Deo Gratias

So the excommunications against the four SSPX bishops have been lifted. What wonderful news, and what a wonderful answer to prayer. It should be a reminder that we can never aim our sights too high in prayer. It's one thing to pray that Gran gets over her illness soon or that Patrick does okay in his exam next week. But I always felt an inner reservation when praying "And let the Pope lift the excommunications and let there be unity between the SSPX and the rest of the Church." It seemed like such a presumptuously big thing to be praying for. But now we've seen that prayer, the prayer of so many traditional Catholics, answered.

Of course, this is only the first step towards total "unity between the SSPX and the rest of the Church". Fr. Z sets out how things stand, and how much ground is yet to be covered, here. But it's an amazing step, one that seemed unimaginable for so long.

Bishop Fellay's press release can be found here.

And of course, as you can imagine, the media greeted the news with typical lack of objectivity. They were not slow to pick up on Bishop Williamson's comments on the Holocaust (that is, his claim that the evidence points to a mere 200 - 300 000 Jews killed, and not six million). Indeed, the very media savvy Damien Thompson is convinced that the leaking of the Swedish interview with the Bishop was deliberately timed to coincide with the lifting of the excommunications, thus allowing the gleeful anti-Church press to print headlines like "Dismay as Pope welcomes back Holocaust Bishop Richard Williamson."

The problem is that the average layman doesn't know the esoteric history of Catholic traditionalism and doesn't know that neither the excommunications, nor the lifting of them, had anything to do with the Bishop's historical opinions. They may well assume that he was declared excommunicated because he denied the Holocaust, and that the Pope has just decided that that's not such a serious matter after all. The media certainly aren't doing anything to enlighten them. Reading articles like this one from the London Times, one is struck by the mixture of outright error ("there are an estimated 500 levebvrist bishops and 600, 000 followers worldwide") and a total lack of context. There is almost no information about the SSPX in general, about the anguish and persecution suffered by traditional Catholics since Vatican II. There is no sense given that this was an earnest attempt by the Pope to reconcile Catholics to full communion with the Church; Bishop Williamson and his controversial views dominate the article entirely. Remarkable, too, is the implication that the lifting of excommunications should be dictated by policy considerations. If this or that special interest group is going to be offended at the lifting of an excommunication, then don't lift it - that's very much the tone of Richard Owen's article.

We should leave the media to their own stupidity and hope and pray for the talks between the SSPX and Rome which lie ahead - especially that both sides will enter into them in a spirit of humility and earnest desire for unity.