“Bis repetita do not always place” (1), said César to Gergovie, according to René Goscinny (Le Bouclier arverne, 1968). However, comparing the processes leading to the episcopal consecrations of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius
From 1979 to 1988, Bishop Lefebvre increasingly opposed John Paul Ⅱ. If we follow it, the encyclical Redemptor hominis (1979), of Teilhardian inspiration, ignores baptism as a condition of salvation.
Furthermore, the code of canon law (1983) would entrench the ecclesiological deviations of Vatican Ⅱ by establishing them as norms; during the renegotiation of the concordat with Italy, the Church renounced the social reign of Christ by abandoning the status of state religion of Catholicism (1984).
Finally, ecumenism and interreligious dialogue, and especially the meeting in Assisi (1986), would make membership in the Catholic Church not essential for salvation and would make people participate in cults addressed to false gods.
A fleeting appeasement
The Archbishop Emeritus judges that everything confirms that Vatican Ⅱ and its application institutionalize modernism in the Church with the complicity and active support of the Pope and the bishops, who thus become anti-Christs. Its apocalyptic tendencies are growing stronger, supported by private revelations (Mariana de Jesús Torres de Quito, Mélanie Calvat de La Salette, Lucia dos Santos de Fatima).
From 1984, he believed that the Church had entered a Passion comparable to that of Christ, prior to the end of time. Without expressing it formally, he believes that the Catholic Church is falling into apostasy and that only the SSPX and its allies maintain the authentic Catholic faiths and sacraments.
Twenty years later, the appeasement linked to the liberalization of the use of the Latin rite in its 1962 form (motu proprio Summorum pontificum, 2007) and the lifting of excommunications of Lefebvrist bishops (2009) only lasted a short time.
The pontificate of Francis revives the radicalization of the SSPX. The apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia (2016) and the declaration Fiducia supplicans (2023) are read as scandalous violations of Catholic moral doctrine. The Abu Dhabi Declaration on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Common Coexistence (2019) is understood as an apostasy, because it makes religious plurality a divine will and not a consequence of original sin.
The coronations, fruits of radicalization
The celebration of a rite in honor of the Pachamama in the Vatican gardens in the presence of Francis and the installation of statuettes of the same Pachamama in the church of Santa Maria in Traspontina (2019) for their part arouse indignation as a pagan cult.
The progressive extinction of the use of the Roman rite in its 1962 form (motu proprio Traditionis custodes, harshly interpreted by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, 2021) confirms the idea that the radical destruction of the sacrifice of the Mass is aimed at. The synod on synodality (2023-2024) is seen as a democratization of the Church directly opposed to the divine constitution of the Church.
Thus, in 1988 as in 2026, the coronations are the culmination of a reactive and progressive radicalization that negotiations have never succeeded in stopping, neither in 1983-1988, nor in 2012-2013. Indeed, Rome has always favored canonical solutions so that effective submission to the pope takes precedence, the prior acceptance of the authority of Vatican Ⅱ should not, however, prevent subsequent discussion of its hermeneutics and the hierarchy of its content.
Pre-Vatican Catholicism Ⅱ
But the Pope and the Curia have never been able to create the necessary trust in Lefebvre and his heirs and successors. A hermeneutic of Vatican Ⅱ making it compatible with the antimodern Catholic intransigence of the 19th and early 20th centuries has never been explicitly stated. Explicit condemnations and sanctions of theological and pastoral positions and practices that compromise extensively with Western modernity have always been minimal.
No ordinariate welcomed Catholics who identified with pre-Vatican Catholicism Ⅱ. The episcopal appointments were not intended to shape an episcopal body ready to apply the council according to an interpretation of “continuity”.
Finally, above all, the perspective always seemed to be the eventual reduction of traditional fundamentalism to post-Vatican Catholicism Ⅱ, with theological-pastoral alignment and ritual unification. That traditional Catholicism has become a culture comparable to Eastern Church Catholicisms has not been understood.
History repeats itself
That Latin Catholicism can experience a legitimate ritual plurality, including different historical forms of the same rite, has not been thought of either, as if the standardization inherited from the 19th century persisted despite inculturation which had become a ritual norm and pastoral key.
For its part, the SSPX has never developed a critical relationship with the universe whose conservation it claims, hypostatizing it as a “tradition” serving a discourse close to psittacism. Nor has it considered that the Catholicism of Vatican II is not the modernism to which it systematically reduces it, to the point of estimating that it is now almost impossible to be saved outside of it.
In short, the protagonists of this story, by repeating it, seem to want to prove Hegel right according to Marx (2). Except that there is no dimension of farce there. Supported by an environment with strong self-reproduction, solidly organized, financially solid, the FSSPX, whatever it says, is led towards autocephaly by the social logics that make it exist.
For its part, the Curia does not seem ready to really want to act against these and its sociological constraints. It is ultimately a singular defeat of the liberation from all conditioning so central in the epistle to the Galatians (3.28). It seems that there are ultimately few in Catholicism who think, like Goscinny, that, truly, in matters of traditional fundamentalism, “Bis repetita non placent”.
(1) “Repetition is not necessarily good”, in reference to the Latin expression “bis repetita placent”.
(2) Karl Marx wrote: “Hegel somewhere makes this remark that all the great events and people of history occur, so to speak, twice, but he forgot to add: the first time as a great tragedy, the second time as a sordid farce. »
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