His Excellency Bishop Schneider has commented further on the case of the SSPX. This time His Excellency was not speaking publicly but rather in a private meeting with his lay sodality the Confraternity of Our Lady of Fatima, co-founded with Mr. Christopher Wendt.
(The Confraternity of Our Lady of Fatima is a partner with OnePeterFive in the Russian Fatima icon project to support our Russian Catholic brethren of the Byzantine rite for the conversion of Russia and the greater glory of the Immaculata.)
In this private meeting His Excellency expressed his opinion that the excommunications against the SSPX already threatened by Cardinal Fernández, would be of doubtful validity due to the SSPX’s stated intention behind the act.
Mr. Michael Haynes, Vatican Correspondent for Pelican Plus, obtained the record of this private meeting and published them with His Excellency’s permission, with further comments from the good German Bishop from Kazakhstan.
You can read Mr. Hayne’s article and Bishop Schneider’s full comments to Mr. Haynes on Pelican Plus here.
Mr. Haynes also pointed out that the good Irish priest Fr. Gerald Murray disagreed with the SSPX on the “state of emergency” issue (which is one of the most important presuppositions of the SSPX and undergirds all their actions for souls). Bishop Schneider, however, who criticizes the Society on other issues, agrees with the Society on their diagnosis of a state of emergency.
So there are various opinions.
I’m not a canon lawyer, so what do I know? And the vast majority of faithful are not canonists either. Moreover, canon lawyers disagree, and we’ve already seen Bishops and Cardinals disagree with each other on the SSPX issue, even those bishops and Cardinals who are clearly not Modernists, like Müller, Sarah, Zen and Schneider.
In my view, it’s important that we traditionalists keep in mind two things with this: one, our real enemies are not these good bishops, or anyone who has a different opinion of the SSPX, but rather the fallen angels and their puppets, the Modernists and the Iconoclasts controlling the Vatican and many dioceses. So let’s keep up the fight against the real enemies, beginning with Public Enemy Number #1: our own predominant fault. No doubt just as Cardinal Fernández, according to Cardinal Zen, “would be very happy if the SSPX were excommunicated,” so too the fallen angels would be very happy if all the Trads started to shoot each other with bullets of hatred, instead of fighting against the world, the flesh and the devil.
The second point that comes to mind here is what I heard once from one of the wise men at the Avila Institute: the Devil always wants to disturb your heart with a sense of urgency. He wants you to worry about the past, or worry about the future, and he wants to do everything he can to keep you away from the “sacrament of the present moment”[1] – which means beholding and fulfilling, in peace, the will of God in this moment, right now.
Let us all renew in our hearts our own abandonment to divine providence, and place our trust in the hands of Our Father in Heaven, through Jesus Christ Our Lord, amen.
Our Lady of Sorrows, Softener of Evil Hearts, pray for us.
T. S. Flanders
Editor
Monday in the III Week of Lent
St. Frances of Rome
[1] The phrase comes from the Modern spiritual Classic, Abandonment to Divine Providence.