http://www.christorchaos.com/PleaseHelpBishopFellayFindHisHermeneuticOfContinuityPartOne.htmFellay's "first assistant," Father Niklaus Pfluger, himself spoke highly of the "hermeneutic of reform" in May of 2012:
That was actually our argument, and then this Pope comes and says: Stop! The council is being interpreted falsely. That was his famous sermon, an important talk, in December, 22 December, 2005, where he said we need a new interpretation of the council. Up until now, people have been abusing the council, in the name of the council, but that isn't what the council wanted. We need a new interpretation and using the greek term, a new hermeneutic, a new understanding... it's not bad, 40 years after the council, to understand the council correctly, and the correct understanding of the council is the hermeneutic of reform.
So it isn't a contradiction after all, no discontinuity between the council and tradition. It is a continuity, and this continuity is made visible through a healthy reform. That is important for the reason that from now on this is the idea that defines his pontificate. Everything that he does, and thereby the permission for, or the liberation of the ancient mass, plays a very decisive role, everything he does, everything he attempts, is to show that there isn't a break. The council, our main argument for this resistance, for holding firmly to Tradition, for rejecting the ideas of the council, the important ideas of the council -- the Pope wants to say that this argument is no argument at all. It is just... it is just a matter of harmonious development of tradition, this Second Vatican Council. (
http://angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=42305.)
It appears as though close exposure to those infected with the spiritually fatal disease of the "new theology" comes to think and to speak in form of Hegelianism where truth contains within itself the seeds of its own internal contradiction.
More seriously, however, the disease from which the Society of Saint Pius X suffers is a simple one: utilitarianism.
That is, the leadership of the Society of Saint Pius X, starting with its courageous founder, the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, has expected the faithful attached to their chapels to believe whatever is they are told without regard for how credulity is strained in the process, without regard for consistency, without regard for objective truth, without regard for right principles. The "end result" is the only thing that has mattered. The faithful just have to believe what they are told and suspend all rationality while doing so.
To wit, Catholics attached to the Society of Saint Pius X have been told that a pope can teach error if he is not "teaching from the Chair." He cannot.
Catholics attached to the Society of Saint Pius X have been told that the Catholic Church can promulgate liturgical rites that are "evil" or defective, if not invalid, in some way. She cannot.
Catholics attached to the Society of Saint Pius X have been taught to believe whatever the leadership tells them. And the current leadership has encouraged "loyalists" to spy on "rebels," who are considered "enemies" and must shunned, if not denounced as treacherous, ungrateful souls, in order for this or that current "grand scheme" to succeed.
The end result is the only thing that matters, not intellectual consistency and not truth.
For a Catholic, however, the dispassionate adherence to truth without regard for human respect and without regard for a very misplaced and all too frequently highly manipulated, emotionally-laden sense of personal loyalty to various persons who not have the charism of personal infallibility must outweigh all other considerations.
What matters is the truth, not who one likes or what one wishes to be the case, not what desires to be true even though level-headed, sensible human beings, deemed "enemies" by the "leaders," present cogent arguments to explode the mythical contentions by which autocrats seek to aggrandize themselves and arrogate power to themselves while using various emotional devices and mind-control games to control the faithful, fearful of losing the sacraments by being expelled for thinking and an acting as Catholics and not a blind loyalists to this or that person or to this or that community.
The truth about the Society of Saint Pius X, no matter its historic defense of the Social Reign of Christ the King and its firm, clear an absolutely correct teaching on morality that rejects such anti-Catholic notions advanced by the conciliarists as "natural family planning" and "brain death," is that its entire ecclesiology (teaching on the nature of the Church and her Divine Constitution) is false.
In essence, the Society of Saint Pius X's institutional belief that the popes can err if not teaching infallibly or that they can promulgate defective, if not offensive, liturgical rites places them in essential agreement with Joseph Ratzinger's long-held belief that the Catholic Church is "sinful" and thus can err:
One of the progressivist attacks against the sanctity of the Spouse of Christ is to affirm that sin is present in the essence of the Church. That the Church is a sinner and in constant need of reform are affronts made by the heresiarch Martin Luther.
These affronts were heard again at Vatican II and are repeated by significant representatives of the Church.
As Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Card. Joseph Ratzinger made clear that he considers that the note of sin exists in the essence of the Church. He said these words in a speech to the Pontifical Faculty of Theology, Lima, Peru, in July 1986.
The idea of the Body of Christ developed in the Catholic Church with the meaning that the Church presents herself as ‘the Christ who continues to live on earth.’ She is described as the Incarnation of the Son that will continue until the end of time.
This raised the opposition of the Protestants, who saw this as an insupportable identification of the Church with Christ, an identification in which the Church, so to speak, would adore herself and consider herself to be infallible.
Some Catholic thinkers, without reaching this point, also began to conclude that this formula would attribute a definitive character to every ministerial word and action of the Church, which would make any critique of her seem an attack on Christ himself, thus forgetting her human element.
For this reason, it was affirmed that it is necessary for the difference between Christ and the Church to become clearly manifest, that is to say, that the Church is not identical to Christ but is different from Him.
She is the Church of sinners, which incessantly needs to purify and renew herself. Thus, the idea of ‘reform’ – which could not develop easily in the notion of the Body of Christ – became a decisive element of the concept of People of God.
(J. Ratzinger, “La eclesiología del Vaticano,” Iglesia-Mundo, Madrid, October 1986, p. 19) (As found at: Progressivist Docuмent of the Week.)
Obviously, the leaders of the Society of Saint Pius X do not believe in Ratzinger's false view of the Church. However, their own Gallicanism, condemned by Pope Pius VI in Auctorem Fidei, August 28, 1794, and mocked by Bishop Emile Bougaud in the Nineteenth Century, mimics it by contending that the Catholic Church can be stained by error, ambiguity, falsehood and sacrilege. The Society of Saint Pius X's "governing magisterium" as opposed to the "authentic magisterium" (the "Rome of all time") is a work of fiction. It is as much a work of fiction as conciliarism itself.