Why are the liberal German bishops
so obsessed and mean about the FSSPX?
Cardinal Lehmann sounds off
ROME, August 26 (Translated from ASCA) - Cardinal Karl Lehmann, Archbishop of Mainz, who was president of the German bishops' conference for 12 years, said today that the Fraternity of St. Pius X is a "sinkhole that collects all those who are disappointed and frustrated with the Church".
[That's a strange statement to make - because that would include all those 'We Are Church' types that Lehmann and his fellow liberals have been bending over backwards like contortionists to 'make nice' with. It is, of course, meant to indicate contempt for the Lefebvrians whom the liberal German bishops have been treating most un-Christianly like they were the scum of the earth!]
He goes on to say that "even if they continue their provocations against the Pope nnd the Vatican...there is no need to have recourse to excommunicating them again."
[Gee, thanks, how generous! The fact is that liberal dissenters within the Church have not been excommunicated nor are threatened with it at all, because excommunication is punishment for violations of canon law, more usually imposed in our time on clerics rather than laymen. The FSSPX bishops are as free as the most progressive among the German bishops who open defying the Magisterium, to express their disapproval of some Vatican II decisions - or more properly, the way such decisions have been interpreted and implemented.
Why can Mons. Zollitsch, president of the German bishops conference and Lehmann's ideological twin, get away with saying on German TV that Christ "did not die for the sins of the people as if God had provided a sacrificial offering, like a scapegoat" but that rather, Jesus had offered only 'solidarity with the poor and the suffering"? He is echoing all the liberation theologians and Biblical exegetes who see Christ as nothing more than a social activist! Have the Lefebvrians said anything so outrageous? Even Mons. Williamson's anti-Holocaust lunacy pales beside Zollitsch's theological apostasy - Williamson's 'heresy', after all, does not involve a tenet of the faith!
I find it odd and emblematic that the European press raised such hue and cry over Austrian Mons. Wagner's statements on Katrina and Harry Potter, and hardly paid any attention to Zollitsch's 'heresy'!
Lehmann made the statements in an interview with the German newspaper
Frankfurter Rundschau.
He said further: "If the Lefebvrians continue to behave inconsiderately and continue to play games with the Pope and the Curia, then we must say that they really have no place in our community".
[Hmm, let me see: Who were those who 'behaved inconsiderately' - indeed, almost contemptuously - towards the Pope after he lifted the excommunications last January? Gosh, can you believe it? None other than Lehmann and his fellow German liberal bishops, seconded by their linguistic brothers in Austria!
It wasn't the FSSPX bishops to whom the Pope felt he needed to write a letter last March 10 to express his sorrow about the negative reactions to his compassionate gesture towards the Lefbevrians! But Lehmann is hardly motivated by compassion for arguing against re-excommunication, Read on!]
"Excommunication," he said, is considered today to be as obscurantist and regressive a measure as one can possibly take.
And yet, he went on, "when some people, like the Lefbevrians, don't follow the Church's agenda, then one hears other Catholics crying for excommunication."
[DIM]pt[=DIM][Really? How many 'regular folk' Catholics are even aware the Lefebvrians exist? Other than the Pope and his allies in the Curia, no one appears to be particularly interested in the Lefebvrians except bitter European liberal bishops who seem to be unduly uncharitable towards the FSSPX for disagreeing with Rome at all - obviously not seeing their long-festering practice of the hermeneutics of rupture as a disagreement with Rome!]
"But the Pope certainly does not have that style [combative? harsh?] and has acted as 'the supreme shepherd who is doing his duty" by responding positively to the Lefebvrians repeated requests for reconciliation.
Nonetheless, he said, "this does not take away the fact that the FSSPX is a sinkhole that collects all those who are disappointed and frustrated with the Church".
"There are those," he went on, "who reject modernity altogether, some who never accepted the French Revolution, and some who oppose the idea of religious freedom and the liturgical reforms after the Council."
He granted that "many are reconcilable, but there are the 'unreformables' among them, like the Holocaust denier, Mons. Williamson.
"Perhaps," he said, "such distinctions should have been made beforehand and in a clear way" to avoid what he called "the pain and the abandonment of the Catholic Church that followed the recall of the excommunications".
[But Lehmann and company inflamed public opinion by their denunciations of the Pope's decision at the time, instead of using the occasion to explain the situation as it really is! And are we really to believe that German Catholics left the Church in significant numbers because the Pope revoked those excommunications? Whoever 'left' were probably just waiting for a good pretext. Besides, I believe Church membership in German requires the individual to pay a tax - so formally leaving the Church is conceivably a way to get out of paying one more tax.]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 27/08/2009 03:00]