The fallout from the SSPX issue continues to rain down on the Vatican. Several items over the weekend showed how messy it can get when the Vatican botches its presentation of a potentially controversial decision.

• A demonstration against Williamson at the Vatican nunciature in Paris by several dozen Jewish protesters on Sunday. The Reuters photo below by Mal Langsdon shows a man holding a cartoon from the Paris daily Le Monde in which two SSPX bishops say in mock Latin “The gas chamber doesn’t exist.” Pope Benedict holds up a cloak which says “Down with Vatican II” and comments: “As long as they don’t say it in Hebrew, I’m not saying anything.” Will there be more of these elsewhere?
  

• Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, one of the four SSPX bishops whose excommunications Pope Benedict lifted last week, told the Italian daily La Stampa (here in English) that the rebel prelates have no intention of changing their traditionalist views when they negotiate their reinstatement in the Roman Catholic Church with Vatican officials.” No, absolutely not,” he said. “We do not change our positions, but we have the intention of converting Rome, that is, to lead Rome towards our positions.” This is the man who in 2005 told the traditionalist U.S. weekly The Remnant “I will say, one day the Church should erase this Council.  She will not speak of it anymore.  She must forget it.  The Church will be wise if she forgets this council.” Until now, most attention has focused on SSPX Superior General Bishop Bernard Fellay and the Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson. Fellay is considered the most moderate of the group and statements from the others are likely to take a tougher stand against any concessions to the Vatican.

(Photo: Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, May 2008/SSPX)

• Several news outlets such as The Times and the BBC have picked up a story from Austria that the pope had approved the appointment of a new auxiliary bishop of Linz, Gerhard Wagner, who once described Hurricane Katrina as God’s punishment for sin and sexual excess in New Orleans and denounced the Harry Potter books for “spreading Satanism.” In a new interview with the Austrian Catholic agency Kath.net, he says “Islam is really a danger.” How much would you bet this would have gone unnoticed if there hadn’t been other negative news about the Vatican?

New statements and comments are popping up all over. A few trends emerge:

• Denunciations of anti-Semitism by SSPX bishops. Bishop Fellay has made several such statements, each stronger than the previous one. His latest, to the French weekly Famille Chrétienne, calls Jews “our older brothers.” Fr. Franz Schmidberger, the head of the SSPX in Germany who has been quoted as saying the Jews must be converted, has also distanced himself from Williamson’s comments. While these statements have been welcomed, they have not answered the real question of whether the SSPX will accept Vatican II documents such as Nostra Aetate that changed the traditional Church position on the Jews (see Bishop Tissier above…).
• Continued criticism of Bishop Richard Williamson and his denial of the Holocaust. Several Jewish and some Catholic leaders have said his apology to the Vatican for causing the uproar was not enough. The message is that he may have apologised and Pope Benedict may have condemned the Holocaust, but where are his full retractions, more direct criticisms of him and his denial or statements that people expressing such views have no place as office holders in the Church? The Central Council of Jews in Germany says it expects to see some “consequences” from the Vatican to prove it supports continued dialogue with and respect for Jews. One suggestion is that it suspend the procedure to beatify Pope Pius XII and later make him a saint.
• Criticism of the Vatican for botching its public relations. This is going Catholic mainstream, with even Radio Vatican (German service says:“This concurrence of the lifting the excommunication and the Holocaust-denial by Bishop Williamson was fatal. Simply fatal.”) and Benedict’s close ally Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schönborn openly complaining about it. As veteran Vatican watcher John Allen wrote: “The way this decision was communicated was a colossal blunder, and one that’s frankly difficult to either understand or excuse.” Cardinal Karl Lehmann of Mainz openly criticised Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos — head of the office dealing with the SSPX — of not doing his homework on Williamson’s controversial views.
  
• Concern about a pattern in Benedict’s controversial statements. As Charlotte Knobloch, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said: “We’ve heard the pope’s speech about Muslims in Regensburg, another statement about judging the Protestant church, then about evangelising Jews, the old Latin Mass, and now the rehabilitiation of a Holocaust denier. I don’t think this is a coincidence. The pope is a highly educated man. He says what’s being thought in the Church.”
  

  (Photo:Charlotte Knobloch, 24 Oct 2006/Arnd Wiegmann)

• Investigations into anti-Semitism within the SSPX, such as here on the America magazine blog In All Things or John Allen’s All Things Catholic column.
• Rumblings among Catholics who see Benedict as turning the clock back on many Vatican II reforms. Read this comment from Robert Mickens, the Rome correspondent of the London Catholic weekly The Tablet.
• Petitions by concerned Catholics, run in France by the Catholic weekly La Vie (entitled No Negationists in the Church) and in Germany by the Church reform group We Are Church (entitled Full Recognition for Conclusions of Second Vatican Coouncil Demanded). There’s another French petition going around by fax.

Some recent Reuters copy on the controversy:

• Critics point to flaws in pope’s governing style - Reuters
• Italian priests’ comments on Jews, Muslims embarrass Pope - Reuters.
• Holocaust-denying bishop apologises to pope - Reuters (text of apology here).

Where do you think this controversy is going? Should the pope take further steps to calm it?

Bishop Richard Williamson has posted his observations on the lifting of excommunications against himself and three other bishops of the rebel traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X.  Like his colleague Bishop Bernard Fellay, he is triumphant and boasts the SSPX made no concessions to obtain the decree readmitting them back into the Catholic Church. He goes even further, saying that the deal with the Vatican only committed the SSPX to discussing its differences with Rome. Nothing about resolving them.

(Photo: Bishop Richard Williamson, 28 Feb 2007/Jens Falk)

Williamson hardly mentions the controversy caused by his Holocaust denial, which has angered Jewish groups, overshadowed this story and forced Pope Benedict to issue a hair-shirt denunciation of the Holocaust — something he would not have had to do if he and his Vatican aides had handled this better. The bishop thanks Benedict and his aides for making their decision to lift the bans “despite, for instance, a media uproar orchestrated and timed to prevent it.”

The Vatican left the conditions for the lifting of the bans vague when it worked out the deal, leaving the SSPX pleased and many Catholics concerned that prior support for the Second Vatican Council was not required. After four days of speculation during which several bishops’ conferences spoke out to demand the SSPX support the Council’s reforms, Pope Benedict came out on Wednesday and made clear the bishops would have to “take the further steps needed to achieve full communion with the Church, thereby showing true loyalty and true recognition of the Magisterium and the authority of the pope and of the Second Vatican Council.”

Read a few lines from Williamson and ask yourself if this sounds like someone ready to go into these discussions in Rome ready to take those further steps Benedict mentions:

“Nobody can any longer say that Catholics holding to Tradition are “outside the Church”. Certainly a number of Conciliarists will go on behaving as though they are, but they clearly no longer have the Pope on their side only. The difference is enormous!

(Picture: Cartoon from Williamson’s blog Dinoscopus)

Will someone like Williamson negotiate in good faith, or just stonewall now that his excommunication has been revoked? Could he drag his feet so long that the Vatican gives up demanding “the further steps needed to achieve full communion with the Church” and simply gives them a full rehabilitation on their terms?

(Photo: Pope Benedict at his weekly Vatican audience, 28 Jan 2009/Tony Gentile)

Pope Benedict clarified a crucial point in the Vatican’s dispute with the rebel traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) during his regular weekly audience today. Apart from the issue of Bishop Richard Williamson and his denial of the Holocaust, which has angered Jewish leaders and caught most of the headlines, the decision to lift the excommunications of the four SSPX bishops raised serious concerns among many Catholics because it seemed to signal a departure from reforms of the 1962-1965 Second Vatican Council. Specifically, by lifting the bans without demanding the SSPX bishops first recognise all Council reforms, it looked like Benedict was not trying to defend these Church teachings against their most implacable critics. Benedict has long been a champion of a conservative re-interpretation of the Council so any concessions he makes to the SSPX go beyond the narrow issue involved.

The Second Vatican Council was a major and complex event (well explained in the new book What Happened At Vatican II by Georgetown University Professor John W. O’Malley pictured at right). Its reforms include the opening to Jews, Muslims and other religions and a commitment to religious freedom. They replaced earlier teachings that Jews were Christ-killers, that all other faiths were deeply in error and that democracy and the separation of church and state were modernist aberrations. Many Catholics would not be able to recognise their own Church if it went back to those notions. Some would even leave if it did.  But the SSPX officially rejects these reforms as grave errors and it refused to agree to them as a pre-condition for having the excommunications lifted.

The fact that Benedict agreed to lift the bans without gaining this concession from them (which the Vatican was demanding as late as last June) prompted speculation that he would fudge this condition in the negotiations due with the SSPX to regularise their status within the Church. SSPX Superior General Bishop Bernard Fellay fuelled this suspicion by writing a triumphant letter to his followers clearly stating he had not made this concession (the Vatican statement was not clear on this point). Statements from the Vatican in reaction to the uproar about Williamson have been curiously defensive. Church officials have said his views were unacceptable and not related to the excommunication issue. Those statements were fine as far as they went. But they never shifted to the offensive and said, “And what’s more, we’ll demand that they sign up to all Vatican II documents.” The whole episode led Catholics to ask, as did blogger David Gibson, “Why so much for this group?”

This point was not lost on Catholic bishops elsewhere. On Monday, the German bishops’ conference said the SSPX must accept Vatican II, especially the document Nostra Aetate that set relations with Jews on a new basis. On Tuesday, the bishops’ conference in Switzerland — where the SSPX has its headquarters — said the same thing, also citing Nostra Aetate. Today, the French bishops’ conference joined in, saying that “The Second Vatican Council is not negotiable at all. No Church group can take the place of the Magesterium,” the overall teaching of the Church. While none of these statements criticised the Vatican directly, they were stage-whispered shouts of concern to Rome that the Vatican was going too soft on the SSPX.

At his audience today, Benedict made three special announcements. The first hailed the election of Metropolitan Kirill — a friend of the Vatican — as the new patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. The third repeated Benedict’s condemnation of the Holocaust and solidarity with Jews — a well-known position he would not have had to repeat if this whole episode had not been presented so poorly in the first place.

(Photo: Pope Benedict speaks with Holocaust survivor at Auschwitz, 28 May 2006/pool)

The second announcement concerned the lifting of the SSPX excommunications:

“I hope that this gesture of mine will be followed by the desired commitment on their part to take the further steps needed to achieve full communion with the Church, thereby showing true loyalty and true recognition of the Magisterium and the authority of the pope and of the Second Vatican Council.”

That still doesn’t mean the SSPX will follow through. There is good reason to expect the coming negotiations to be extremely difficult and the SSPX will try to deconstruct this statement to the point where they don’t have to make any concessions. But at least now, after four days of vagueness, Benedict has given the impression of drawing a line in the sand. Let’s see how it holds up when the SSPX starts negotiating with Rome.

What do you think? Will Benedict stand up for Vatican II? Or is he using this as another way to re-interpret it in a more conservative way?

Catholic bishops in the German-speaking countries have been especially outspoken in demanding the ultra-conservative Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), whose four excommunicated bishops were welcomed back into the Church on Saturday, must explicitly accept Second Vatican Council documents assuring respect for the Jews. The Vatican had been demanding full acceptance of Council documents for years, including in a compromise it offered last June but the SSPX rejected it. As far as is known, it was not part of the deal that has now led to the bans being lifted. The issue has hit the headlines because one of the four, British-born Bishop Richard Williamson, openly denied the Holocaust in an interview on Swedish television broadcast last week.

(Photo: St. Peter’s Basilica, 5 Feb 2005/Tom Heneghan)

The German Bishops Conference noted the four bishops, whose dissent against Rome mostly concerned its rejection of the Council reforms including a modern liturgy and recognition for Judaism and other religions, must now discuss their future status in the Church with Vatican officials. “We have the clear expectation and make the urgent request that the four bishops and the Society announce unmistakably and credibly their loyalty to the Second Vatican Council and especially the declaration ‘ostra Aetate,’ said a statement by Bishop Heinrich Mussinghoff, its main official for relations with Jews. Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, is the cornerstone of the post-Council opening to Jews, Muslims and other religions.

Munich’s Archbishop Reinhard Marx said Williamson’s comments were “unspeakable, unacceptable…” and added “Every denial of the Holocaust must be punished harshly.” In a statement, he noted the Vatican would now negotiate the conditions of the four bishops’ return into the Church. “There is no doubt that the decisions of the Second Vatican Council are binding for that.”

(Photo: Archbishop Reinhard Marx, 3 Oct 2008/Michael Dalder)

The Swiss bishops apologised to the Jewish community there “for the irritations that have arisen in recent days.” In a statement entitled “Denying the Holocaust cannot be accepted,” bishops’ conference chairman Bishop Kurt Koch said the Swiss-based SSPX had long rejected the Council’s opening to other religions. “We Swiss bishops expect that in these discussions (with the Vatican) … these bishops say credibly that they accept the Second Vatican Council and especially the positive view of Judaism set out in Nostra Aetate.”

In Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn wrote a Holocaust Day letter to the city’s Grand Rabbi Paul Chaim Eisenberg saying it was “shameful and frightening that there are still voices publicly denying the Shoah and question the right of the Jewish people to exist.”

John Allen has posted an excellent summary of the problem of anti-Semitism in the SSPX. Vatican damage management has cranked up to the point where the spokesman and the official daily have called Williamson’s comments unacceptable. L’Osservatore Romano ran a front-page article stating that Nostra Aetate “is an indisputable teaching for a Catholic… the recent negationist declarations contradict this teaching.”

The SSPX will have to go to Rome at some point to start negotiating its return. It wore down the Vatican to the point that Pope Benedict agreed to lift the excommunications on the SSPX’s terms, without an explicit condition to accept Vatican II reforms. Will they continue to get their way when it comes to Nostra Aetate?

LINKS: Here are links to my Q&A Why has the pope welcomed back traditionalists? and to a bilingual France24 cable TV discussion I took part in –
Benedict XVI: Provocative Pardon and Benoît XVI:le pardon qui fâche.

(Photo: Russian Orthodox prelates vote for candidates for patriarch, 26 Jan 2009/pool)

There was a slightly Soviet air to the proceedings as bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church voted on Sunday for three candidates to be considered as their new patriarch. Meeting in the gold-domed Christ the Saviour cathedral overlooking the Moskva River, just a few hundred metres from the Kremlin, about 200 metropolitans and bishops had delegates badges dangling from their necks along with their usual pectoral crosses. A Soviet-style “presidium” of 16 top prelates presided over the session in the Hall of Church Councils. The proceedings started with voting for an election committee, a drafting committee and a credentials committee. Journalists covering the session couldn’t help but think of the old communist party conferences.

Seated in the middle of this “presidium,” Metropolitan Kirill — the acting patriarch and frontrunner for the top post — added to the atmosphere by chairing the meeting with a distinctively firm hand. But there were differences, of course. Voting for the three candidates was secret. And when it came time to announce the results of the vote, there was no official stamp to validate the protocol.

(Photo: Metropolitan Kirill addresses the Council of Bishops, 25 Jan 2009/Alexander Natruskin)

For readers outside of Russia, the only other major church election they might have seen in the news was the 2005 Roman Catholic conclave that picked Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to become Pope Benedict XVI. That vote took place behind locked doors in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, beneath Michelangelo’s famous ceiling and his huge fresco of the Last Judgment behind the altar. Here the “presidium” sat in front of polished stone images of the 12 Apostles in a kind of modern icon style. Journalists were allowed in for the opening of the session,  had to leave during the pre-vote debates but could return for the actual voting and result.

When the official stamp was finally found, the announcement ceremony got underway. “Your Holiness, Metropolitan Kirill, please bless me to announce the protocol of the secret ballot vote to elect candidates for the See of the Patriarch of Moscow,” Metropolitan Isidor of Yekaterinodar and Kuban, head of the election committee, finally said from a Soviet-style rostrum. After he read out the results giving Kirill a strong lead of 97 out of 197 votes, the delegates gave the acting patriarch a long ovation.

Kirill reminded the hierarchs not to forget to bring a special liturgical mantle on Tuesday when a solemn service will be held before the start of the Local Council to elect the new patriarch. “Those without these mantles will not be allowed to take part in the service,” Kirill stressed.

(Photo: Christ the Saviour Cathedral, 26 Jan 2009/Alexander Natruskin)

The Local Council is made up of about 700 bishops, monks and laymen. Russian newspapers say the lay delegates will include members of the ruling United Russia party, one possible conduit for the influence the Kremlin is assumed to want to exercise in this election. Delegates to the Local Council can also nominate their own candidates for the final round.

The Local Council will meet in the main hall of the cathedral. Unlike the Catholic conclave, where the doors are shut during the whole process, journalists here will again be allowed in for the start and end of the session. The result is due Tuesday or Wednesday.

One more thing — there won’t be any white smoke either, another trademark of a papal election. The Russian Orthodox Church will do it the Russian way, even if it sometimes seems to have a few Soviet touches.

(Photo: Candidates for Russian Orthodox patriarch selected by the Council of Bishops. Pictured are (L-R): Metropolitan Kliment, Metropolitan Kirill and Metropolitan Filaret, 25 Jan 2009/Alexander Natruskin)

Paris Cardinal André Vingt-Trois,  chairman of the French Bishops Conference, held a press briefing on Saturday evening on the lifting of excommunications of four bishops of the ultra-traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX). France is home to the largest of the provinces of the dissident group, with around 100,000 faithful  of a worldwide total of 600,000. Sitting in a medieval meeting room in Notre Dame cathedral, he defended Pope Benedict’s decision to take the four bishops back into the Roman Catholic Church and indicated the SSPX would have to bend to Church discipline.

(Photo: Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, 8 Sept 2008/Benoit Tessier)

He called the decision “a measure of clemency and mercy” that would allow the Church to repair a damaging split. He declined to question the bishops’ motives, saying that “when people express their desire to respect the teachings of the church and the primacy of the pope, my ministry of mercy does not allow me suspect them a priori and to suspect them to be the worst people on earth … what they have in their hearts, only God can judge. Not me.”

The handful of journalists present repeatedly asked about one of the bishops, Richard Williamson, whose denial of the Holocaust this week outraged Jewish leaders. “The Jewish community was not shocked by this decision, it was shocked by the comments of Bishop Williamson,” he said. “He may have some twisted thoughts, but it’s not because the excommunication is lifted that these twisted thoughts have been approved.”

(Photo: Bishop Richard Williamson/SSPX)

Although the Vatican said that SSPX leader Bishop Bernard Fellay had pledged to respect the pope and Church teachings, Fellay posted a letter on an SSPX site saying the bishops still opposed some reforms of the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965. Asked about this apparent discrepancy, Vingt-Trois said he had not read Fellay’s letter. But he indicated that the SSPX could not have it both ways:

“One cannot both say that one recognises the primacy of the pope and wants to respect him and also set oneself up as the judge of the authenticity of the Catholic tradition. In the Christian tradition, in the Christian experience, the interpretation of the tradition is not a private exercise. It is a church exercise and it is done by the magisterium, notably by the pope as the first of the apostolic college, but also by the other bishops. So an individual group is not going to say what the authentic teaching of the church is … well, until now…”

Vingt-Trois stressed that the lifting of the bans on the four bishops was a first step meant to allow both sides to sit down and thrash out their differences: “One cannot say today how (the SSPX) will respond to this proposal and how they will engage in this work.” This is not an international negotiation under United Nations auspices, he added. “The pope is not the symmetric interlocutor of Bishop Fellay,” he said. “Bishop Fellay’s letter doesn’t say that either. He recognises the primacy of the pope. If there is a primacy of the pope, there is a dissymmetry.”

(Photo: the four SSPX bishops Alfonso de Galarreta, Richard Williamson, Bernard Fellay and Bernard Tissier de Mallerais in May 2008/SSPX)

The cardinal said today’s step did not change the status of SSPX priests, who remain outside the Catholic Church until their status is clarified. The lifting on the excommunications concerned only the four bishops and had no further immediate consequences.

He defended the pope’s decision as a bid to end the 20-year split before it got too wide. “When one sees what happened at the Reformation and the break between Catholics and Protestants, one sees the missed opportunities, the periods where there were people who really worked on both sides to avoid the division and maintain unity,” he said. “The failure of those opportunities that meant the two traditions gradually drifted apart. The further apart one drifts, the harder it is to get back together again.”

Also today, the head of the German bishops’ conference, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, supported the decision as proof of “the readiness of Pope Benedict to take another step towards the schismatic movement of the late archbishop in order to foster the unity of the Church.

“Pope Benedict is offering his hand to the Society of Saint Pius X. With him, I hope and pray that they take it. The Pope is showing the possibility of a return into full communion with the Catholic Church and, at the same time, leaves no doubt that the decisions of the Second Vatican Council are the indispensible basis for the life of the Church.”

In another reaction (audio here in French), Rev. Michel Kubler, religion editor of the French Catholic daily La Croix, said the ball was now in the SSPX’s court: “As a colleague at La Croix said, they’ve been given a visa to return but now they have to buy their tickets.” He expressed concern about Fellay’s letter saying they did not accept some Vatican II reforms.

(Photo: SSPX procession on St Peter’s Square, 2000/SSPX)

“What do they challenge? Only secondary things, or essential things like liturgical reform, which we think about a lot, or religious liberty, ecumenical dialogue, interreligious opening or the relationship of the Church to the world?” Kubler asked.

“The schism hasn’t been overcome. We have to overcome differences in doctrine. To take an analogy, 40 years ago, the Catholic and the Orthodox churches lifted the reciprocal excommunications imposed in 1054 in the famous schism between Rome and Byzantium that lasts to this day.” There have been fruitful discussions in the past 40 years, he said, but the schism remains. “It will probably be the same with the traditionalists, but I hope it won’t take 1,000 years for them to decide to return.”

The left-wing Catholic magazine Golias wrote in an angry editorial: “The people of God are increasingly tested in its trust in a hierarchy that turns its back on their ideals. It is probable that the free hand given to the enemies of the (Second Vatican) Council ends by provoking holy fury. By going very far, perhaps too far, Joseph Ratzinger — Pope Benedict — has broken the sound barrier. His decision to bring the disciples of Archbishop Lefebvre back into the fold will necessarily lead to more resistance.”

“Actually, for Pope Benedict — Joseph Ratzinger — the Council simply marked a regrettable parenthesis that some naive people thought was enchanted. The page has turned.”

The French SSPX website has posted another video marking the lifting of the excommunications. It’s mostly about Archbishop Lefebvre.

Pope Benedict lifted the excommunications of four ultra-traditionalist SSPX bishops on Saturday. While much daily media attention is focused on the fact that one of the four is a Holocaust denier denounced by Jewish groups in advance, the interesting internal Catholic question is what the conditions of this deal were. The two sides have been at loggerheads for years over the SSPX’s refusal to accept some reforms of the Second Vatican Council. SSPX leader Bishop Bernard Fellay insisted the Vatican should lift the excommunications first and talk about differences later. The Vatican wanted them to accept the reforms first and be rehabilitated later.

(Photo: Pope Benedict at the Vatican, 10 Jan 2009/Alessia Pierdomenico)

We’ll have to see the full documentation to know exactly who has agreed to what. It seems that the excommunications have been lifted first (as the SSPX wanted) and the SSPX and the Vatican are now to hold discussions to clear up their doctrinal differences. The assumption is that the doctrinal gap can be bridged but there is no indication how or when this would be done.

The Vatican announcement (here in SSPX English translation and original Italian) says that Fellay wrote a letter on Dec. 15 restating the SSPX request for the excommunications to be lifted. It then says:

“In the above mentioned letter, Bishop Fellay, among other things, stated: “We are still as steadfast in our determination to remain Catholic and to place all our strength at the service of the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which is the Roman Catholic Church. We filially accept her teaching. We firmly believe in the primacy of Peter and in its prerogatives…”

That sentence “We accept its teachings with filial animus” might be code for an SSPX acceptance of the Vatican II reforms it has long opposed. But Fellay struck a different tone in a “letter to the faithful” posted on the SSPX website DICI. The English translation of the original French says:

“The decree of January 21 quotes the letter dated December 15, 2008 to Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos in which I expressed our attachment “to the Church of Our Lord Jesus-Christ which is the Catholic Church,” re-affirming there our acceptation of its two thousand year old teaching and our faith in the Primacy of Peter. I reminded him that we were suffering much from the present situation of the Church in which this teaching and this primacy were being held to scorn. And I added: “We are ready to write the Creed with our own blood, to sign the anti-modernist oath, the profession of faith of Pius IV, we accept and make our own all the councils up to the Second Vatican Council about which we express some reservations.” In all this, we are convinced that we remain faithful to the line of conduct indicated by our founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, whose reputation we hope to soon see restored.

(Photo: Bishop Bernard Fellay, 13 Jan 2006/Franck Prevel)

“Consequently, we wish to begin these “talks” — which the decree acknowledges to be “necessary” — about the doctrinal issues which are opposed to the Magisterium of all time…  during these discussions with the Roman authorities we want to examine the deep causes of the present situation, and by bringing the appropriate remedy, achieve a lasting restoration of the Church.”

Here Fellay clearly says the bishops are still opposed to some Vatican II reforms and that Catholicism needs “the appropriate remedy.” Can we assume that when he says the appropriate remedy, he means the SSPX remedy?

In the decree lifting the excommunications, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, says the pope agreed to this step after reading in Fellay’s letter a pledge…

“…of sparing no effort to go further in the necessary discussions with the Authorities of the Holy See concerning the issues still pending, and thus of being able to reach quickly a full and satisfactory solution of the problem …

“…Wishing that this step be followed without delay by the full communion with the Church of all the Society of Saint Pius X, in testimony of a true fidelity and genuine recognition of the Magisterium and of the authority of the Pope by the proof of visible unity.”

It seems the SSPX is saying it will defend its views in these talks, i.e. not accept Vatican II reforms it opposes, while the Vatican hopes it can find a solution. On the basis of what we have so far, this seems even less demanding of the SSPX than the conditions that Castrillon Hoyos presented in his ultimatum last June that Fellay turned down. They included prior commitments to avoid criticising the pope in public and claiming there was a magisterium superior to his teaching. So unless these conditions are written somewhere else, it would appear the Vatican has basically accepted the SSPX conditions for ending this split.

The Vatican documents don’t mention the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of the SSPX whose schismatic act of consecrating the four rebel bishops (including Fellay) in 1988 formalised the split between Rome and the SSPX. He apparently remains excommunicated. In his letter, Fellay says the SSPX hopes for his prompt rehabilitation. That hasn’t stopped the website of the French SSPX province from posting a video of Lefebvre announcing that he has been rehabilitated (with Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus in the background):

“The video of the rehabilitated Archbishop Lefebvre”

Of all the denunciations of greed coming from the pulpits in this financial crisis, few have had as much sting as the attack that Bishop Wolfgang Huber of Berlin delivered just before Christmas. Huber, who as council chairman of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) is the country’s top Protestant prelate, singled out the head of the biggest German bank when he lambasted top financiers for their rush for profits.

(Photo: Bishop Wolfgang Huber, 5 Nov 2006/Alex Grimm)

Referring to Josef Ackermann, he told the Berliner Zeitung that he hoped “a Deutsche Bank chief executive should never again set a profit goal of 25 per cent.” Such goals fuelled excessive profit expectations and amounted to a form of idolatry, he said. “In these circumstances, money has become a god.”

The bank angrily rejected his criticism as “inappropriate.”

Now comes the news that Huber has apologised to Ackermann. “Since many have suspected I was personally attacking Mr Ackermann, I have apologised to him,” he told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung. “The issue now is not to criticise a single person, it must be to discuss at length what led to this financial crisis. And what we must avoid, so as not to fall into equally destructive mechanisms again.”

Many religious leaders’ comments about the crisis seemed a bit tame considering all the damage it’s done and the way few if any business leaders have accepted any blame. At least Huber was clear. Was his comment really over the top? Are critics not allowed to single out prominent business leaders who they think contributed to this mess?

(Photo: Josef Ackermann, 17 Nov 2008/Kai Pfaffenbach)

The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the author’s alone. The author is Program Director at the Interfaith Center of New York. He is writing a book about Interfaith and Civil Society.

By Matthew Weiner

The choice of Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation, and the drama surrounding it, was President-elect Barack Obama’s latest carefully planned move to prove that he is not a far out liberal, but instead mainstream. Obama is good at the art of compromise, but also at improvisation. The liberal outcry that followed, and his addition of the openly gay Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson to join the party, continues to demonstrate his skill as political tai chi master.

(Photo: Obama and Warren at Saddleback Church,17 Aug 2008/Mark Avery)

But Obama would be more in keeping with his own sense of diversity if he had the first ever interfaith invocation. Instead of a single speaker from a single religion, why not have many from a diversity of faiths and political positions? Instead of a liberal Christian or an evangelical Christian, he could have a conservative Christian, a liberal Jew, and a Muslim, a Buddhist  and a Hindu (or any such combination).

Interfaith as it has developed over the last century is often misunderstood. It does not mean many religious groups merging into a kind of single religion or religious Esperanto. Nor does it mean different religions holding hands in a kumbaya moment. Instead, good interfaith takes place when different religious traditions offer their own unique perspectives, one after another, in a shared public space. It allows people to remain who they are, amidst others who do the same.

Interfaith events hold the basic symbolic value of bringing everyone together, and this upcoming situation clearly calls for such a strategy. In fact it does so in Obama fashion far more than his current choice of a single conservative voice, no matter what his pragmatic arguments are.

This is why we should be happy for Robinson’s inclusion, but distressed by his idea of not giving a Christian prayer. It’s important to see upstanding Christians who are homosexual. But when a Christian bishop speaks not for Christians but for other faiths, it is actually a bad day for the other religions. Someone else is speaking for them (and that person is usually a Christian). Other faiths must speak for themselves. Good liberal Christians get themselves in trouble when they think they can be somehow universal or speak for everyone.

(Photo: Robinson outside the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, 21 July, 2008)

Would an interfaith vocation create a happy ending to Obama’s predicament?

Not for everyone. It would, however, challenge groups on both sides of the aisle. Conservative commentators tend to criticize interfaith as New Age or liberal fluff. But if Warren were only one of many leaders standing together, they could hardly do so. They may have to see interfaith as a decent way to go, where they can keep their views, but engage more and politicize less. It could reconfigure interfaith all together, galvanizing evangelicals to the growing interfaith movement.

It would also challenge liberals, who tend to see interfaith as their turf. In a way similar to Robinson, it is far too often that liberal religious leaders claim they are a diverse group speaking in one voice, only to be religiously but not culturally, theologically or politically diverse. Instead, if Obama had an interfaith invocation that included conservatives, a real range of diversity would stand together on nobody’s reserved turf.

Such a strategy would be refreshing and could signal a new way of doing business when it comes to religion. It may make for a reconsideration of the overly Christian Faith-Based Initiative, once the new administration has a chance to focus on things other than war and the economy.

And perhaps it could re-announce what public religion has always meant (or supposed to mean) in our American context: a vibrant mixture of conservative and liberal religious groups from every faith, engaged in our civic sphere, fostering our shared democratic tradition.

Matthew Weiner is the program director at the Interfaith Center of New York and is writing a book about interfaith in New York City.

(Photo: Leaders of the world’s major religions at an interfaith conference in Nicosia, 18 Nov 2008/Andreas Manolis)

Of all the things to get exercised about, yoga would seem to be an unlikely candidate for controversy. But such has been the case in Malaysia this week.

Malaysia’s prime minister declared on Wednesday that Muslims can after all practice the Indian exercise regime, so long as they avoid the meditation and chantings that reflect Hindu philosophy. This came after Malaysia’s National Fatwa Council told Muslims to roll up their exercise mats and stop contorting their limbs because yoga could destroy the faith of Muslims.

It has been a tough month for the fatwa council chairman, Abdul Shukor Husin, who in late October issued an edict against young women wearing trousers, saying that was a slippery path to
lesbianism. Gay sex is outlawed in Malaysia.

The council’s rulings, and other religious controversies, might at first blush seem to indicate a growing strain of conservative Islam in mostly Muslim Malaysia. But it could also
reflect the growing unease of Islamic authorities in defending the faith in a rapidly modernising Malaysia where non-Muslims constitute 40 percent of the population and are increasingly
asserting their rights.

The yoga fatwa stirred up a hornet’s next, not only in the blogosphere where that could be expected, but in another deeply conservative Malaysian institution — the sultans.  Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah, who presides ceremonially over the central state of Selangor, said Abdul’s fatwa council should have consulted the nine hereditary Malay rulers who take turns being Malaysia’s king before announcing the ruling.  The highly unusual comment from one of the sultans on a
policy matter suggests some discord about who speaks for Malaysia’s Muslims on matters of faith. Islam is the official religion in multi-religious Malaysia and the constitution designates the nine sultans as guardians of the faith. The (rotating) king is the head of Islam in Malaysia.

The sultans, for their part, have seen what remains of their secular powers eroded over the years, particularly under the two-decade administration of former prime minister Mahathir
Mohamad. They could be defending a last bastion of royal prerogoative in the religious arena.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badaw, who has been preaching a moderate brand of Islam called Islam Hadhari, moved to contain the damage saying Muslims can do exercises like the “sun
salutation” so long as they don’t start chanting.

The fatwa council’s rulings, in any case, are not legally binding until they are adopted as national laws or sharia (Islamic) laws in individual states. There seems to be little appetite for that. No laws have been made against young women wearing trousers. The government in May dropped a proposal to restrict women from travelling abroad by themselves after a storm of derision from women activist groups.

But even as the flap over yoga is relaxing, the government is crossing swords with Christian groups.

A Christian federation  claimed Bibles were seized at entry points earlier this year. Malaysian Catholics are having an ontological argument with the authorities about the word “Allah”.
The government banned the Malay-language section of a Catholic weekly newspaper from using the word, saying it creates confusion among Muslims. Catholics say Allah is simply the Arabic word for
“God”, and has long been used in Malay-language Bibles. (A Dutch bishop has stirred debate in Europe with a similar argument)

Non-muslims, who constitute 40 percent of Malaysia’s population, sometimes worry that things such as the fuss over fatwas and words for God, may augur a mini-clash of civilisations in Malaysia, which last year saw a harsh crackdown on Indian rights protesters. It was one year ago that 10,000 ethnic Indians defied tear gas and waterr cannon to voice complaints of racial and religious discrimination in its biggest ever anti-government street protest.