Event: SSPX

As expected, the head of the SSPX, Fr. Davide Pagliarani, has sent a letter to Cardinal Fernández formally rejecting the offer of further dialogue over doctrinal matters. “While I certainly rejoice at a new opening of dialogue,” he wrote, “I cannot accept the perspective and objectives in the name of which the Dicastery [for the Doctrine of the Faith] offers to resume dialogue in the present situation.” The tone and tenor of the letter are formally polite but with an undercurrent of combative resistance to Rome’s insistence on certain doctrinal non-negotiables as the key determinant for formal regularization of the Society. Apparently, for Fr. Pagliarani, such insistence on faithfulness to the contemporary magisterium as the central demand for any hope of reconciliation is just a bridge too far. Fr. Pagliarani’s stance makes it clear that further discussions will be as pointless as a defibrillator in a morgue. The conversation is dead, and the corpse of ongoing “dialogue” cannot be resuscitated. If the SSPX proceeds with its plans to consecrate new bishops without papal approval in July, its excommunication seems all but guaranteed. The SSPX’s denunciations of Vatican II as containing “heretical” doctrines, its demonization of the papally approved Novus Ordo as “dangerous to souls,” and its vigorous criticisms of all post-conciliar papacies as riddled with “modernism” have now reached a point of theological incoherence. The rationale given by the SSPX for the “need” to ordain new bishops is that the broader Church now lacks the means to provide souls with salvific grace. The implication is that the Church is so consumed with the metastasized cancer of Vatican II that it has forfeited all authority and sacramental integrity. The theological logic of the SSPX is at this point indistinguishable from the sedevacantist splinter groups that have broken away from the Society,…