Towards the end of the previous year (2011) an Extraordinary Chapter meeting had taken place in Albano, which rejected overtures from the Vatican which, it seems, would have involved us accepting the new Catechism and the ‘legitimacy’ of the New Mass. This Chapter meeting voted (not for the first time) against the signing of anything with Modernist Rome prior to that latter’s conversion.  Already many people were uneasy: confidence in Menzingen was on the wane, rumours had been abroad for a little while, and the disgraceful exclusion of Bishop Williamson from the Albano meeting (on virtually no pretext, let alone reason) did nothing to improve matters. And yet, many SSPX faithful still decided to reserve judgement, and wait for something conclusive and indisputable to settle it for them. To wait for “a sign”, in other words.
 
2012 arrived, and the men at the top wasted no time in giving us all the signs we needed and more.
- In February, Bishop Fellay gave a sermon attacking independent priests (and claiming the posthumous approval of Archbishop Lefebvre for this new position of course!). That ought to have been a sign for us: for many years the majority of the British District priests were “independents”, former diocesan clergy from before the Council, the last few of whom died only relatively recently.

- Not long after, Fr. Schmidberger gave an interview to the German daily Die Welt. Here was the first clear suggestion that the SSPX leadership might decide to: “...give up our relative freedom that we have used so far for the worldwide expansion of our work and put it into the hands of the Pope.”
...and that: “If the Roman authorities do not require something from the Fraternity... [which]is against the traditional teaching and the praxis of the Church, then there will be no major difficulties concerning a regularization.”
Nonetheless, in spite of these warning signs, there were perhaps still relatively few faithful awake to the very real danger at this stage.
 
In March came the media frenzy from which we gathered that Bishop Fellay had been closeted for two hours with Cardinal Levada. What passed between the two remained a mystery, but a deadline of April 15th was mentioned. In Cor Unum, the bulletin for the clergy of the SSPX, Bishop Fellay argued for the first time in favour of a deal, saying that things were changing for the better in Rome, and that this therefore justified a change in attitude towards modern Rome on the part of the SSPX.

March also saw the Good Shepherd Institute being forcibly “Novus-Ordised” by Rome (although this did not become public knowledge for a couple of weeks). The same Rome which six years earlier had granted them a ‘no-strings’ deal in which (according to Fr. Laguerie at the time) “No compromise was necessary!”. Fr Laguerie, lost no time in contacting the French SSPX District Superior, Fr. DeCaqueray, to try to warn the SSPX against signing anything with Rome.
 
By the time April had ended things were moving fast and the whole SSPX landscape already looked very different. Several things happened during this month, although many of them were not known about at the time.

On Maundy Thursday, (5th April) Bishop Fellay gave a sermon in Econe. Long and difficult to listen-to (in French), it lamented the evil of being outside a normal structure, and the danger of being in an irregular situation for too long.

On April 7th the ‘Three Bishops’ wrote their famous letter to Bishop Fellay, Fr. Pfluger and Fr. Nely, telling them: “Don’t do it!” The letter which was sent in reply will still be quoted years from now, and even nine months later we do well to re-read it in order to remind ourselves of just how far the true thinking of the SSPX leadership (evident in this letter, which has never been retracted) has deviated from the right course. Once it became public the following month, this letter was one of the clearest signs for those still inclined to give Menzingen the benefit of the doubt. Although this correspondence dealt with the most important public affairs imaginable, and although it had already been made public, a press release from DICI told us all that to read it would be a mortal sin! It is not difficult to understand why Menzingen wanted the contents to remain unknown. The date on the letter of reply was 14th April, which, as it happens, was the 100th anniversary of RMS Titanic hitting an iceberg.

On the following day, April 15th, centenary of that ship’s sinking, Bishop Fellay signed a scandalous “preamble”, in which it is quite clearly implied that Vatican II has something to teach the Church (“not yet formulated but implicitly present.” is one particularly terrifying phrase.)
 
Looking back, it was about this time that the world’s media seemed convinced that a deal was imminent. Der Spiegel even spoke (as if it were a fact, and with the boldness of one having been let in on a confidence) of a very conciliatory letter sent by Bishop
Fellay to the Pope, which signalled the end of SSPX/Vatican opposition. And while the media are often dead wrong, as the saying goes, there’s no smoke without a fire. On April 18th DICI issued a press release about these media stories that Bp. Fellay had given a positive or conciliatory reply, denying that this was the case (“La realité est autre.”). In hindsight, was this just yet another Menzingen fib? Or is someone perhaps just using a lot of mental reservation?
 
Rome, we were told, would respond to Bishop Fellay in May. This, we were told, lent a new significance to the Rosary Crusade. Well, yes, quite. Little by little the scales continued to fall from the eyes of many.
 
In the month of May the atmosphere of suspense and expectation was very high: almost everyone seemed convinced that an important decision would be reached, and so this month saw colours of one sort or another being nailed to various masts.

Fr. Walliez, The District Superior of Belgium and Holland wrote in his District newsletter that Archbishop Lefebvre “would have accepted a canonical recognition”.

A similar piece of openly pro-Roman propaganda was offered by Fr. Schmidberger as the editorial of the German District newsletter, in which he also claimed that Archbishop Lefebvre, in his 1974 Declaration rejected: “some of the declarations of the Council and...some of the reforms that arose from the Council,” and ended with a word of gratitude to Benedict XVI for “calling us back from exile.” At a District Pilgrimage to Trier, 2,500 German pilgrims were treated to a sermon in which Fr. Frey, rector of Zaitskofen, opined that the agreement would strengthen Tradition and help little by little to overcome modernism in the Church.

In France, Fr. Michel Simoulin published an article in the May edition of
Seignadou, a newsletter for chaplains of the Fanjeaux Dominicans, entitled: “We Cannot be 88-ers.” In the meantime, Fr. Pfluger spoke to a large audience at the annual “Spes Unica” conference in Hattersheim (Germany) to whom he extolled the great wisdom and virtue of completely ditching any idea of doctrinal agreement and instead having as our goal “canonical recognition” by modernist Rome, and making it very clear that this was what was both intended and desired by Menzingen. Within days he was travelling throughout the French District in an attempt to convince as many of the faithful there as possible of the same message of “good news”.

To the US District, Fr. Rostand wrote a letter reminding them that Bishop Fellay was the successor of Archbishop Lefebvre and “the only competent authority,” when it comes to “the delicate task of our relations with Rome.” He continued: “We renew to him [sic] all our confidence, trust and respectful obedience,” and he urged his readers to form an “esprit de corps around our Superior.” In “filial piety to him, as to the Sovereign Pontiff [sic!] ” he announced a Novena to the Holy Ghost, to end on Pentecost Sunday.
This letter was placed prominently on the US District website, as was a translation of Fr. Simoulin’s article, a piece by Fr. Iscara (who is on the staff at Winona) about “St. Basil’s Economy of Silence”, and a short while later an article by Fr. Celier on “How to interpret the words of Archbishop Lefebvre” (!)

In Asia, Fr. Couture’s message to the faithful possessed at least the virtue of being short and to the point: “I would like to make mine the recent letter of Fr. Rostand.”
 
One positive event was the Consecration of Russia, performed by Bishop Williamson from the Philippines, on May 13th. Many faithful around the world joined their intentions in prayer, even though 11.00am Philippines time meant dragging oneself out of bed at 4.00am British Summer Time! And yes, since you ask, I’m sure it was pure coincidence that Menzingen chose May, at the height of anticipation and with an agreement expected imminently, to send Bishop Williamson on confirmation tour to the Far East!
 
May 11th saw the publication of a CNS article summarising an interview with Bishop Fellay. It included such gems as:
“...‘There are some discrepancies in the society,’ Bishop Fellay told CNS. ‘I cannot exclude that there might be a split.’ ...
‘I think that the move of the Holy Father - because it really comes from him - is genuine. There doesn't seem to be any trap,’ he said. ...
‘I would hope so,’ he said, when asked if Vatican II itself belongs to Catholic tradition.”
     CNS subsequently released video footage of the interview with Bishop Fellay, in English. The scandalous contents will, or most certainly should, by now be familiar to all our readers.

On May 16th, a Vatican press release said that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had convened to discuss Bp. Fellay’s response, and that they had decided that the other three Bishops: “will have to be dealt with separately and singularly.”

The following day, Cardinal Koch told reporters that, regarding the SSPX, Vatican II (and specifically Nostra Aetate) was “binding...and important for every Catholic.” And that “denial of the Shoah...has no place in the Catholic Church.”

There does not appear to have been much by way of official response from Menzingen.
 
Nor was there any sort of response from Bp. Fellay in the days which followed, leading up to the weekend of 19th—21st May when he was administering Confirmations in Austria. As with his Pentecost sermons a week later, we were offered the usual imprecise, pious-sounding rhetoric (“The devil is at large in the SSPX”). He indeed seemed to say that the deal might not happen, but only due to either the machinations of wicked liberals who work against the Pope, or his own uncertainty as to whether there would be “safeguards” for the SSPX. Not because of any reasons of principle, as one might reasonably have expected. He spoke in terms of a ‘springtime’ in the Church signalling the end of the crisis, and in what might have been called a “Freudian slip”, he spoke of the SSPX being allowed to keep “this tradition”.

It was also whilst in Austria that Bp. Fellay attended the district priests meeting, and there divulged to some priests that under the terms of the Roman offer which he was now considering, the SSPX would have to work with local Bishops (whose approval would be required to open a new Mass centre) and would only definitely be allowed to keep open those properties which had already existed for three years; furthermore, that the Pope would choose new Bishops of the SSPX. A few weeks later he would tell DICI that he had never spoken these words, and that the reports of them were “entirely false.”
 
As May wore on into June, the reaction to a perceived watering-down of the SSPX position and the opposition to any proposed agreement with Rome began to make itself heard publicly. To begin with, two priests stationed in the Asian District, Fr. Chazal and Fr. Joseph Pfeiffer, each independently warned their congregations of the danger of signing anything with modern Rome. Recordings of their respective sermons were listened to on the internet by thousands. Although no canonical process had even been begun against them, they were forbidden from saying Mass by both the Asian District (Fr. Couture) and the US District (Fr. Rostand).

Fr. Patrick Girouard, a priest of the Canadian District, gave a sermon against an agreement where he only quoted from the book: “Catechism of the Crisis in the Church” (sold by Angelus Press). In spite of quoting only from this book, and not having interposed a single word of his own opinion, he was still warned by his superior as if he had done something wrong! Other priests spoke out too: Fr. Ringrose at St. Athanasius Church in Virginia. Fr. Koller, in France. And, most significantly, Bp. Tissier de Mallerais spoke out very clearly, firstly in a sermon at St. Nicolas du Chardonnet in Paris, and then in an interview given to the French magazine Rivarol, in which he debunked a great deal of recent pro-agreement propaganda and made it clear that there could be no agreement with modernist Rome.

Bp. Tissier revisited a previous theme at the end of June in his ordination sermon at Winona. The following day, Fr. David Hewko preached a sermon at the first Mass of one of the new priests. Despite the subtle, oblique, indirect nature of his anti-agreement message, and despite the fact that he had previously submitted it to censorship and had it passed, he still found himself disciplined for it by Fr. Rostand.
 
In the meantime Bp. Fellay was in Rome and on June 13th met Cardinal Levada to receive the response of Benedict XVI to his proposed text of agreement. According to Bp. Fellay himself on later occasions, it was he who turned down Rome. However, there is another version of events according to which Benedict XVI himself rejected Bp. Fellay’s proposed preamble because it was too ambiguous: the Society’s acceptance of Vatican II needed to be more explicit! Fr. Pfluger, for one, would later corroborate, in his October Kirchliche Umschau interview that this second version of events was what truly happened. (Whether he meant to or not is another question!) Nonetheless, both the Vatican Press and DICI indicated that “the dialogue” was continuing.
 
Three letters from the middle of June are worth mentioning here. The open letter to Bp. Fellay, signed by well over 200 lay faithful of our British District, earned us worldwide renown as the naughtiest and most rebellious District in the ‘Brave New SSPX,’ a cause of many a sleepless night in Menzingen! Let us all work hard, dear reader, to defend the title and retain that badge of honour of which we are justly proud!

  On June 25th, Fr. Thouvenot from Menzingen sent a letter to all SSPX priests. Though short, it contained news that Bp. Williamson was banned from the Econe ordinations and barred from the Chapter. Also, that Bp. Fellay would not be ordaining the Franciscans and Dominicans as expected, since he doubted the loyalty of their communities. (We are reliably informed that these actions, depriving a Bishop and capitulant of office and refusing to ordain, were, according to either version of Canon Law, well beyond the limits of Bp. Fellay’s authority, since he is neither an Ordinary nor the Pope.)

  Shortly thereafter, Fr. Clifton, parish priest of Ss. Joseph and Padarn, in London, and 20 years a priest of the SSPX, wrote a reply to Fr. Thouvenot, succinctly and accurately summarising the situation in the SSPX and placing the blame where it truly lies.
 
The General Chapter took place from 3rd - 14th July: The participants, it is said, were kept separate in small, carefully chosen groups and only reunited towards the end (for which occasion the agenda was set in stone). Having waited with baited breath, the long-suffering faithful would ultimately be disappointed: none of the action which was so urgently needed took place. The cancer was not removed; rather, the better capitulants risked having been co-opted. Despite the positive spin or wishful thinking of some anti-agreement clerics, the resulting declaration was not edifying. Bishop Tissier would later tell Fr. Chazal his opinion of the General Chapter: “It’s a disaster!”

July also saw the appointment of the German Cardinal Müller (a purveyor of outrageous heresies and liberalism), and Archbishop Di Noia (a more diplomatic but no less dangerous American conciliarist) respectively to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Ecclesia Dei Commission. Bishop Fellay recently described the latter as a “good appointment” made by the Pope to balance the “bad” of the former.
 
By this point it became clear that the immediate danger of an agreement had been removed. The optimists hoped it had been removed for good, though the pessimists feared that‘our relations with Rome’ would resume once Rome came back from its summer break. Some optimists found solace in the words of Bishop Fellay during his tour of Australia in August. Everywhere he spoke, he stressed the impossibility of agreeing with modern Rome, how we differed from each other, that there would be no agreement this side of the next Pontificate. Indeed, he made the idea of signing an agreement with such obvious modernists seem so utterly unthinkable that some people began to wonder if there had ever really been any move to do so, and to doubt themselves as to whether they had perhaps imagined the scandalous events of the previous four months!

Worrying rumours were circulating towards the end of August, to the effect that Bp. de Galarreta, a Spaniard, was being reassigned to Geneva in Switzerland, and Bp. Tissier, a native of France, the largest SSPX District in the world by far, would be posted to Chicago, the newest priory in the very pro-Menzingen US District. Like so many   others which preceded them, these rumours turned out to be entirely correct.
 
In September Bishop Fellay, speaking before a large gathering of priests and seminarians at Econe, said that he had been utterly deceived by Benedict XVI. A few weeks later he would be telling a meeting of Catholic families at Flavigny that whatever we think of the Conciliar Church, “it is still the Church...and it is the only Church”, and therefore cannot be rejected: a far cry from Archbishop Lefebvre’s distinction between Eternal Rome and neo-Modernist Rome. What’s more, Bishop Fellay’s protestations at Econe, that he had been “utterly deceived”, were not only unfair on Benedict XVI, who has, at the very least, the dubious credit of having been a consistent modernist (do not, dear reader, expect to hear me often defend Benedict XVI!), but are also undermined by his own subsequent actions in the weeks and months which followed. Far from thanking those brave souls who had spoken out, who had been loyal enough to Tradition to warn him of the danger and oppose any move towards an agreement, he continued to move against them and to exact punitive measures. In any case, his subordinates (Fr. Schmidberger, Fr. Pfluger et al.) continued to talk openly of compromise with modernist Rome.
 
Had anyone been in any doubt about the continued drift in direction of the SSPX, October must surely have laid such doubts to rest. Whilst Fr. Pfluger was admitting that Rome had rejected Bishop Fellay’s proposed text in June “...to our great surprise”, and threatening those who dare to criticise authority, in the meantime the screws continued to turn on the good and the brave. Most notably, Frs. Chazal and Pfeiffer received their final expulsion, and towards the end of the month Bishop Williamson also: none of them recognised it, and continued to call themselves SSPX. In the meantime, various priests who had been sidelined and expelled from the SSPX began to work with Frs. Pfeiffer and Chazal from their base in Kentucky.

October also saw an announcement by Rome which made it clear that they, at any rate, did not view the issue of an agreement as quite so dead and buried as Bishop Fellay had led the optimists to believe. A further disappointment was in store for those loyal to Tradition: Bishop de Galarreta gave a talk at Villepreux in France where he defended the idea of a practical agreement with Rome, thus making clear his effective reconciliation with the official direction of Menzingen. Bishop Tissier, exiled to Chicago, had by now gone disconcertingly silent and remains so to this day.

By the end of the month, a small newsletter had begun to circulate in the British District.
 
Throughout the weeks and months that followed, Bishop Fellay gave talks in several places, always slightly different, always carefully designed to resonate with his audience, yet none of them entirely satisfactory to one looking to hear the clarity of the SSPX of former years. His final talk of the year, given at the end of December in Ontario, Canada, is analysed elsewhere in this issue. A full transcript, for those with enough patience and stamina, can be found on our website.

Declaration & the General Chapter

+AMDG+
Feast of  SAINT CONRAD, HERMIT
Feast of SAINT GABINUS, PRIEST & MARTYR

Thank you B from A.
Am having some difficulty trying to understand.
Pleas bear with me.
The AFD was adopted as the official stand at the General Chapter?
Or is it a failed declaration?

We were not aware of this at our chapel, at least me and a few other ladies.
All we knew was that Bp. W was expelled for "disobedience" - no further explanation.
We did not make much of it back then because we figured well, this is a matter for priests.

This was followed by a pronouncement from the pulpit that all the things you read on the internet are not true - referring to sspx - do not listen to them.
Pretty much took Fr.'s word for it, and paid no mind.
Until recently, we heard and noticed strange things going on.  
Nothing we could quite put our finger on.
So I decided to seek out the info regarding Bp. W on the internet. And lo and behold - CathInfo!

Since then we have been trying so hard to muddle through the information.
Some of the ladies say -  "Well it's not a problem the declaration was not signed."
Others say - "?????" "!!!!!" "Aaaargh!" we have become NO right before our eyes!
What is the stance of the SSPX as it stands today?
Can anyone help me reference this?
The other ladies have no computer and therefore I have been entrusted in figuring out all this.