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Interesting Recent Excerpt from Post by "Gabriel" on IA
GREC Pushing for an Accord Since 1997:



It’s clear from the book on GREC by Fr. Michel Lelong, Pour la necessaire reconciliation, that since 1997 priests in high positions in the SSPX, led Fr. Alain Lorans, with the approval of Bishop Fellay, have been working towards finding a means of reconciliation with Rome. Although it’s made clear in the book that Bishop Fellay has reservations, especially regarding the interpretation of Vatican II and the New Mass, it’s still the case that he would accept an agreement if certain tolerable solutions could be found, even if "not in this Pontificate". Otherwise he wouldn’t have agreed to the GREC talks and taken part in the doctrinal discussions. Or allowed the publication of the disastrous Six Points of the General Chapter.

This shows that he has abandoned Archbishop Lefebvre’s post-1988 decision that there must be no agreement until Rome converts. (The Archbishop said the sign of this would be their public acceptance of the Syllabus and Pascendi.) Obviously, the Archbishop didn’t mean the whole Church at once, but that the Pope and the Vatican must have returned to the traditional Faith and be working to re-convert the rest of the Church, in the way that a Pope Pius X would have done. The role and the vocation of the SSPX will then be to help in this re-conversion, as missionaries. The whole thing must be CLEAR and thus something no true Catholic would have any objection to.

Instead, it’s clear that the intention of Rome is to convert the SSPX by degrees to Conciliarism and to use their integration into the Conciliar Church to promote the concept of the Hermaneutic of Continuity regarding Vatican II and the Novus Ordo. They would in return allow the SSPX to provide a respectable safe haven (or not so safe) for conservative Catholics who like Latin liturgy. (As the Fraternity of St. Peter, etc. have already done.) The SSPX is no longer a threat to them. The Revolution is by now consolidated and apparently unshakeable, so they can now allow some leeway and grant concessions, while using the propaganda value of these concessions to reinforce the Revolution. "Even the SSPX has joined us and realised its former opposition was misguided ..." People won’t look at the details, they’ll just see that the SSPX is "back in the Church". Rome is not moving back towards Tradition; it’s moving forward to the next stage in the Revolution – consolidation. (Like the change from the French Revolutionary era to the rule of Napoleon, who completed the destruction of the Holy Roman Empire, but by other means.)

Archbishop Lefebvre’s words in 1989 apply exactly to Bishop Fellay today and to the Society until Rome converts:
QUOTE
... we who have struggled against the Council for twenty years because we want the Catholic Church, we would have to re-enter this Conciliar Church in order, supposedly, to make it Catholic. That is a complete illusion. It is not the subjects that make the superiors, but the superiors who make the subjects ... I would have been completely swamped. I would have been able to do nothing, I could have protected neither the faithful nor the seminarians.

http://www.sspx.org/archbishop_lefebvre/on...nsecrations.htm

Number CCXCV (295)
    
9 March 2013
GREC II
Before we continue with the story of GREC, namely the Parisian group of laity and clergy meeting from the late 1990’s onwards in pursuit of reconciliation between Vatican II and Catholic Tradition, we must consider the basic attitude of GREC participants. The Church’s future depends on those Catholics who will understand GREC’s error, i.e. how modern minds lose their grip on truth. To illustrate that attitude let us take at random four quotes, typical of dozens and dozens in the book For the Necessary Reconciliation by the Newchurch priest, Fr Michel Lelong, one of the founders of GREC. In a letter he wrote to the Pope in July of 2008 are to be found the first two quotes:--

“We also wish that the excommunications (of the four SSPX bishops in 1988) be lifted and that the SSPX recover its place within the Church to which it has so much to give. That is why we ask the authorities of the SSPX to put an end to the polemical statements and articles criticizing the Holy See.” Comment: (Has that not happened over the last 10 years ?) But if polemics are so bad, why were a number of Church Fathers - and Archbishop Lefebvre -- so polemical ? Polemics are only that bad if unity is that good. But unity is only as good as that around which it unites.

“In our society so tempted by materialism, indifferentism and sectarisms, we think that in response to your request, Holy Father, all Catholics must strive together to be faithful to Christ’s recommendation, ‘Be united so that the whole world may believe’.” Comment: “United” around what? Around Catholic truth, or around the lie that Catholic truth is reconcilable with Vatican II ? Then the primary and crucial question for Catholic unity is where Catholic truth is to be found. But GREC leaves questions of truth to the “theologians”. So non-theologians can be saved by lies !?

This letter of Fr Lelong was so well received by Benedict XVI that GREC leaders and sympathisers wrote again a few months later. Here are two more quotes from the second letter to the Pope:-

“For sure we were saddened that the Holy See’s recent proposals were not accepted by the SSPX authorities, but we know that to heal wounds amongst Catholics always requires generosity and patience to restore confidence on both sides and to make reconciliation possible.” Comment: Are wounds only ever to be healed, and never inflicted ? Did Our Lord not twice use a lash across the backs of the money-lenders in the Temple ? There is a God, his honour is to be defended above all things, and men can be wicked enough to understand nothing but the lash, be it physical or verbal.

“We think that lifting the excommunications would set in motion an irresistible process of drawing closer, with a view to an agreement between the Holy See and the SSPX, or at least an agreement with a large part of the SSPX priests and faithful.” Comment: indeed the friendly contacts between Rome and the SSPX were setting such a motion in process in January of 2009, and only an outburst from within the SSPX of the most horrible heresy of modern times - “anti-semitism” - stopped that process. But either Catholic reconciliation with Vatican II is no problem, or one has to say that that outburst was providential, because it also stopped, at least for a while, the false reconciliation.

In conclusion, GREC, like millions of modern Catholics, above all else seeks unity, non-polemics, reconciliation, agreement, etc.. But where does the God of truth figure amongst all these sweet sentiments ? Is he a sugar-daddy who blesses all men’s lies, just so long as they lie in unison ?

Kyrie Eleison

Number CCXCIX (299)   6 April 2013

GREC -- III

Wishing to put himself in the place of God, modern man seeks to replace God’s order of the world with his own. But God’s order is real, outside of and independent of man’s mind. So modern man unhooks his mind from that reality, and selects from it only such pieces as he wishes to build into his own fantasy. Now the highest order of God’s Creation is best expressed in his Church’s doctrine. Therefore all churchmen or laymen today undergoing the influence of everything “normal” in the world around them suffer from a deep refusal or ignorance of the nature and necessity of doctrine.

Here is the essential problem of GREC, as presented in two previous issues of “Eleison Comments” (294 and 295). The Groupe de Réflexion Entre Catholiques was founded in 1997 in the salons of Paris to promote friendly meetings and exchanges between Catholics of Tradition and Catholics of the mainstream Church, in order to create a climate of mutual trust and respect which would facilitate a reconciliation between them, and an end to their unnecessary estrangement. Such a purpose gravely overlooks the importance of doctrine, not necessarily with malice aforethought, of which God is judge, but whatever foolish men may think, doctrine can no more be left out of account than can reality.

In Fr. Lelong’s book on GREC, For the Necessary Reconciliation, he tells how two Society of St Pius X priests and its Superior General “made a decisive contribution to the launching and continuance of GREC.” Even before it was launched, Fr. Du Chalard gave to Fr Lelong a friendly reception in his SSPX priory, and “in following years never ceased to support GREC in a discrete and attentive way.” At the launching of GREC, Fr. Lorans, then Rector of the SSPX Institute in Paris and exercising from Paris a decisive influence from then until now on SSPX publications, welcomed the idea of “dialogue between Catholics”, and very soon obtained from the SSPX Superior General in Switzerland approval for his participation in GREC. From then on Fr. Lorans played a leading part in all of its activities.

Those activities began on a small scale and in private. In May of 2000 was held GREC’s first public meeting to which Fr. Lorans contributed, with 150 people attending. Meetings became more and more frequent, with SSPX priests participating. Church authorities at the highest level were regularly consulted and kept informed. Fr. Lorans for his part made possible “a contact of deepening trust” and friendly exchanges with the SSPX Superior General. From 2004 GREC meetings were opened wider still to the public, and in September of that year a “theological working group” was set up with Fr. Lorans participating, and another SSPX priest and a theologian from Rome, both of whom would later be taking part in the Doctrinal Discussions between Rome and the SSPX from 2009 to 2011. GREC may well have seen in these Discussions the realization of its fondest hopes – at last the theologians were meeting in a climate which GREC had done so much to crea te “for the necessary reconciliation”.

Thanks be to God, the Discussions gave back to doctrine its proper primacy. They demonstrated that between Catholic and Conciliar doctrine is an unbridgeable gulf. But was GREC’s way of thinking then blocked within the SSPX ? Far from it ! SSPX Headquarters switched overnight from “We pursue no practical agreement without a doctrinal agreement” to “There can be no doctrinal agreement, so we pursue a practical agreement” ! Alas, the springtime uprising of protest last year from within the SSPX was smothered and confused again at the General Chapter of July, but SSPX HQ’s continued pursuit of a practical agreement has hardly been smothered.

“Our help is in the name of the Lord”, in particular in the Consecration of Russia. Nowhere else.

Kyrie eleison.