Kennedy Hall has positioned himself as the foremost apologist for the SSPX, his books and articles are considered required reading by some fellow traditionalists. His most recent foray into that field may be found here, responding to a previous article by ‘Brother Linus’ – a pen name of an anonymous religious brother – analyzing and ultimately criticizing the SSPX’s decision to ordain four bishops contrary to – not simply without – papal mandate.
Mr. Hall claims that Brother Linus throws a lot of spaghetti at the wall, hoping something will stick. But Kennedy throws quite a few of his own noodles, in a piece that goes for 25 pages and 12,000 words on ‘grades of necessity’ and so on – and this before we get to his admonition that one must wade through the numerous labyrinthine works of Lefebvre himself and SSPX theologians.
Forgive me, Mr. Hall, but one’s presbyopic eyes glaze over and the mind is benumbed.
It’s a general rule that although arguments for any given position may be complex, the more true something is, the more simply the argument for its truth should be.
Science mostly works this way. One primary evidence that a hypothesis or equation is true is its simplicity. E=mc2, v = d/t, and all the rest of them. There are books written on proving God’s existence, but a child knows He’s there.
So too with the SSPX. One could get wrapped up in all the canonical and quasi-canonical wrangling, but can we not just cut through the Gordian knot? Just as without God in the moral sphere, anything goes, as Dostoyevsky said, so too, without the authority of the Pope, anything goes in the Church. There is no source of unity, and no obedience to ensure that unity. Nor is there any principle of reform, only lots of different people arguing about what ‘reform’ really implies. To paraphrase the Book of Judges, each does what seems ‘right in his own eyes’. (cf., 17:6, 21:25)
The SSPX may have the appearance of unity, but what’s really holding it all together, at least in any supernatural sense?
As I’ve said before, it’s obvious there are any number of serious crisis in the Church, and I sympathize with Mr. Hall’s and the SSPX’s aim to see through these and find a refuge. Who doesn’t want beautiful, traditional liturgy? It’s their modus operandi that is concerning. The end is good, but their means to attain that end are chimerical. If God has willed that we live in a liturgical Babylonian exile for a time and even half a time, should we not endure such, and accept what reprieve He sends through His holy Church?
The SSPX claims obedience to the Pope, but of a strange sort, like the scene in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited: In a discussion on papal infallibility, Charles Ryder asks Sebastian Flyte whether the pope, looking at a cloud, said it was going to rain and it didn’t, would he still be infallible? Sebastian replies, “it would sort of be raining spiritually, only we’d be too sinful to see it”.
Or, to put this more bluntly, as one FSSP priest said to me recently (whose society is in full union with the Church) ‘they do whatever they want’. Again, see Judges.
Mr. Hall distinguishes – if we may glean his point – between exterior and interior schism, as though an obvious exterior schismatic act – ordaining bishops contrary to papal order – can be justified by some vague ‘interior’ adherence to the papacy. This is reminiscent of Jesuits who interpreted their ‘fourth vow of obedience to the Pope’ in light of a ‘higher obedience’, transcending the run-of-the-mill and, shall we say, traditional kind.
These recent illicit ordinations will, I fear, result in more deleterious consequences than the last ones. Speaking of spaghetti, peruse this recent article for some glimpse into the scandalous mess such rogue wandering bishops produce. Bishop Williamson – one of the first four that Lefebvre ordained, and the founder of the SSPX ‘resistance’, who thought the SSPX not ‘radical’ enough – was only one initial strand of this tangled web that has been woven. The endeavour is in grave danger of becoming fissiparous Protestantism with a traditional flavour, and already mostly there.
How is their superior, Father Davide Pagliari, going to contain this? He has not the charism of unity, nor of governance, at least in any Magisterial sense. The various factions are now more entrenched than that fateful summer of 1988 forty years ago, and beneath the quasi-unified surface, the SSPX contains any number of sedevacantists, along with those who consider the Novus Ordo Mass, priesthood and sacraments, indeed even the whole ‘post-conciliar Church’ entirely invalid. All the other 23 ‘rites’ in the Church will intermingle and worship together, but not so the SSPX. They are an enclave unto themselves, which is sort of disheartening for those of us who would like their company, and to pray together, and once upon a time, with some, did so.
This is about a lot more than access to the TLM, but concerns the very nature and structure of the Church, as willed by God, founded by Christ, and governed by His vicar, through whose limitations, and even bad decisions, God can, does and will, work.
Patience, dear reader, for he who perseveres to the end will be saved. Regardless of how storm-tossed the barque of Peter may seem, stay aboard and stay faithful.
