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Monday 28 September 2009

A Day Spa for Saints, or a Clinic for Sinners?

Or better, is the Barque of Peter a luxury liner for saints or a lifeboat for sinners?

I have no dog in this fight, so to speak, I don't believe that I have ever even met anyone in the SSPX, (full disclosure, I did once, inadvertently go to Mass at the chapel of "independent" schismatics, but I did not at that time know that there were schismatics.
I also, in those days, by mistake found myself worshiping with schismatics on t'other fringe of the Seamless Garment, a sect with Catholic in its name, and married and women priests, and thus forced to avail myself of a LifeTeen Last-Chance-Mass that evening to fulfill my Sunday obligation.
So you can see, I am an equal-opportunity Osteo-encephalitic.)

But I am fascinated by the continuing seeming newsworthiness of the continuing He Said/He Said, (ooooooooh! that mean ol' misogynistic hierarchy! ;oP) of the continuing ruckus over the lifting of the excommunication on the noted film critic, Richard "Bishop" Willimason.

I must say, I don't see the logic of the expressed reasons most of those who objected to the Pope's act of mercy.
There may be, in fact I believe there were, good arguments to be made mitigating against it, but the one being put forth over and over and over again ain't it.
Flunking Modern European history, being Politically Irregular rather than PC, being a mean or stupid son of a b****? Not excommunicatible offenses.

And where is the canon saying "Sinners Need Not Apply" for full communion with the Body of Christ? who has decreed that those already aboard the Barque are only to extend a lifeline if the drowning man bobbing or thrashing alongside is certifiably sinless?

And I'm not the only one with wonderings of the same sort:
Maybe those with doubts about the Apollo Moon landings should be questioned about their attitudes to the Treaty of Utrecht. Or Global warming deniers should fess up about their links to Lee Harvey Oswald.
I have my own candidate for the One Unforgivable Sin, and the leaders of the SSPX seem to be guilty of it -- lack of a sense of humor.
Cardinal Castrillón-Hoyos reveals this alarming tidbit,(I have cleaned up the syntax a bit, the English translation of the Cardinal's interview with Suddeutsche Zeitung seems to have been effected by a non-English speaker):
[The LeFebvrists he once met by chance] are good people, but sometimes fixated on the idea that all evil in the world has the reforms of the [Second Vatican] Council as its source. As I tried to relax the atmosphere and joked that if I were to choose a language for Mass, I would take Aramaic, the language of Christ, as I didn't know who had the bad idea to exchange the language of the Lord for the language of His [Roman] persecutors. They found it a very bad joke.

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