The Nation's Pulse/Circumschism

Allen, Charlotte Low

THE NATION'S PULSE CIRCUMSCHISM by Charlotte Low Allen A t the local Lefebvrite parish in Northern Virginia, the congregation was reacting to the split with Rome with a textbook demonstration of...

...Ringrose has about six times the mental candlepower of the average Catholic priest—and, sad to say, of the average Lefebvrite layman...
...One could similarly spend hours in fruitless argument over linguistic nuances with the Rev...
...Pro vobis et pro multis effundetur," goes the Latin text...
...their heaven is as sparsely populated as a suburb zoned for five-acre lots...
...secrated by Lefebvre at EcOne, Switzerland, on June 30 in defiance of Vatican orders (John Paul had already vetoed all four), Lefebvre responded with complex legal and linguistic arguments as to why no schism actually exists...
...He raised the legal defense of necessity, arguing that he had to do what he did because of the emergency state of the church...
...That's the Roman Catholic Church to everyone else, of course—minus Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and his estimated 100,000 clerical and lay followers worldwide...
...One parishioner solemnly assured me that this blooper makes Jesus out to be a universalist and voids the efficacy of the entire mass...
...His departure from Maryland was more or less with the blessing of Baltimore's Archbishop William Borders, he said, but under an interdiction not to say mass publicly...
...Brings back happy memories, does it...
...Lefebvrite women take seriously St...
...Utter silence is required of the congregation, who are supposed to follow along in their prayer books (virtually everyone at St...
...More sixties airheadedness, one might say, but to Lefebvre and his followers, it was another component of a vast and powerful conspiracy of Protestants, Freemasons, Marxists, modernists, and the devil to condemn the Church and its hundreds of millions of members to perdition...
...He spent three years battling liberals and getting disillusioned in a Maryland parish, while reading "traditionalist" literature, as he calls it, for the first time...
...I would call it the Roman apostasy," said the Rev...
...By "those people," he was referring to what Lefebvrites call "the conciliar church...
...After the Second Vatican Council, many Catholic churches chopped up their communion rails and hauled them off to the city dump in one of those efforts to make the laity feel more relaxed in church...
...Athanasius is said to be trying to negotiate legitimate status for itself with the diocese of Arlington, Virginia, as a center for Tridentine masses under the 1984 indult, but such attitudes could make for rocky dialogue...
...Many of the priestly prayers, said always with the priest's back to the congregation, are silent as well...
...The underside of the optimistic skepticism of Descartes has always been the pessimistic skepticism of Pascal...
...It's an old-fashioned, knock-down, drag-out Catholic retreat house," explained Williamson...
...In 1982, he left to be pastor at St...
...Athanasius, which has been in existence since the early 1970s...
...Literally, this means that the Precious Blood "is shed for you and for many," but for some reason the new mass turned "for many" into "for all men" and lately, with the rise of women's liberation, into "for all...
...Athanasius in Vienna, Virginia, it was hard to know whether to laugh or to cry...
...Athanasius, several parishioners were engaged in heated discussion of one of their favorite topics: the Novus Ordo translation of the language of the Consecration in which the priest transforms wine into the Blood of Christ...
...Ronald Ringrose, the pastor at St...
...Perhaps in imitation of his mentor at Econe, Williamson takes a very hard line on just about every issue pertaining to the schism...
...Pius X auspices...
...Some were obviously there primarily for the old-fashioned liturgy...
...It might surprise many orthodox Catholics, whose admiration for Pope John Paul II is boundless, to learn that the pontiff is not all that popular among the ultras...
...We all have to sit down and do our homework on where He can be found...
...Athanasius Church...
...At Sunday mass at the Lefebvrite church, St...
...Pius X spun off the Society of St...
...Nonetheless, joining the Lefebvrites requires a taste for endless disputes over shadings of meaning and interpretation of texts that would give most Catholics a headache...
...This is a revival of sorts of Jansenism, with its Calvinist emphasis on the weakness and corruption of the human will (ironic for a system that regularly blasts the "false religions" of Protestantism...
...That is why, when Pope John Paul II excommunicated the 82-year-old Lefebvre and the four bishops conCharlotte Low Allen is a senior editor of Insight magazine...
...Athanasius carried a worn, quartercentury-old missal...
...The church proper occupies what was apparently once a basement recreation room: a low-ceiling space crammed with hand-me-down pews, auditorium chairs, kneelers, a makeshift confessional, innumerable statues of varying sizes, a communion rail (natch), and an altar with nicely pressed cloths and a handsome silk-curtained tabernacle...
...We don't want to go the way of the Old Catholics," said a St...
...At the coffee hour at St...
...the bishop joked...
...Pius X, who comprise his most loyal followers...
...Lefebvre's impending death may engender more chaos...
...The new mass, he pronounced, is "an engine designed for the destruction of the Catholic Church...
...Athanasius...
...Assessing the meaning of these demographics—the relatively high proportion of young people—was tough, because it was such a small crowd and many of them had driven in from as far away as RichTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1988 33 mond and Annapolis...
...All ninety or so seats were filled, a typical Sunday crowd that ranged in age from a large number of oldsters to teenagers, toddlers, and babes in arms...
...The fallout from all of this could be a boon for those who would like to see a sense of the sacred return to the liturgy: In an effort to lure back Lefebvrites, the Pope has promised to widen the availability of the old mass, still resisted by many bishops ("a bait-and-switch operation," warned Bishop Williamson of the Pope's maneuver...
...Thomas Aquinas Seminary, whichjust moved from Ridgefield, Connecticut to Winona, Minnesota (about two-thirds of the seminarians are sons of older Lefebvrites...
...But on the far right, where Lefebvre fellow-travelers abound, the Pope is regarded as a man of questionable philosophical training (phenomenology, not Thomism), mushy-left politics (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis didn't help), and just plain softness...
...The mass was in Latin, of course, the old Tridentine Mass that Pope Pius V made mandatory for the Western church in 1570 and which Pope Paul VI superseded with a revised, vernacular mass called the Novus Ordo in 1969...
...Athanasius the Sanctus bells still ring, the altar boys are still boys, and no one ever shows up in Bermudas or chews on the Host...
...Jansenist gloom has been a particular affliction of the Catholic ultra-right, who sometimes seem to spend as much of their energies in efforts to purge deviationism among their allies as in fighting the numerous genuine abuses in today's Church...
...Mary's Seminary at Emmitsburg, Maryland, praised as one of the best in the country for learning orthodox Catholic doctrine...
...Williamson prophesies the utter destruction of the West by the Soviet Union in the near future, a form of divine punishment that will force the Catholic Church, under either this stiff-necked Pope or another, finally to repent and see the Lefebvrite light...
...Lefebvre and his followers believe that they alone are standing with their shoulders against those gates, like the boy with his finger in the dike...
...The major virtue of the Tridentine Mass is that its implacable rigidity of form allows no tampering...
...John Paul allowed a strictly limited revival of the Tridentine Mass in 1984...
...It is not surprising that Lefebvrism is the creation of a French prelate and that its following is strongest in France...
...Richard Williamson, 48, one of the four excommunicated new bishops...
...English-born, he matriculated at Lefebvre's headquarters in Econe after trying several British seminaries and now heads the Pius X Society's 50-student St...
...The same is true of the outspoken, now excommunicated Bishop Williamson, although Williamson displays a certain lack of the gravitas one might expect from a prince of the Church, where the most circumspect, even platitudinal demeanor is the rule...
...For Catholics used to the new mass, where dialogue between celebrant and congregation and half-hearted congregational singing are the rule, attending a Tridentine Mass can be an eerie experience...
...Many are called, but few are chosen," said Christ, and the Lefebvrites couldn't agree more...
...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1988...
...It is not actually a church, but a suburban tract house in the middle of a large drought-bleached lawn, around the periphery of which the parishioners park their cars with their "Pray the Rosary" bumper stickers...
...Athanasius parishioner, referring to a group that condemned itself to obscurity when in 1870 it broke with the Church over the newly defined doctrine of papal infallibility...
...I mentioned that my Catholic girls' school used to force us in preconciliar times through such retreats, which included grueling days of absolute silence punctuated by priestly harangues...
...The excommunications had not cooled the ardor or number at St...
...There is a certain dignity and drama to the old mass, however, that can be matched in the new but rarely is...
...Excommunicated...
...In 1983, the Society of St...
...At St...
...Ringrose later had himself reordained by Lefebvre...
...Thomas Aquinas buildings in Ridgefield, now reopened as the St...
...Pius V, confusing those with a weak command of Roman numerals...
...You can tell that Williamson is a bishop sans diocese...
...Although the archbishop's followers recognize the validity of ordinations in the "conciliar church," priests often get reordained "to allay possible doubts" by their new flocks, says Bishop Williamson...
...But that way just might be inevitable...
...L'homme, c'est une passion inutile," wrote Sartre, and Lefebvre might well agree...
...He was ordained in 1979 as a diocesan Catholic priest after graduating from Mt...
...THE NATION'S PULSE CIRCUMSCHISM by Charlotte Low Allen A t the local Lefebvrite parish in Northern Virginia, the congregation was reacting to the split with Rome with a textbook demonstration of the first of Elisabeth Kiibler-Ross's five stages of grief: denial...
...Those who want to repent right now can visit the St...
...Asked how God could designate a splinter religion as virtually the only means of salvation for His children, Williamson answered: "The Lord God is putting us all to the test...
...Christ promised His Church that the gates of Hell would not prevail against it...
...Ignatius Retreat House under St...
...Athanasius females, from tots to gran-vies, wore lace veils...
...I've never felt that I was in communion with those people who won't even kneel to receive Our Lord," said an elderly man in a shiny suit at the after-mass coffee-and-donut hour...
...It is the undertone of despair—in the sense of the word that pertains to ones own salvation...
...Paul's injunction that women cover their distracting tresses in church, and all the St...
...Ringrose, a slight, fortyish man who wore steel-rimmed spectacles and a not-incongruous pair of black leather athletic shoes with his cassock, commissioned a highly publicized Gallup survey in 1984 showing that 53 percent of Catholicswould attend the Tridentine Mass if it were offered at convenient times and places...
...T he most gruesome aspect of this movement is not its Manicheanconspiracy theories that involve the unwitting participation of almost everyone else on earth (and below...
...Interestingly, Ringrose is not a member of Lefebvre's Society of St...
...Orthodox Catholics are used to hearing the Pope vilified by liberals for failing to give his papal benediction to the gay-rights movement, "responsible" extramarital sex, and in vitro fertilization...
...Catholics who stick with "the conciliar church" can just about give up any hope of saving their souls: "The doctrine is often false and the practices are false," Williamson declared...
...Schisms tend to beget further schisms, and the Lefebvrite movement has already been rocked by a few...

Vol. 21 • September 1988 • No. 9


 
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