but this letter’s main interest lies elsewhere : how could the Archbishop have dared to address it to all SSPX priests without prior collusion with SSPX HQ ? It served him by forwarding the letter to all SSPX priests ! Here is one indication amongst many others that there are contacts between Rome and SSPX HQ that are kept from public view. But the question then arises, what motive can SSPX HQ have had to give to the modernist Archbishop such privileged and dangerous access to all SSPX priests ? Does it want them to become modernists also ? Surely not ! But it may well want to help Rome towards “reconciliation”.
Is there some confusion with this? My understanding is that the letter was forwarded to SSPX priests by SSPX-HQ, not that Rome has access to the SSPX priests directly. Is this correct? Seraphim's comments seemed to suggest otherwise.
Does anyone have the answer to this?
If the letter was only forwarded by Menzingen, then I have a pretty hefty apology to deliver!
You must not have read my post, Seraphim.
Or maybe you didn't understand it when you read it.
but this letter’s main interest lies elsewhere : how could the Archbishop have dared to address it to all SSPX priests without prior collusion with SSPX HQ ? It served him by forwarding the letter to all SSPX priests ! Here is one indication amongst many others that there are contacts between Rome and SSPX HQ that are kept from public view. But the question then arises, what motive can SSPX HQ have had to give to the modernist Archbishop such privileged and dangerous access to all SSPX priests ? Does it want them to become modernists also ? Surely not ! But it may well want to help Rome towards “reconciliation”.
Is there some confusion with this? My understanding is that the letter was forwarded to SSPX priests by SSPX-HQ, not that Rome has access to the SSPX priests directly. Is this correct? Seraphim's comments seemed to suggest otherwise.
Does anyone have the answer to this?
If the letter was only forwarded by Menzingen, then I have a pretty hefty apology to deliver!
If I have misread this letter, and in fact Menzingen did not turn over contact info for all SSPX priests to the Romans, then I publicly apologize for having accused Menzingen of treachery in this matter.
For, if contact info was in fact delivered, the betrayal and treachery are self-evident and prima facie.
But if it was not, while it seems probable to me that the collusion Bishop Williamson suggests has occurred, still, there would be the possibility that Di Noia was simply impertinent enough to make the address to SSPX priests unilaterally without Bishop Fellay's collusion.
Alternately, if there was collusion by Bishop Fellay giving Di Noia the green light to address SSPX priests, there would in fact be some treachery involved, but of a lesser magnitude (which is not to say it couldnt still be a harmful maneuver) than providing Rome with contact info for all priests.
So if my outrage was ill-founded, I apologize to those whom I have explicitly or implicitly accused.
Seraphim.
All you have to do is contact a few of the priests who received this letter,
and ask them from whom it came - was it sent to them from Menzingen
or was it sent to them from Di Noia's office? That will answer your
question definitively.
Short of that you have the EC itself, which speaks for itself.
It's one of two things. Either +W is credible, and Di Noia used an
address list to blast it out by email, or else +W is not credible and HQ
forwarded the msg to all the priests. If the latter, several things in this
EC don't add up, as I started to explain.
Just read the EC with A in mind, and compare what comes out of that
reading with comes out when you have B in mind, and compare the two.
This EC came out early- Friday afternoon, basically, or Friday morning
Greenwich time, UTC (a.k.a. GMT). Could it have been a tiny bit hasty?
I doubt it.
This one sentence should solve the question:
It served him by forwarding the letter to all SSPX priests !
What is the subject of this sentence? "It" is the subject.
What is the verb? The verb is "served."
What follows? A prepositional phrase follows, "...by forwarding the
letter to all SSPX priests!"
What is the object in the prepositional phrase? The object of the
preposition, "by" is "forwarding." So a verb in the gerund case is
the object of the preposition, in the prepositional phrase.
Is this verb transitive or intransitive? It is transitive.
Do transitive verbs necessarily have a causal agent?
This is where it gets sticky. While it may seem that all do, for you
can't have an effect without a cause, still, in language, it may be
possible to not identify the causal agent, but leave it up for
interpretation.
This is where the confusion is coming from. What the causal agent is
is what we are discussing. Was the causal agent SSPX HQ, or was it
Di Noia's office?
To answer that, all you have to do is look at the previous sentence.
When the causal agent is not clear in the sentence with the
prepositional phrase,
It served him by forwarding the letter to all SSPX priests !
..then the causal agent cannot be other than the subject of the
previous sentence, to which the sentence in question refers. Which is:
"...but this letter’s main interest lies elsewhere : how could the Archbishop have dared to address it to all SSPX priests without prior collusion with SSPX HQ ?"
I went ahead and included the TWO previous sentences, just for good
measure. You should not get confused by looking past the previous
sentence, "[H]ow could the Archbishop have dared to address it to all
SSPX priests without prior collusion with SSPX HQ," and ignoring that,
make the mistake of looking for the causal agent in the sentence that
came BEFORE that one: "...but this letter’s main interest lies elsewhere,"
because it might have a different subject. In this case:
What is the subject of the mistake sentence? It is "main interest." That's a
dead end, because "main interest" cannot be the sender of an e-mail.
What is the subject of the first previous sentence? That is where you'll find
the causal agent.
Now this one might not be obvious.
"[H]ow could the Archbishop have dared to address it to all SSPX priests
without prior collusion with SSPX HQ."
But it should be not too difficult to see that "SSPX HQ" cannot be the subject,
because it's at the very end of the sentence. Not only that, SSPX HQ is at the
end of another prepositional phrase, "without prior collusion with SSPX HQ."
IOW, you could have a complete sentence if you amputate that entirely:
"[H]ow could the Archbishop have dared to address it to all SSPX priests" is a
complete sentence, and the clipped phrase is not a sentence. Therefore, the
clipped phrase does not count for anything in looking for the subject of the
sentence -- which subject is one and the same as the causal agent of the
following sentence's prepositional phrase, the thing we're looking for.
Thus, all you have left to work with is: "[H]ow could the Archbishop have dared
to address it to all SSPX priests." Once again, "SSPX priests" is not the subject,
as it is the object of the object of the
verb, "dared (to address)." So the
subject has to be the entity that performs the action, the verb, "dared." Who
dared? The Archbishop dared. Therefore, the Archbishop is the causal agent in
the prepositional phrase of the subsequent sentence, "It served him by
forwarding the letter to all SSPX priests!"
IOW: The Archbishop "forwarded" (or sent, actually) the letter to all SSPX priests.
One more thing: Bishop Williamson openly admits that he is no whiz with
computers. IT SEEMS TO ME THAT HE USED THE WORD, "
FORWARDING,"
without a conscious intention to communicate that an e-mail FORWARD function
was used in this e-mail blast.. Ask him and see: I would be willing to assure
you that H.E. does not know what it means to "forward an e-mail" to anyone.
He may have heard someone say "So-and-so forwarded this email to you and
I printed it out."
So H.E. thinks,
"Oh. I guess that means this pugnacious so-and-so was
"forward" in his presumption to stuff his nonsense into my In-Box!" And none of us should have ANY PROBLEM understanding that H.E. is entirely on
board with thinking that this e-mail blast letter was a presumptuous, pugnacious,
forward, and
impertinent (thank you, Seraphim!) gesture, without
rights or reasonable grounds..
That's what this EC is all about!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!We are staring at CULTURE CLASH in the face here.
Someone else handles the computer stuff for him. All he does is author the
copy. And he is second to none at authorship of the copy! There should be
no doubt about that.
The bottom line is, there is no objective way to make sense out of this EC
unless you accept that it was Di Noia on whom responsibility lies for sending the
letter to the SSPX priests. HOWEVER, he could not have done so without at
LEAST the tacit approval of the SSPX HQ. Somehow, Di Noia got a-hold of all the email addresses (as Machabees says, it
could have been by some means other than HQ literally handing it over to them),
But in the final analysis, Menzingen would have had to REMAIN SILENT while
this email blast went out, which would constitute collusion, that is, by not sending
their own letter out telling the priests that Di Noia had no PERMISSION to do any
such thing.
Remember how big Menzingen is on PERMISSION?
Yes, they DEMAND that the SSPX obtain permission for everything, including
but not limited to where you are permitted to go to Mass on Sunday, or whether
any particular SSPX priest has PERMISSION,
PER SE (not
in se) to offer Mass
here, there, or anywhere (to quote Dr. Seuss!).
So it SHOULD be a no-brainer that they would demand that Di Noia obtain
permission before he blasts out a letter to their own loyal sons, the priests of the
SSPX. Correct?
There are three possibilities. Either Menzingen is CONSISTENT, and demands that
Di Noia obtains this permission, or Menzingen does not demand that of Di Noia, in
which case Menzingen is INCONSISTENT.
The third possibility is that Menzingen has already become subject to Di Noia,
and therefore does not dare to demand that Di Noia do anything, and as such,
accepts the authority of Di Noia as having the right to demand that Menzingen
obtain permission from Di Noia
before doing anything! If the third possibility is in force, then everything else is window-dressing. The
'deal' has already been made, and we're just waiting for the official
announcement.