ABOUT THE CHURCH AND THE VATICAN

FSSPX ORDAINS ITS PRIESTS
WITHOUT INCIDENT


Here are photos from the news agencies who decided there was news value in the FSSPX ordination of three priests at their Zaitzkofen seminary near Regensburg today (Saturday).

Bishop Antonio Galarreta, one of the four FSSPX bishops ordained illegally by the late Mons. Marcel Lefebvre, was the ordaining bishop.









So, they went ahead and did it as they have done without incident for the past 30 years - during which never once did the Diocese of Regensburg nor any other German bishop take interest in them or their activities. [Probably these bishops did not think them worth even thinking about - fit only to be ignored!)

Until this year when the Bishop of Regensburg and the chairman of the German bishops' conference warned them not to go ahead with their yearly ordinations because they would be in violation of canon law and a 'provocation' to the Vatican!

All of a sudden, these German bishops were acting holier than thou - when it was clear from simple common sense and a modicum of canon law that nothing has changed so far in the status of the FSSPX.

They still have no canonical status in the Church, and lifting the excommunication from the four bishops was the Pope's personal gesture to the four men individually. It regularized neither their own canonical status in the Church nor that of the FSSPX as a whole - all this was to be decided depending on what happens in the next phase of this rapprochement with Rome, which the Pope as Pastor of the Church so dearly wants.

Who are better Catholic pastors, after all: the FSSPX who live by the millebnnial tradition of the Catholic Church and manage to train a constant number of seminarians yearly, or the ultra-liberal German bishops who will bend over backwards and contort themselves to 'curry favor' with their liberal and dissenting 'parishioners' but who can never get to fill their Churches, from all accounts, and whose seminaries are empty?

What good is professing adherence to all of Vatican II while openly defying what it says about how bishops should behave with respect to the Pope and his authority? And even worse, dissenting from traditional teaching about abortion and divorce and priestly celibacy, to name just a few!

Personally in this Year for Priests, I thank the Lord for three new priests today who, i think, are not ever likely to campaign to abolish priestly celibacy.