Fresh from giving the Latin mass at a small Toronto church, which he does every day, Father Howard Venette says the past few weeks have brought both joy and sadness.And more than a little frustration at the pounding the Catholic church has taken since Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunication of four controversial bishops last month.
"What the newspapers have been full of has nothing to do with what the excommunications were all about," says Venette, who is in residence at Holy Cross Church in East York. "It's a misunderstanding."
The four bishops are leaders of the Society of Saint Pius X, a conservative sect that split from the Catholic mainstream over the reforms of Vatican II after the bishops were excommunicated in 1988.
"That's when the misunderstanding began," says Venette. "Excommunication is a penalty, but it's a rehabilatory penalty."
Venette, a member of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter that was formed just after the excommunications by society members who wanted to stay in the Catholic church, says lifting the excommunications sets the stage for them to rejoin the church.
The reversal of the excommunications has gained worldwide attention because one of the bishops, Richard Williamson, has fervently denied the Holocaust, offending many both in and out of the church.
"I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against – is hugely against – 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler," Williamson told Swedish TV just before his excommunication was lifted. "I believe there were no gas chambers."
But such comments, as abhorrent as they are, have nothing to do with why Williamson and the other priests were excommunicated, says Father Thomas Rosica, head of Salt and Light Catholic Media.
The four bishops were excommunicated, he says, after they were consecrated by conservative Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre without papal consent, not because of their opposition to the liberal reforms of Vatican II in the 1960s nor their preference for the Latin mass or Williamson's anti-Semitism.
Which means, says Rosica, that the reversal of the excommunications has nothing to do with such issues, but is about trying to bring traditionalists back into the fold in the name of Catholic unity.
It's a distinction lost on many, however.
"In the 20-odd years that I have been teaching Jewish-Christian relations, I never thought I would witness a time when, in the name of Christian unity, a German-bred pope would bring back into the fold a Holocaust denier," Ed Kessler of the British Centre for the Study of Jewish Christian Relations in Cambridge told the London Times.
"It is a very, very sad day for Catholic-Jewish Relations."
Rosica was in Rome the day in 1988 when the excommunications took place and remembers that as a very sad day, too. He was working as a translator for Pope John Paul II, who the day before had given the mass for the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, when new bishops receive their vestments from thepontiff.
In defiance of the Vatican, Society of Saint Pius X founder Lefebvre chose the day after the feast to consecrate four bishops, including Williamson.
"It was a public slap in the face to Pope John Paul II," says Rosica. "I will never forget that day."
Lefebvre, 81 at the time, was worried about who would lead the society after he died, Rosica said, so felt he had to consecrate the new bishops to ensure the group could continue without him.
Lefebvre died three years later, and one of the men he made a bishop that day, Bernard Fellay, now leads the society.
The split, says Rosica, was years in the making. Lefebvre had formed the Society in 1970 in reaction to Vatican II, hoping that one day it would be made a "pia unio," or Pius society officially recognized by the pope and allowed to continue with pre-Vatican II Catholic traditions.
But five years later, the French journal Itinéraires published a leaked declaration by Lefebvre deeply critical of Vatican II and the path on which it set the church.
This hurt relations with the Vatican, and ended the society's chance of becoming a pia unio, Rosica says, leading eventually to the society splitting from the church, which came 13 years later with the excommunications.
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(Source: tsc)