[Question]{.underline}: Does the disobedience of the 1988 Episcopal consecrations constitute a schismatic act?
[Answer]{.underline}: The consecration of the bishops was not an act of disobedience at all, but to the contrary an act of the most painful and exact obedience, which virtue sometimes requires obedience “to God rather than men” (Acts 5:29) who contradict Him, as the Apostles answered the high priest, and which virtue sometimes requires that one resist the highest abuse of authority, as St. Paul did to St. Peter, the first Pope: “But when Cephas was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed” (Gal 2:13).
The Apostolic Mandate, read as a part of the ceremony of the consecration of bishops, confirms that it was not at all an act of disobedience, but to the contrary an act of obedience to the Church: “We have this mandate from the Roman Church, always faithful to the Holy Tradition which She has received from the Holy Apostles. This Holy Tradition is the deposit of Faith which the Church orders us to faithfully transmit to all men for the salvation of their souls. Since the Second Vatican Countil until this day, the authorities of the Roman Church are animated by the spirit of modernism. They have acted contrary to Holy Tradition…”
However, even if the consecration of bishops were an act of disobedience, it would not follow that it is schismatic. The question of whether or not it was a schismatic act is an entirely different one. Schism is defined in the Code of Canon Law as the refusal to submit to the Sovereign Pontiff, or the refusal of Communion with the members of the Church who are subject to him (Canon 1325, §2 of the 1917 Code and Canon 751 of the 1983 Code). Disobedience, real of apparent, is consequently not the same thing as schism. In the same way as a child who refuses to obey his father when he orders him to steal candy from the store practices a true virtue of obedience (to God rather than men), nor does he in any way deny that his father is truly his father, so likewise do the Episcopal consecrations not at all imply the rejection of the authority of the Holy Father, nor a refusal to submit to it. There is one clear proof of schism, and it exists when a bishop claims for himself jurisdiction over a portion of the Church. It is because all authority in the Church flows from the Pope that this is a direct refusal of the Pope’s universal authority to govern the Church. This the bishops of the Society have never done, never claiming anything but a supplied jurisdiction, coming from the need of the faithful.
Consequently, Pope John Paul II was quite simply in error when he claimed, on July 2, 1988, that the Episcopal consecrations were an act of disobedience such as to imply in practice the rejection of the Roman primacy and to constitute a schismatic act. Much to the contrary, it was because of Archbishop Lefebvre’s unshakeable belief in Roman primacy that he held to the constant, repeated, infallible teachings of the Popes who condemned for two centuries the errors later adopted by Vatican II. This is true obedience and true communion with the Church.
However, there is a reason for every assertion, and there was a clear reason why it was that Pope John Paul II accused this act of being schismatic. It was because he had an entirely different notion of Tradition. For the Catholic, Apostolic Tradition is one of the two sources of Divine Revelation. It has as its objective content the deposit of the Faith, unchanged since the death of the last of the Apostles, that it transmits down to us.
Not so for modernists, for whom tradition is a subjective, evolving, changing experience of how the faith is lived in every moment of the Church’s history. This is what St. Pius X had to say in 1907 in the encyclical Pascendi: “Tradition, as understood by the Modernists, is a communication with others of an original experience…stimulating the religious sense…renewing the experience once acquired” (§15). It cannot, therefore, be the simple passing down of a fixed truth, but rather the living of a communicated personal experience, as a consequence of which St. Pius X says: “Thus we are once more led to infer that all existing religions are equally true, for otherwise they would not survive” (ibid.). Ecumenism is the immediate consequence of this new notion of tradition that approves every religious experience.
Thus it is that Pope John Paul II in Ecclesia Dei adflicta states that “the root of this schismatic act can be discerned in an incomplete and contradictory notion of Tradition.” He considers that Archbishop Lefebvre’s notion of Tradition is incomplete because it is not “living,” meaning that it is not an experience, allowing for the possibility of evolution, change, and adaptation to the times. It is simply a transmission. He considers that it is “contradictory” because it goes against collegiality that is the present teaching of Rome and the bishops, which is an essential part of the modern day experience that they call tradition. It was consequently precisely because he adhered to what the Church has always taught that Archbishop Lefebvre was condemned as being schismatic.
Can one be schismatic for refusing the modernist notion of tradition condemned by St. Pius X? Clearly not. Can one be schismatic for believing in the unchanging, objective nature of the Catholic Faith, as always taught? Clearly not. Can one be schismatic for refusing to obey the destruction of the Faith and the Church? Clearly not. Can one be schismatic for standing up to a Pope who has become the instrument of the liberalism and modernism so often condemned by more than two centuries of Popes? Clearly not.
Answered by Father Peter Scott, SSPX.