George Weigel and the SPPX
by P.J. Smith
George Weigel, in his most recent column, has decided that the Holy See
should not offer the Society of St. Pius X a personal prelature. It appears
from statements by Archbishop Guido Pozzo, secretary of the Pontifical
Commission Ecclesia Dei, and Bishop Bernard Fellay, superior general of the Society,
that a personal prelature is the current offer. More than that, it seems that
the Holy See is not insisting on the Society’s submission to every jot and
tittle of every document of the Second Vatican Council. This is wonderful news.
Many informed commentators noted that the 2012 negotiations between Rome and
the Society were torpedoed at the last moment by the sudden insistence of the
Roman authorities on such submission. Archbishop Pozzo has conceded in public
interviews that there are levels of authority in the documents of that
“pastoral council,” and that total assent may not be necessary. And Weigel is
positively hysterical at the prospect.
Of course, one recognizes at the outset that Weigel
literally wishes to be more Catholic than the Pope. Pope Francis’s course of
dealing with the Society has been marked by his recognition that the Society of
St. Pius X is wholly Catholic and entitled to canonical standing. He has, more
or less on his own initiative, conferred upon priests of the Society the
faculty to hear confessions. He has also provided a process by which Society
priests may lawfully witness marriages. While the Society has argued that it
has had supplied jurisdiction for these acts, the fact remains that there are
now few differences between priests of the Society and ordinary parish priests.
(Except, all too often, the Society priests are better formed and more willing
to do the gritty work of a pastor.) All of this the Supreme Pontiff has
decreed, but George Weigel knows better.
Weigel’s entire argument is this: the SSPX “dissents” from
the Church’s teaching on religious liberty, as that teaching is set forth in
the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Liberty, Dignitatis humanae. He asserts that the
Society’s supposed dissent is based upon French politics after the Revolution
rather than “a serious account of the history of Catholic church-state
doctrine.” Yet his allegation is wholly peremptory and wholly unserious. We
have Weigel’s ipse dixit and that is
it. It is easier, in fact, to rehearse what Weigel does not talk about in his
haste to declare the Society dissenters. For example, Weigel does not discuss
Archbishop Lefebvre’s dubia regarding
Dignitatis humanae, submitted to the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which did not receive an
authoritative, point-by-point response, but only a vague general reply by an
anonymous peritus. Weigel does not
mention Mirari vos, Quanta cura, Immortale Dei, Libertas
praestantissimum, or any of the other papal pronouncements on religious
liberty before 1965. And Weigel certainly does not show any signs of having
considered the more recent work on Dignitatis
humanae by scholars such as Prof. Thomas Pink.
It is, of course, by no means clear that the Society
actually dissents from or rejects Church teaching. Given wthe text and history
of Dignitatis humanae itself, it is
not clear what Dignitatis humanae
actually means, and, therefore, it is impossible to say what dissent looks
like. Even if the Declaration were wholly clear, that would not resolve the
question. In 2014, the International Theological Commission issued a very
lengthy document, “Sensus fidei in
the life of the Church,” which discussed the sensus fidei, “a sort of spiritual instinct that enables the
believer to judge spontaneously whether a particular teaching or practice is or
is not in conformity with the Gospel and with apostolic faith” (para. 49). The
document observes that, “[a]lerted by their sensus
fidei, individual believers may deny assent even to the teaching of
legitimate pastors if they do not recognise in that teaching the voice of
Christ, the Good Shepherd” (para. 63). Given the sharp distinctions between Dignitatis humanae and the teachings of
Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII, and other good and holy popes, it seems
eminently reasonable to discuss the Society’s position in terms of the reaction
of an authentic sensus fidei. With
all of this in mind, one must ask whether it is George Weigel who is staking
out a position for largely political reasons.
Things go from bad to worse when Weigel explains why it is
that the Society’s supposed dissent is such a problem. To recognize the Society
and give it a personal prelature would, Weigel frets, embolden liberal
dissenters. Because the Society identifies inconsistencies between Dignitatis humanae and the Church’s
traditional teachings—set forth in all those dusty encyclicals Weigel
ignores—modernists would articulate a case for “faithful dissent” from Humanae vitae and Ordinatio sacerdotalis. Weigel’s claim is as bizarre as it is
ridiculous. For one thing, modernists have had no trouble asserting for
themselves a right to faithful dissent, even during the years when simply everyone thought the Society was
“schismatic.” St. Pius X warned us in Pascendi
that dissent and tension are among the most favored methods of the modernists.
That great pope has been proved right again and again, notwithstanding the
question of the Society that bears his name. There is no reason to believe that
granting the Society the juridical recognition that is its right would embolden
modernists, if only because it is impossible to believe, in 2017, that the
modernists could be bolder.And Weigel’s argument is beyond ridiculous insofar as he
attempts to say that the Society of St. Pius X’s ongoing questions about Dignitatis humanae (among other things)
are equivalent to the modernists’ heresies. Consider it like this: the priests
of the Society observe that Dignitatis
humanae cannot be reconciled easily, if at all, with the teachings of Gregory
XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII and other good and holy popes. They, following their sensus fidei, appeal to the universal
magisterium, including the teachings of those popes, and ask for clarification
from the Roman authorities. After long decades of hostility and silence from
the Roman authorities, Archbishop Pozzo stakes out a position that would go
some distance toward clarifying the situation, and additional clarification
could take place through careful study. To put this process—a process
reflecting true submission to the universal magisterium of the Church—on the
same level as the modernists’ clamor for priestesses and blessings for
sodomitical unions beggars belief, but it appears that Weigel wants to do just
that.
Weigel never really comes to the point. He suggests that
giving the Society its long-deserved juridical recognition would hurt
ecumenical outreach and the New Evangelization. Weigel apparently does not know
that the New Evangelization has been a dead letter since March 13, 2013, when
Pope Francis’s election was announced. And it is impossible to imagine how
ecumenical outreach could be hurt by the Society when Pope Francis makes
extravagant ecumenical gestures at every turn. The only possible explanation
for Weigel’s incoherent argument is that he has committed himself to the view
that the Second Vatican Council is the most significant moment in the life of
the Church since Pentecost. To be sure, a faction in the Church believes just
that. And they are a faction with considerable power. Denying the Society
juridical recognition—despite its evident Catholicism and the indefatigable
pastoral work of its good and holy priests—would, therefore, in Weigel’s words,
“reinforce the notion that doctrine is not about truth, but about power.”
