As is well known, Pope Honoris I stated in a letter to Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople that “we confess one will of our Lord Jesus Christ”—despite the Church’s dogmatic teaching that Christ has both a divine will and a human will—and was posthumously anathematized by the Third Council of Constantinople.
What is not generally known, what is, in fact, virtually unknown, is that Pope John IV taught that Christ “never had two contrary wills [his human will being perfectly subordinate to his divine will] …we fittingly say and truthfully confess [in a metaphorical sense] one will” and that, therefore, Honorius’s letter was not intrinsically heretical its precise wording—because it did not state whether “one will” was meant literally or metaphorically.
In other words, the Church condemned Honorius for supporting the Monothelite heresy in practice but also ruled that the letter in which he did so was not technically heretical in principle.
Given that precedent, I have long believed that the Society of Saint Pius X should accept that Vatican II and the Novus Order are capable of orthodox interpretations, including as a matter of probability in the case of non-definitive conciliar teachings.
Moreover, I believe that the SSPX should abandon its insistence upon doctrinal agreement preceding canonical reconciliation in favor of reconciling on the basis of ambiguity, in support of which position I will cite the fact that Saint John Fisher was willing to accept the monarch of England as the “singular protector, supreme lord, and even, so far as the law of Christ allows, supreme head of the English church and clergy”—since nothing was stated about what the law of Christ allowed in that matter.
Having said that, the Society’s public statements, its publications and my own conversations with some of its priests give me reason to believe reconciliation with a substantial proportion of the Society would be possible if Rome were clearly willing to tacitly allow it to treat Vatican II and the Novus Ordo much the way the Church treated Honorius’s letter.
The clearest example of this is the position taken by Bishop Bernard Fellay, then superior general of the SSPX, during discussions with the Ecclesia Commission in 2017.
Archbishop Guido Pozzo, the Commission’s secretary, suggested Vatican II’s statements on religious freedom in Dignitatis Humanae—a major point of contention—could be interpreted “as directives for pastoral action, directions, and suggestions or exhortations of a practical pastoral nature”[1] rather than as doctrine. Bishop Fellay believed the suggestion had potential.
Details could have been worked on the basis of a preparatory schema for Vatican II. Approvingly included as an appendix in Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s book They Have Uncrowned Him, it supports extensive religious freedom as a matter of law while maintaining the traditional magisterial teaching that limited restrictions can be placed on false religions under certain circumstances solely to direct people towards truth and away from error. For Rome to merely allow Dignitatis Humanae to be interpreted that way would demonstrate that there is no intention of imposing a break with traditional doctrine.
But in 2017 Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, rejected Archbishop Pozzo’s suggestion—insisting Dignitatis Humanae be accepted as doctrinal without qualification, failing to make even a perfunctory effort to reconcile it with the magisterial teachings of numerous popes and destroying one of the best chances to reconcile the SSPX.
Today Cardinal Müller has virtually abandoned even a pretense of finding continuity on the question of religious freedom, dismissing the magisterial teachings of numerous “pre-conciliar” popes as “ambiguous” (and by implication more or less irrelevant) while claiming that Vatican II corrected “misunderstandings” (without specifying who was guilty of them) and “rethought and re-examined many decrees”[2] (which sounds suspiciously like “re-interpreted” in violation of their original meaning).
Examples could be multiplied, with Rome’s treatment of the Tridentine Mass at the top of the list.
Little imagination is needed to foresee the consequences if a priestly society or religious order which habitually uses both the traditional Roman rite and the missal of Paul VI—and whose acceptance of the latter therefore cannot be questioned—suddenly started to produce a series of books, articles and lectures arguing that Vatican II and the Novus Ordo are no more than minimally Catholic in the manner of Honorius’s letter.
SSPX insistence upon doctrinal agreement preceding canonical regularization is neither solely the result of its refusal to recognize that the conciliar texts and liturgical reform have that minimum of Catholicity nor a pretext for prolonging its irregular status. It is also a reaction to Rome’s treatment of those traditionalists who—without falling into the errors of the SSPX—call attention to ambiguities of those texts and that missal and to the heterodox intentions of churchmen responsible for them.
[1] https://sspx.org/en/news/key-points-council-negotiable-7494
https://onepeterfive.com/abp-pozzo-on-sspx-disputed-vatican-ii-documents-are-non-doctrinal/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
[2] https://www.herder.de/hk/hefte/archiv/2016/6-2016/barrieren-abbauen-ein-gespraech-mit-dem-praefekten-der-glaubenskongregation-kardinal-gerhard-ludwig-mueller/
