In my last Fourth Watch, which treated the controversy over the SSPX, ended with the claim that the problem it raises for the wider Church goes beyond the proper form of the Mass and will not be resolved by the excommunication of some traditionalist schismatics. Rather, the fundamental issue is the proper reception of the Second Vatican Council, especially its teaching on the availability of saving grace outside the Church’s sacramental economy. It is for this reason that I drew a parallel between the SSPX and the followers of Fr. Leonard Feeney, since both groups object to anything that downplays the urgency of being a full member of the Catholic Church. While Feeney saw the danger in the teaching of Pope Pius XII, the SSPX implicates an ecumenical council.
The sharp edges of the SSPX controversy bring needed clarity. Fr. Pagliarani’s forthright rejection of a request from Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith, for continued dialogue is a case in point. The terms of the discussion had been established in 2017 by the then prefect of the DDF Cardinal Gerhard Müller, and approved by Pope Francis. If full communion was to be restored, the SSPX had to meet three conditions: 1) members of the Society would need to take the 1988 version of the Profession of Faith (as opposed to the one from 1962), 2) explicitly declare acceptance of the teachings of the Church from Vatican II to the present, and 3) recognize the validity and legitimacy of “the Rite of the Holy Mass and the Sacraments, according to the liturgical books promulgated after the Second Vatican Council.”
Any discussion based on these terms, according to Pagliarani, was pointless since the SSPX is bound by conscience to view the Second Vatican Council as a “rupture with the Tradition of the Church.” The same is true of the confirmations of its “fundamental orientations” in the actions of the papal magisterium over the last six decades:
This dialogue is supposed to clarify the interpretation of the Second Vatican Council. But this interpretation is already clearly given in the post-Conciliar period and in the successive documents of the Holy See. The Second Vatican Council is not a set of texts open to free interpretation: It has been received, developed, and applied for sixty years by successive popes, according to precise doctrinal and pastoral orientations.
In a subsequent missive in May, Pagliarani specified the points of conflict beyond the liturgical, e.g., the status of the Jewish people, the availability of grace outside the visible borders of the Church, and Christendom as “the only order willed by God among men.” He goes on to say that since there is little evidence that the Holy See intends to reverse or invalidate either the Council or its post-conciliar reception in authoritative teaching, the distance is unbridgeable. Pope Leo agreed and proceeded with the excommunications as soon as new bishops were consecrated without authorization.
It is my contention that the major point at issue with respect to Vatican II, for the SSPX, is its interpretation of the ancient teaching extra ecclesiam nulla sallus (“outside the Church there is no salvation”).
