Bishop Fellay criticizes new CDF prefect, says SSPX united in response to Holy See

July 17, 2012

The superior general of the Society of St. Pius X said that its general chapter attained “peace and unity” during its July 8-14 meetings and “very soon” will respond to the Holy See’s offer of reconciliation.

“All ambiguity has now been resolved among us,” said Bishop Bernard Fellay. “Very soon we will convey to Rome the position of the chapter, which has been the occasion to specify our road map insisting upon the conservation of our identity, the only efficacious means to help the Church to restore Christendom … We cannot refrain from speaking when confronted with the ‘silent apostasy’ and its causes. Doctrinal mutism is not the answer to this ‘silent apostasy’ which even John Paul II denounced already in 2003.”

Bishop Fellay added:

We are Catholic, we recognize the pope and the bishops, but above all else we must keep intact the Faith, source of God’s grace. Therefore we must avoid all that may endanger the Faith, without trying to become a replacement for the Church, Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman. Far from us the idea of establishing a parallel Church, of exercising a parallel magisterium!

This was well explained by Archbishop Lefebvre more than thirty years ago: he did not wish to hand down anything else but what he himself had received from the Church of two millennia. This is what we want also, following his lead, so that we may effectively help “to restore all things in Christ.” It is not us who will break with Rome, the Eternal Rome, mistress of wisdom and truth. Nevertheless, it would be unrealistic to deny that there is a modernist and liberal influence in the Church since the Second Vatican Council and its subsequent reforms. In a word, we maintain the faith in the primacy of the Roman Pontiff and in the Church founded upon Peter, but we refuse all which contributes to the “self-demolition of the Church” acknowledged by Paul VI himself since 1968.

Bishop Fellay also criticized Archbishop Gerhard Müller, the newly-appointed prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

“It is nobody’s secret that the former bishop of Regensburg, where our seminary of Zaitzkofen is located, does not like us,” he said. “For us what is more important and more alarming is his leading role at the head of the Congregation for the Faith”: “numerous writings” of the prelate are “questionable, to say the least” and “would have been in the past the object of an intervention of the Holy Office, which now is the very Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith presided by him.”

 

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Further information:

• Interview with Bishop Bernard Fellay on the occasion of the General Chapter (July 16, 2012) (DICI)
• SSPX to publicize ‘common statement to Rome’ (CWN, 7/16)