There was a time when excommunication
could bring an emperor to his knees or cause an entire nation to
apostatize. But excommunication is no longer what it once was, and that
is the work of the very Church that today wields it against the FSSPX.
History knows these diminished echoes, those tragedies that repeat
themselves as farces, as Marx described when he identified Napoleon III as a ridiculous imitation of his uncle. Nor is Leo XIV Gregory VII.
But if farce
is already a fairly appropriate term to describe this case, with Tucho
Fernández, carrying all his record of absurdities, leading the
excommunication, we have an even more fitting term for it. It was given
to us by the great Valle-Inclán, and as you may have guessed, the term
is esperpento.
With the aforementioned cardinal, and with the brand-new pontiff who
backs him, Canon Law has gone for a stroll down Callejón del Gato.
Yes,
there we have the guardian (sic)
of the Doctrine of the Faith turned into a grotesque distortion of his
own office.
The image of the censor of Écône appears at the bottom of
the glass, brandishing the Code, after having turned doctrine into
something viscous, adaptable, sentimental, contextual, liquid… Such a
scarecrow dressed in purple would have delighted Valle-Inclán, who would
have known how to make the most of the theatrical effect of that
excommunication.
Taking oneself so tragically seriously
when one has long since lost all composure provokes an emotion composed
of several ingredients, among them astonishment and laughter, even
second-hand embarrassment, but certainly not reverential fear. That such
a figure should promote an excommunication in the name of the purity of
ecclesial communion is simply the height of it all.
It is the height of
it because one of the aspects that most separates the excommunicated
from the excommunicators is that the former denounce, precisely, the
extent to which the latter have emptied their acts of meaning.
Doctrine is little more than the
report of a working group, always dependent on context; morality has
dissolved into that mercy without judgment that accompanies the sinner
while trying not to inconvenience him; the liturgy has for decades
suffered from parochial creativity; Germany has for years been
rehearsing schism in installments, and the Communist Party of China has
been ordaining bishops; the Curia appoints cardinals to serve under
religious prefects, while homosexual couples are blessed as long as they
do not pray in Latin; pastoral care
no longer means leading souls toward the truth, but rather
sugar-coating that pill until it is completely hidden, and synodality
has managed to make old heresies re-emerge, shiny and fresh out of a brainstorming
session.
It is no surprise that with such an emptying-out, the Doctrine
of the Faith has ended up in the hands of a cardinal who, without
shame, disputes Ratzinger while flirting with contextual theology.
Yes, for this prefect, backed by the
new Pope, ecclesial acts are nothing more than noise. So too is
excommunication, despite being the Church’s gravest penalty, for even
the most serious weapons become ridiculous when wielded by someone who
has turned his own authority into a matter of opinion.
How can Rome
expect its excommunication to be taken seriously after having spent
decades demonstrating that everything, or almost everything, could be
nuanced, contextualized, negotiated, tolerated, reinterpreted, or
blessed with a footnote? It is Rome itself that has devalued for decades
the language with which it now seeks to judge. It should not be
surprised that its liquid theology fails to impress. Or is not everyone
good, excommunicated or not?
That Rome which disorders its own
signs of governance and then expects its penal order to sound terrifying
has earned, by its own efforts, that its most solemn gesture may sound,
in too many Catholic ears, like the night-watchman’s whistle. They have
no right to complain.
Max Weber would have understood the
scene instantly: no authority lives on command alone. Rome retains all
its power, but it has squandered a great part of the credit of its
authority. And that is not easily recovered. It is gained through
coherence, proportion, justice, and fidelity to the deposit of faith…
And not even the first step has been taken!
When one is sunk, what one
must do is stop digging, and the digger Fernández never lets go of the
shovel. His excommunication fails twice: juridically, because with a
Note it attempts to project onto priests, faithful, and adherents the
schismatic condition that can only be declared by means of a penal
Decree; politically, because it fires from an authority that has for
years been wetting its own gunpowder.
Thus, the sentence dissolves into the
voluntarism of one who takes as juridical reality what he barely manages
to formulate as a threat. Víctor Manuel Fernández has achieved the feat
of turning the Church’s gravest penalty into an esperpento of canonical technique and a public confession of impotence.
And with that impotence he also
reveals his weakness. Carl Schmitt would surely have smiled at Rome’s
action, considering how much it laid bare the seams. Whoever administers
the exception points out where he recognizes the danger, and while Rome
has created exceptions left and right for what is most inadmissible, it
has placed before Écône an impassable boundary. That “selectivity of
the exception” betrays the shortcomings of authority: with Germany
everything is process; with Écône, an absolute limit.
The post-conciliar Church has finally
discovered that Hell is not empty, but it only sees there the followers
of Lefebvre. These children are the only ones given a stone when they
ask for bread. There is no better way to confess that the problem is not
disobedience, but the direction in which one disobeys.
Leo XIV’s inability to manage that disobedience has made me think, by contrast, of the king in The Little Prince.
Saint-Exupéry granted this character a prudence that Prevost has not
shown. That monarch waited for sunset to order the sun to set. He knew
an elementary truth of governance: an order that is born defeated does
not ennoble the sovereign, it exposes him, and Leo XIV has inaugurated
his pontificate with that exposure. The first great scene of his reign
has been the solemn administration of a fracture.
Wishing to appear as guarantor of
communion, Prevost has been portrayed as heir to a squandered authority.
He received a Rome accustomed to tolerating the intolerable, and after
entrusting the delicate task to the man who symbolizes the worst
doctrinal drift, he chose to respond to Écône with the severest gesture
when his own word had already been publicly ignored. Without restoring
order, he has recorded that he had failed to impose it.
If the signature is Tucho’s, the failure is Leo XIV’s.
“We want the faith of the Church in
order to remain in the Church. And we want the Church for the faith and
in the faith,” Pagliarani has said, and it is something that not even
the Pope who excommunicates them calls into question.
Écône speaks of
preserving, receiving, transmitting; it speaks of priests who celebrate
the Mass, preach the faith, and administer the sacraments as the Church
received them. And to all this Rome responds with its power of
governance.
Showing the muscle of power is easy,
but it does not seem the best way to recover authority. Because what is
no longer so easily achieved is convincing others that the FSSPX’s
concern arose from an intolerable indiscipline and not from a genuine
and holy necessity, attended to for the Glory of God, for the good of
souls, and for the sanctification of its members and followers, now
excommunicated or clumsily threatened with excommunication.
Too many Catholics have suffered the
remnants of its fire to accept without further ado that the refugees are
the arsonists. Let us hope in Christ for the Pope’s blessing upon his
sons of the Fraternity.
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