For those interested, I thought you might find the response of Fr. Laisney to Fr. Pfeiffer to be insightful. - Let each make of it what he will.
To: Father Joseph Pfeiffer
Very dear Reverend Father,
I listened with great interest to your four sermons posted on the net. You are very right to point out the great confusion of the present times. You very well expose how within the very same docuмents you have sometimes contradictory statements.
And in the midst of this confusion, you are very right to insist on the duty of keeping the Faith.
It is precisely on these two points that all the priests and bishops of the Society of Saint Pius X fully agree. Remember that it is the very first principle that guides Bishop Fellay, as he wrote in Cor Unum: no compromise on the Faith!
In these sermons, you mention that there are many rumours, and “the leak of the leak of the leak of the leak of the leak of the leak of the leak of the leak, which is admitted to be true.” That last word really comes indeed as most unexpected: how could you trust such rumours, after so many repetition/distortions? If there is something true in it, should not one also fear that it be mixed with error? And a half truth is also a half lie: how could it be trusted? And how could one judge and condemn the superiors based on half-truths and half-lies?
Of course you – and I – would sometime wish to know what is going on. But it is quite normal that the superior’s counsels remain discreet and sometimes secret: in this, human authority simply imitates the model of all authority, i.e. divine authority (as St Thomas explains): “For who hath stood in the counsel of the Lord, and hath seen and heard his word?” (Jer 23:18). Remember in April 1988, when Father Laroche and the then Father Tissier de Mallerais talked with the two Roman theologians in preparation of the protocol: it was ALSO secret talks. And we all trusted Archbishop Lefebvre to make the right final decision. The goodness of a decision ought to be considered in itself; it is not necessary that all the steps of the counsels that lead to this decision be public. This is particularly true in the present situation, when the final decision is not yet made: the superior made public his guiding principles, and these are clearly good: no compromise on the faith and full freedom for the traditional apostolate. On another hand, it is also good for our humility that we be kept out of the counsels of the superiors. Remember: “God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble” (Jac 4:6). So Fr Couture very well says: “truth will be made known to souls who humble themselves before God.” When the final decision of the superior will be set out (likely to be at the end of the General Chapter, not before), then – IF it is clearly against the Faith – it will be time to resist it; but if it is not against the Faith then we should not be rebellious.
You rightly pointed out the confusion of our times. Indeed! This confusion should put us on our guard: we are not dealing with a black and white situation, we are not dealing with people who are all good or all bad. And in particular that applies to the present Pope. Some people tend to think, when they like a Pope, that he can do no wrong; others, when they dislike him, tend to think he can do no right. Such a black and white situation would be much less confusion than our present mixture. Let us therefore be careful as Our Lord Himself teaches us, that in resisting the evil we do not cast out the good together: “And he said to them: An enemy hath done this. And the servants said to him: Wilt thou that we go and gather it up? And he said: No, lest perhaps gathering up the cockle, you root up the wheat also together with it” (Mt 13:28-29).
In such a confusion, grey area, it is a great error to say: everything that is not white is black! I am afraid that, listening to your sermon, most of the time you fall in this trap. And thus you jump to condemning our superior for things which he did NOT say (it would be too long to point out every single instance, but to give just one: he said that “with the Discussions, we see that MANY things, which we would have condemned as being from the Council, are in fact, not from the Council, but the common understanding of it”: in other words, there are some errors in the council, and other many errors in the interpretations of the council. But you jump to the conclusion that Bishop Fellay said there was nothing wrong with the Council: this bishop Fellay did not say, and it is most certainly against his thinking. So please, in such complex situation, do not make simplifications which are distortions of reality. Such simplifications come from passions, not from reason.
The above passage of the Gospel on the cockle and the good grain reminds me of a very important principle of St Augustine, precisely based on these words of Our Lord: in the Church there are found good and bad people; communion of the good with these bad people does not harm the good so long as they do not consent with the evil deeds of the bad. This very important principle of Faith underlines bishop Fellay attitude, an attitude of Faith in the Church as Our Lord instituted it. St Augustine uses another parable of Our Lord to make the same point: on the threshing floor, there are both good grain and chaff, and at the end of the world “he will thoroughly cleanse his floor and gather his wheat into the barn; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Mt 3:12). St Augustine insists with the Donatists that, if they leave the threshing floor before the end of the world in order not to be with the rest of the chaff, they simply prove themselves to be chaff, since only the chaff is carried away by the winds!
Let us listen to Archbishop Lefebvre: remember how he insisted on the importance of the fact that the Society of Saint Pius X was “a work of the Church – une oeuvre d’Eglise”: he insisted on the importance of the canonical approval by Bishop Charrière on 1st November 1970, which he always considered to be the “birth” of the Society of Saint Pius X, though he started to work with the first nine seminarians in 1969. In other words, he considered a proper canonical situation to be a very good thing, which was unjustly denied later on; he suffered this situation, without ever desiring it. The reason is quite simple: order is a good thing, a very good thing. Our Lord Jesus Christ has instituted His Church precisely with order, with a hierarchical order founded precisely on a sacrament called “holy Orders.” That hierarchical communion is the third element of the external unity of the Church as described by St Robert Bellarmine and as has been always believed and taught by the Church. Now the abnormal situation that has been forced onto us (since 1975 with the illegitimate[1] suppression of the Society of Saint Pius X, and the 1976 suspension of Archbishop Lefebvre, then 1988) is in itself an evil, i.e. the privation of a due good: though we do recognise the successor of Peter and the successors of the Apostles, we are not recognised by them, our houses are not recognised by them: this is the absence of a due good. We are not responsible for this evil, which has been forced on us for years, yet we should not say that evil is good, it remains evil. The fact that God can (and did) draw good out of evil does not make evil good. To correct an evil and restore a due good is in itself a good thing: this is the good that Bishop Fellay pursues and before him Archbishop Lefebvre himself, who in 1987 went to great length to try to “make it work” then. Neither Archbishop Lefebvre was ready then nor is Bishop Fellay ready now to compromise the faith to obtain that good; but as Archbishop Lefebvre did pursue it then, so does Bishop Fellay pursue it today. Archbishop Lefebvre went so far in pursuing this good then that he signed the protocol of 5th May 1988[2].
Now that good in itself will have good consequences for Tradition; it will greatly strengthen our preaching. Indeed take your very example: the local bishop will not be able to dismiss your apostolate as if you were outside of the Church. It will close his mouth. He will complain against you, but will not be able to say that you are not Catholic. And this, without any compromise on your part. The very opposition of the modernists to this recognition of the Society of Saint Pius X manifests that they fear greatly the good that will come out of it.
True, they will also be dangers. But dangers there are everywhere, and there will continue to be everywhere. Our hope is in the name of the Lord, not in this or that situation. As it is well said, the whole effort of prayers that our superior general has asked cannot be without fruit; not that this would give a guarantee that whatever Bishop Fellay does will be good, but it gives the guarantee that the Good Lord will not abandon us. It is not in vain that He said: “ask and it shall be given to you; search and you shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you.” Though they were not miracles[3], the motu proprio Summorum Pontificuм and the 2009 lifting of the excommunications were unexpected, and obtained against the opposition of the majority of the Vatican officials. It is not bad to see them as answers to our prayers; God does not have to make miracles to answer prayers; He can also move secondary (and imperfect) causes to His purposes: the defects of the effects are due to the defects of the secondary causes, but the good part in the effect is due to God, Who is the First Cause of all good.
Our hope is also in the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And in this regard, you said something both good and surprising. You said that we “wait for the Blessed Virgin Mary is her own miraculous way brings out the victory and the conversion of Russia, and the conversion of the bishops and the conversion of the Pope.” Yes, we do wait for this, but I think it will be in the reverse order: we “wait for the Blessed Virgin Mary is her own miraculous way brings out the victory and the conversion of the Pope, and the conversion of the bishops and the conversion of Russia.” Indeed Our Lord Jesus Christ built His Church from above, not from below: He first called the Apostles, trained them, and then sent them convert the people. And before having all the bishops converted, I think it is necessary that the Pope be converted. So it is, by the graces obtained by the Immaculate Heart of Mary, that first the Pope, then through him the Bishops will be converted, then the Consecration of Russia will be able to happen as She has requested, and then the people of Russia (and through Russia, the people of the rest of the world) will be converted.
Our Lady said that Rome will lose the Faith: she did not say that every single person in the Vatican will lose the Faith, nor that they will lose it for ever. Remember that Our Lord also said: “I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren” (Lk 22:32). Our Lady is not against Our Lord!
In all this, I think we should do our duty where we are, and our present duty must be a call to holiness: it will be necessary whatever happens in the coming months, necessary so that we may hold to the Faith, since if we do not live it we will lose it; it will be necessary also so as to lift us others, and not fall ourselves. And that call to holiness requires a call to prayer; holiness is impossible without prayer.
So let us keep the faith where we are, let us pray as we are requested to do by our superiors, let us give the good example of charity, humility and all virtues, let us correct our own defaults, let us encourage our faithful to do the same, and let us trust in God and in our Lady’s intercession.
Cor unum in Christo et Maria,
Father François Laisney
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[1] Of course, these illegitimate sanctions were not valid in the sight of God, and in His holy sight we are still attached to the Catholic Church: yet this is the invisible bond; it remains that there is something lacking to the visible bond.
[2] Which protocol he did not reject the next day: the very reading of his letter of 6th May says that he was “very satisfied” in signing the day before. That letter of May 6th, far from rejecting the protocol, asks principally for the prompt implementation of it by fixing a date for the Consecrations. It was only when the date he had asked was rejected and new candidates were requested and an impossible date was offered (impossible since, as Archbishop Lefebvre explained, Rome knew full well that it could not be kept, there was not enough time to prepare another terna and have it approved), only then Archbishop Lefebvre decided to go ahead without the Pope’s approval. Read all the docuмents in my book “Archbishop Lefebvre and the Vatican”.
[3] I do not know who says that they were.