submission to the juridical authority of the pope. The excommunication of SSPX clergy and lay faithful exposes that reality. Here are Catholics who believe they are preserving the tradition Rome itself once handed down, yet when they persist against papal decree, they are treated as schismatics. That is how Rome views unity: not unity of apostolic truth, but a unity of institutional obedience. And in that sense, this is a small picture of what happened five hundred years ago. The Reformers were not innovators trying to invent a new church. They were seeking to recover the ancient gospel after centuries of ecclesiastical accretions, sacerdotalism, and sacramental machinery had obscured the simplicity of salvation by grace through faith in Christ.