Reflections of a stormy petrel

I am horrified. Of all the unwelcome, untimely, ill-conceived, unnecessary, insulting and disastrous measures Pope Benedict could have taken, this is the worst. On the very week that the most anti-Catholic and pro-abortion President has taken office in Washington DC, the Pope seems to indicate that open flirtations with Le Pen and Pinochet, notorious sympathies for Petain, open Jew-bashing of the vilest sort, are no obstacle to reconciliation with Rome. Thos of us who try to fight on a principled opposition to abortion and murder in all its forms have now had a ton of banana oil poured under our feet; any opponent of Catholic teaching will be able to raise the ugly spectre of Marcel "Marechal a nous!" Lefebvre, and the horrible living presence of Richard Williamson, whose moral and intellectual sins go even beyond his obscene denial of the Holocaust and belief in the Protocols. And what about Catholic leadership among Christians? For the last few decades, the mere force of events had driven many Christian bodies closer together, to discover that they shared so much of morality and belief, and against that dictatorship of relativism against which the Pope himself spoke such memorable words. And now, for the sake of a few hundred thousand obstinate, wilful and often bizarre schismatics, who never did anything on their own to earn or even encourage reunion, and who positively insulted the last two Popes, all this common ground, all this real and verifiable growth together, is endangered; because most Christians will see the Lefebvrists for what they are. Just because Richard Williamson is such an ugly caricature of the worst sort of traditionalists, real conservatives, let alone middle and liberals, will want nothing to do with him. How many Protestants and Anglicans in search of a decent Christian centre away from the various heresies and schisms of their own confessions will have seen this as confirmation that everything they had been told about Rome was in fact true? I am willing to bet that the conversion of adults will slow down considerably. And what about the Church itself? This act has been taken as much on the Pope's own decision as the famous Motu Proprio that sought to reinstate the Latin Mass. If the one can be described as reactionary, ill-advised, insensitive to Jew-bashing and admiration for tyrants, then so can the other. Far from strengthening the conservative side of the Church, the Pope has just delivered them a vial of poison. And at the same time, he has done nothing to please liberals, many of whom will read this to mean that one hard-right soul is more important to the Pope than one left-wing one, and either leave or reinforce even further their "inner schismatic" position. I will not leave the Church - I know how many like Williamson there are already; but many others may. There is absolutely no upside to this decision; every aspect of it is completely mistaken.

God help the Church. Mother of Victory, pray for us.

I hope the Pope does not bother to receive any Lefebvrite representative until they have learned some manners, let alone common sense (http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=4761). Even apart from the outrageous notion of making demands of the Successor of Peter; apart from the bathetic and egotistical use of the eschatological hope of "establishing all things in Christ" to describe the end of a very minor schism; given their claim to love and respect the See of Peter, who the Devil do they think they are, not only setting terms for their re-entry into the Church (which, in and of itself, is not unreasonable), but demanding that the Church "must move first"? Is that the way that the head of a small group with four bishops and a few hundred thousand members addresses the head of the greatest religious body in the world, with a billion baptized members, hundreds of millions of practicing adults, a presence in almost every country on Earth? These people have spent thirty years breaking off from the world, insulating themselves in thei right coccoons of imagined legitimacy, that even when they want to interact with the world outside, to deal with things as they are, they simply do not know how. They have forgotten, or never learned, the basics of diplomacy and good manners.