The Bishop's Weekly Column from the Parish Bulletin

OUR LADY OF FATIMA

CATHOLIC CHURCH

The Enterprise Fires another Photon Torpedo....

...."Shields up Mr. Sulu !"

December 8th, 2005

The "Enterprise" has struck again. (For Star Trek fans I don't mean Captain Kirk's starship !) I refer in this instance to the series of articles being exchanged between Fr Cekada and Christopher Ferrara in Trad newspapers the last few months. Fr Cekada's latest round reminds me of the starship pictured left from the 1960s sci-fi classic.

No this isn't yet another installment from my point of view (yawn...yawn...yawn). Let's turn the debate on its head... let us suppose Fr Cekada is correct. There is no Pope...there is no mechanism for getting another...Jesus lied and the gates of hell prevailed. If the Conciliar Church is not the Church then where is the Church ?

Theology students know as does the Catholic in the pew; the Church is known by 4 marks. We hear it in the Nicene creed: one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic. Where these 4 notes or marks are verified the Catholic Church is present.

Fr Cekada would claim that the Traditional Movement is the Church. Does this stand up ? Try the four marks' test: is there unity ? Are you kidding me ? Go from one chapel to another and Communion is denied at the rail. Is there Catholicity ? Check the Trad internet blogs - everyone's contradicting each other but they're all right (outside of me there's no salvation). Is there apostolicity ? Everyone says everyone else's orders are questionable, doubtful, invalid.... And as for holiness... well nothing better than being holier than thou!!!

The reality is each group says that they are the Church and no-one outside the group is Catholic anymore. If you watched dateline NBC last Sunday you will have seen a short documentary on the Schukardt group in Seattle. 100 or so people grouped around a man who hasn't been seen in public for more than two years claiming to be the remnant Church. The numbers elsewhere may be greater than 100 but the statement remains the same. The blind leading the blind ! As St Paul put it to Timothy: "And will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables." (2 Tim 4:4)

After Vatican I the Dollingerites claimed Papal Infallibility was "heresy" and promptly went into schism and now with the passing of time into oblivion. Today's sedes claim Vatican II taught heresy citing this or that theologian etc. (Tailored of course to justify their argument). They also have headed into schism and like the reactionaries of 1870 will meet the same fate. Cekada and his ilk have created their own "Frankenchurch" (Cekada's expression) - a corpse without a head. Frankenstein's monster at least had life - a church without a Pope is just plain dead.

I am absolutely sick and tired of the old re-runs on both sides. In the next few weeks I will post on this site in electronic form a short work by Bishop Joseph Fessler entitled True and False Notions of Papal Infallibility which was written shortly after Vatican I and received the approbation of Pius IX in a written brief. Fessler was Bishop of St Polten in Austria, a Papal Theologian and Secretary to the Council. If anyone should know what the Council intended he should.

In the work Fessler explodes almost every one of the myths upon which Trad theology is based. I give a few examples: Quanta cura, The Syllabus of Errors, Cum ex apostolatus officio are NOT infallible documents. A Pope's disciplinary decisions are NOT irreformable and NOT infallible. A Pope CAN be a material heretic and REMAIN pope. Interestingly enough Pius IX wrote Fessler: "For it (infallibility) is a matter the true meaning of which, not all men, and especially not all laymen, have a thoroughly clear understanding of, and the truth, when lucidly set forth, is wont to expel from properly constituted minds opinions which men perhaps have drunk in with their mother's milk, to confirm others in a right mind, and fortify them against insidious attacks". Watch this space....

+TF