Pope Francis Looks to Reconcile With Breakaway Catholic Group
Pontiff tackles schism, rattles liberals and conservatives with outreach to traditionalist Society of St. Pius X
Pope Francis leads Regina Coeli prayer from the window of the apostolic building at the Vatican.PHOTO: EVANDRO INETTI/ZUMA PRESS
ROME— Pope Francis is edging closer to reconciliation with a breakaway traditionalist group, a possible coup for a liberal pope who could succeed where his more conservative predecessors failed.
Claude Solnik
Long Island Business News
2150 Smithtown Ave.
Ronkonkoma, NY 11779-7348
Home > LI Confidential > Stop scratching on holidays
Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
It is the pope’s Nixon-to-China moment: His credibility with progressive Catholics has given him more leeway to reach out to the other side, like President Richard Nixon’s historic overture to Communist China.
But the prospect of bringing the Society of St. Pius X—known as SSPX—back into the church has alarmed some conservatives and liberals, for different reasons.
SSPX has vexed the Vatican since French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, a critic of the modernizing changes brought to the church by the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council, founded it in 1970.
Reconciliation would avoid a permanent schism with a group that today claims hundreds of priests and hundreds of thousands of followers. It would fit the pope’s agenda of bringing marginalized groups and individuals, such as divorced-and-remarried Catholics, back into the church.
Yet it would also risk antagonizing liberals and even some conservatives who worry that legitimizing a group skeptical of the Vatican’s dialogue with other faiths and opposed to modern ideas of religious freedom could undermine the progressive legacy of Vatican II and the very unity of the church.
Archbishop Lefebvre opposed the end of the Latin Mass—a move he regarded as a damaging rupture with the church’s millennial traditions—and the Vatican’s more open stance to other religions. He argued that Catholicism is the only true faith and that Catholic officeholders are duty bound to make sure it is favored by the state.
In 1988, Archbishop Lefebvre and another prelate ordained four SSPX bishops without permission from Pope John Paul II, incurring automatic excommunication for themselves and the new bishops.
Since then, all three popes have worked to bring SSPX back. Pope Benedict XVI lifted restrictions on celebration of the Latin Mass, which had been replaced by worship in local languages in an effort to increase lay participation. Pope Benedict also lifted the excommunications of the four illicitly ordained bishops.
But SSPX leaders and members remained wary of losing their autonomy under Vatican jurisdiction and adamant about their opposition to certain tenets of Vatican II.
The rehabilitation of SSPX bishops led to an explosive controversy after one of the prelates, Bishop Richard Williamson, turned out to be a vocal Holocaust denier.
A reconciliation seemed imminent in 2012, the last full year of Pope Benedict’s reign, until talks broke down.
Now, under Pope Francis, who has been more willing to overlook differences, prospects for reunification are more favorable.
“There is reason to believe the moment of full reconciliation is not far off,” said Archbishop Guido Pozzo, a Vatican official assigned to deal with the SSPX.
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1977. Lefebvre rebelled against the Vatican's modernizing reforms of the 1960's, including replacing Latin with local languages at Mass. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
SSPX leader Bishop Bernard Fellay, who took over after Archbishop Lefebvre’s death in 1991, didn’t respond to requests for comment. In March, Bishop Fellay, who still contends with widespread wariness among his priests, assured an audience in Poland: “We must go with great prudence and also secure our future to be able to prevent any possibility of a trap,” according to one of the Society’s websites.
Both sides privately caution that an agreement could still take months or more. “I don’t like to rush things. Keep walking, walking, walking and then we’ll see,” Pope Francis told reporters on May 13, speaking of the negotiations with the SSPX.
Last month, Pope Francis granted SSPX priests permission to conduct marriage ceremonies, 1½ years after allowing them to hear confessions, both important steps to restoring full communion between the SSPX and the rest of the church.
The Vatican and the SSPX are also closer to an understanding on the thorny theological debate over Vatican II. Statements by Archbishop Pozzo in February indicated that, as a condition of reconciliation, the Holy See is asking the Society to sign a statement of common beliefs, but one that leaves open the most contentious issues, including relations with other faiths and the relationship between church and state.
Discussion on those matters could wait until “after a full reconciliation,” Archbishop Pozzo told Spanish magazine Vida Nueva.
The prospect of a deal has upset some Catholics on the left who generally support the liberal pope, but who are disappointed by his failure to change church doctrine on such issues as the all-male priesthood, contraception and homosexuality.
SSPX members “flagrantly reject the Catholic Church’s rite of the Mass, its teachings on the primacy of conscience, and its respect for the truths expressed by other religions. Yet they are beckoned back into the fold,” wrote Jamie L. Manson, an editor of the progressive National Catholic Reporter, in April 2016. “But Catholics who…challenge the church’s teachings on women’s ordination and sexual ethics are still locked outside of the doors of mercy.”
Pope Francis has made it clear that he doesn’t miss the old liturgy or share the SSPX’s conservative doctrinal approach, but also that “there is no going back” to the Latin Mass, signaling that in his view it isn’t at risk from a minority of traditionalists.
Moreover, the pope’s has shown a more relaxed approach than his predecessors to differences in doctrine.
But if Pope Francis brings SSPX back into the fold by glossing over divergent interpretations of Vatican II, some conservatives warn the result could be to undermine the church’s doctrinal authority.
Allowing the SSPX to “cross their fingers behind their backs on religious freedom (and ecumenism)…would, by a bizarre ultra-traditionalist route, enshrine a ‘right to dissent’ within the Church,” George Weigel, biographer of Pope John Paul II, wrote last month in the conservative journal First Things. “It would validate even more dissent on the Catholic Left.”
Write to Francis X. Rocca at francis.rocca@wsj.com
