TKGS said:In other words, those who believe in two mutually exclusive doctrines at the same time, i.e., Modernists, are still held to be Catholics in good standing.
I wonder if this is a novelty or if this is the immemorial teaching of the Catholic Church.
The SSPX teaching is a novelty, but the reason it is seductive is that it is based on truth. You could say it's an exaggeration of truth.
What they are playing on is St. Augustine's saying that we don't judge someone as a heretic who is innocently mistaken. For instance, if your mom says "The Virgin Mary had relations with Joseph after Christ was born." She doesn't instantly become a heretic upon emitting this statement. If you tell her, "No, she was always a virgin," and she says "Oh, I see," then you can see she isn't a heretic, she was willing to believe what the Church teaches. She just didn't know it.
It's common sense. In fact, all of what is happening in the Church can be solved by common sense, but the SSPX has distorted that beyond all recogition.
Some of the SSPX people have taken this idea of being slow to judgment and turned it into an attack against the very nature of objective truth. They have, for all intents and purposes, erased the very possibility of formal heresy, since one "never knows." Even if Benedict was preaching devotion to Satan they'd quote Thomas Aquinas -- as Caminus did the other day -- saying that no one consciously does evil, but they do evil thinking that it's good, so maybe Benedict really mistakenly believes that Satan is better than God and was the victim of a misunderstanding.
So? When has that ever concerned people about heretics before? We who do know the truth have to protect ourselves and the Church, which amounts to the same thing, and that is why when we see a heretic, we treat them as a heretic until they prove otherwise, we separate from them. And these anti-Popes are not just making innocent mistakes, they are creating a new religion. Yeah, they probably think it's a more tolerant and better religion, but they're wrong, and they're destroying souls.
I remember the Albigensians being routed and waged war upon, I don't recall anyone saying "Oh, they thought they were doing good."
But the SSPX leaders play on the idea of being slow to judgment, and then they exaggerate it beyond all recognition. They don't just give the "Popes" one or two chances to correct themselves, but engage in decades of "talks" whose terms remain unexplained and whose outcome is almost always vague.
When hearing this, the SSPX have two tactics to try to recover ground:
( a ) They play on the fear of people to say Rome has defected and that there have been decades of anti-Popes, like those government shills who act as if 9/11 could not have been a conspiracy because it would have involved too many people.
This is why so many of them mock the idea of cօռspιʀαcιҽs in general, because the existence of a vast conspiracy is damaging to SSPX, who need you to believe this is just an innocent misunderstanding ( otherwise people will be rightfully enraged and cut off these heretics in Rome as they should have done long ago )
By the way, it doesn't matter if this conspiracy is fully conscious and involves men in dark rooms chomping cigars. I doubt any conspiracy is fully conscious to anyone except Satan, since he is the one pulling the strings of them all. But these guys know they are not teaching what the Church has always taught.
( b ) They distort the idea of papal infallibility beyond all recognition, reducing it to nothing, to ex cathedra statements which most Popes never even make
What makes this more offensive is that, though it's true we can't judge souls, these anti-Popes are not only heretics but moral reprobates who did nothing to stop vast networks of child molestation. Yet the SSPX act as if this is all accidental, as if it's not connected. Then what about the universal wreckification, what about the many heretical priests and bishops who are never reprimanded? Oh, the Popes are victims of a Modernistic mindset ( rather than violent Modernists themselves ). And on and on... There's no way out of these mind games when you're dealing with the SSPX die-hards.