SSPX reminds Catholics of what it was like before Vatican II

 "You've been given a great gift, George. You get to see what the world be like if you had never been born."
- Clarence, fictional angel sent to George Bailey in the 1946 Frank Capra classic, Its a Wonderful Life

The Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius Tenth (SSPX) has often been accused of being arrested in time, frozen in 1962 on the eve of the Second Vatican Council (October 1962 - December 1965). While this is an obvious exaggeration, there is some truth to it as regards the positions, vitality, and durability of the Catholic Church as it was on the eve of the council.

The SSPX was founded in the diocese of Econe, Switzerland in 1970 with the full approval of the diocesan bishop. The impetus behind the project was a handful of seminarians who, disillusioned at finding the seminaries of their own dioceses completely given over the conciliar zeitgeist. These young men looked for a seminary that could give them the traditional priestly formation common to all Roman Rite priests prior to the reforms of Vatican II. They begged retired Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre to form them.

Word soon reached Rome that the seminary was not forming priests after the manner of the conciliar reforms and to offer the novus ordo missae (new Mass) of Pope Paul VI. The canonical standing of the seminary was revoked just four years after its establishment after apostolic visitators dispatched from Rome surveyed the program. Its founder Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre found himself suspended a divinis in 1976 upon ordaining his first coterie of priests formed just as he himself was in the late 1920s in France. 

Lefebvre needs no introduction to anyone conversant in the tensions between Catholic tradition and the conciliar bent towards liberal progressivism since the 1960s. Suffice to say that Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre was the most fruitful missionary of the 20th century. He baptized tens of thousands of African converts, ordained hundreds of priests, founded 21 new dioceses and consecrated African Bishops for all of them. He founded seminaries, schools, convents, religious houses, clinics, and churches. Pope Pius XII made him Apostolic Legate for all French speaking Africa and the continent's leading prelate. The Holy Ghost Fathers elected him Superior General of their 5,000 member congregation active in more than 300 dioceses.

No single Catholic of the last century did more than Monsignor Lefebvre to advance the frontiers of the Catholic Church and win converts. The SSPX was founded under this missionary charism and every SSPX priest is formed with this same evangelical vision and purpose.

SSPX priests serve approximately a million Catholic faithful around the world in ways that would not raise an eyebrow in the preconciliar world. In fact, the SSPX stands as a living reminder of what any normal Roman Rite priest was expected to believe, teach, and administer prior to the chaos unleashed by the Second Vatican Council. It is estimated that 70,000 priests abandoned their ordination vows between 1965 and 2000 with about a third of them returning at some point over the following decades
(On the basis of indications sent to the Vatican from the dioceses, from 1964 to 2004, 69,063 priests left the ministry. From 1970 to 2004, 11,213 priests have returned to the ministry. source). 

In the United States the Catholic Church experienced remarkably robust growth under Popes Pius XI and Pius XII. American seminaries - 516 of them - were full of young men wishing to be ordained in the service of the Church. 

As seen in our introductory quotation, the Catholic Church, like the protagonist George Bailey has been given a chance to see what the Church would have been like had Pope John XXIII not convoked the Second Vatican Council in the fall of 1962. The Church of today has the gift of looking at herself as she was on the eve of the council every time she references the SSPX, its priests, the Mass they champion, and the faithful who adhere to them for spiritual nourishment. 

The French philosopher Jean Guitton, secretary, a confidant of Paul VI, and lay observer at the Second Vatican Council wrote in his book "Paul VI secret":

I (Guitton) asked him: “Why would you not accept that the priests at Ecône continue to celebrate the Mass of St. Pius V? It was what was said before. I do not see why the seminary is refused the ancient Mass. Why not allow them to celebrate it?” The response given by Paul VI is very significant. He replied: “No, if we grant the Mass of St. Pius V to the Society of St. Pius X, ALL that we have gained through Vatican II will be lost."

Josef Cardinal Ratzinger as Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith believed that a reconciliation was necessary to close the gap between what was and what came afterwards.

“For fostering a true consciousness in liturgical matters, it is also important that the proscription against the form of liturgy in valid use up to 1970 should be lifted. Anyone who nowadays advocates the continuing existence of this liturgy or takes part in it is treated like a leper; all tolerance ends here. There has never been anything like this in history; in doing this we are despising and proscribing the Church’s whole past. How can one trust her present if things are that way? I must say, quite openly, that I don’t understand why so many of my episcopal brethren have to a great extent submitted to this rule of intolerance, which for no apparent reason is opposed to making the necessary inner reconciliations within the Church.”

J. Ratzinger, God and the World: A Conversation with Peter Seewald, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2002, 416.

Ratzinger told a gathering of Chilean bishops shortly after Lefebvre consecrated four bishops in 1988 without papal mandate,

We should allow ourselves to ask fundamental questions, about the defects in the pastoral life of the Church, which are exposed by these events [consecration of SSPX bishops]. Thus we will be able to offer a place within the Church to those who are seeking and demanding it, and succeed in destroying all reason for schism. We can make such schism pointless by renewing the interior realities of the Church.

As Pope, Ratzinger went far in effecting this reconciliation. He annulled the motu proprio declaring the self-excommunication of SSPX bishops consecrated in June of 1988. He required no penance, retraction of positions, or renunciations by the society. He corrected a previously regarded (and canonically wrong) perception that the preconciliar form of the Mass had been abrogated when he promulgated the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum and its follow up letter Universae ecclesiae.

The Pontiff apparently felt much pressure for these decisions and a severe limitation on his freedom to adjudicate the tensions between the SSPX and Rome. 

The answer is revealed by an incident of which I [Christopher Ferrara] was reliably informed during a recent Ignatian retreat at the Retreat House of the Society of Saint Pius X in Ridgefield, Connecticut. During an audience with the Pope, Bishop Fellay found himself alone with the Pope for a moment.  His Excellency seized the opportunity to remind the Pope that he is the Vicar of Christ, possessed of the authority to take immediate measures to end the crisis in the Church on all fronts. The Pope replied thus: “My authority ends at that door.” (Castel Gondolfo August, 2005) source: The Remnant

The very existence of the SSPX serves as a looking glass held up to the conciliar reformers at all times: this is who you were and what you are fighting to restrict, even eliminate. 

Not only does the society serve as a reminder of the health, vitality, and orthodoxy of the preconciliar Church, it serves as an embarrassment to those ashamed of her exclusive claims as the Barque of Peter outside of which no one can be saved. The Church's robust health in 1960 compared to the contemporary wasteland characterized by sexual abuse, lawsuits, drastic diocesan closures and consolidations, hemorrhaging members, vocations crisis, and widespread heresy and liturgical abuse should embarrass anyone. Not that everything was perfect within the preconciliar Church; the Church has always been assailed by persecution without and heresy within. But the mere existence of the SSPX and it's steadfast commitment to the traditional theology, liturgy and discipline of the Catholic Church presents the conciliar faith and its reformers with an unwanted and inescapable confrontation. 

George Bailey with Clarence the angel as his guide surveyed the world as it would have been had he never been born. So much evil, ugliness, and frustration occupied the spaces of his life because he not been there. So much good - so much! - never occurred because he was not there to do it. Upon the realization of the evidence George begs Clarence to send him back to the life he knew, even though it was fraught with all the same problems and limitations as before. 

The Society of Saint Pius X provides a similar window into the state of the Church prior to the reforms inspired by the Second Vatican Council. It reminds the enemies of Tradition what they have ruined; it informs the friends of Tradition what we must recover. 

We cannot erase the past. We cannot mask it over and bury it with what we wish things to be like now. This is all the more grave when treating of institutions and movements inspired by the Holy Ghost. The oppression of the SSPX is an act of self-contempt; it is tantamount to suicide. It will fail. Whatever good came from the Second Vatican Council will endure, but not at the expense of what almighty God established in the two millennia prior to it. 

George Bailey prays, "I want to live again... please God, let me live again..."