Paix liturgique

In the letter from *Paix Liturgique* No. 1347, Father Claude Barthe skillfully sets out to define the spirit and letter of the rupture contained in chapters 21 through 27 of the Dogmatic Constitution *Lumen Gentium* of the Second Vatican Council. More precisely, it is still a matter, even today, of understanding the extraordinary magisterial and juridical implosion that allowed the residual Christianity of Catholic countries to be destroyed, rather than fostering a genuine revival. And to discern the root cause of this disaster, perpetually denied by episcopates who, forgetting that they will be held accountable before God, refuse, in the name of Vatican II, to grieve over it.

The FSSPX’s announcement regarding episcopal consecrations in early July 2026 is an invitation to Pope Leo XIV to validate these upcoming consecrations, rather than to take offense at them. The aim is to ordain bishops who are certainly Catholic, so that they in turn may ordain priests who are certainly Catholic. Is there not here, for a reigning pope, an unadulterated joy to be shared from a heart animated solely by missionary zeal?

Is the reigning pope ready to lay bare his heart, in the manner of Célimène, pressed in this by Alceste, who wants her to follow him into the desert and renounce, for his sake, the frivolous world? The beloved, as we know, wanting the beloved without renouncing the world, renounces the beloved who is too demanding. Will Leo XIV, who yielded to the demands of Communist China, validate bishops unilaterally designated as Catholic, and why not the six bishops consecrated by Bishop Williamson, all of whom contest the alleged authority of the Second Vatican Council?

What the state of necessity entails to legitimize this legal concept is not in contradiction with the 1983 Code of Canon Law, since the priority of the salvation of souls is common to both. The question is no longer whether a bishop endowed with geographical jurisdiction is identifiable and accessible, but whether the latter, according to Lumen Gentium, as “successor and delegate of Christ,” retains his power of jurisdiction—and thus his power of order—if he wishes to remain faithful to Christ rather than to the reigning pope. This is the question that Father Barthe raises, de facto, by astutely noting that the proper, ordinary, and immediate power defined by LG 27, while received directly from Christ with the consent of the “supreme authority of the Church,” is nonetheless subject to the Vicar of Christ in order to be validly exercised. Thus the bishop possesses a “proper” power that is nonetheless conditioned—despite or because of its extension to the entire Church—to the good pleasure of the reigning pope and his personal religion. “He who gives and takes away is the son of Satan,” as the saying once went.

Any faithful person who categorically rejects the academic hypothesis of a Vicar of Christ who is unfaithful to Christ—and who would therefore be outraged by such a conjecture—cannot read without emotion Cardinal Re’s response to Bishop Vigano, who, having been excommunicated in 2024, met His Eminence face to face on January 27 of this year and heard him say: “We must obey the Pope, even if the Pope no longer obeys the Lord.” Thus, the Cardinal, who possesses sufficient clarity to see that the reigning Pope no longer obeys the Lord, intends to maintain the faithful’s obedience to the Vicar, despite the Vicar’s betrayal.

Faced with this aberration—which maintains unconditional obedience despite the Vicar’s injustice toward Christ, whose disobedience is acknowledged yet without diriment effect—it is the logic of Panurge’s sheep, deadly if ever there was one, that looms large. It is Pantagruel against Saint Paul, and his anathema against any “new revelation” that disturbs the faith of the simple. Such, however, is the logic of LG 27, whatever qualifications that same chapter may contain to serve as a pretext. This logic is as follows: the Bishop of Rome is the only bishop with unconditional jurisdiction. All bishops with territorial jurisdiction are bound, under the guise of communion, to unconditional submission. Any dissenting bishop risks losing his territorial jurisdiction, whether he is removed or resigns. All that remains to the reprobate is ordinal jurisdiction, which is irremovable but may be prohibited. This is the only jurisdiction required by the SSPX, which regards the possibility of prohibition as proof of Roman error, and the state of necessity as a corollary of probable Roman prohibition.

Abbé Barthe easily demonstrates the Council’s departure from the episcopal theology repeatedly emphasized by Pius XII. The Council’s promotion of bishops—whose territorial or functional jurisdiction becomes the metonymy, or more simply the Achilles’ heel, of each one within a hypostatized communion encompassing the entire Church—compels them to a common and singular voice, that which the reigning pope approves. Thus, the terrifying conciliar virus has succeeded in diverting the missionary and salvific action of the vital core of the Church by placing it at the service of universal brotherhood, that Babel of “monotheisms” which erases the face of Christ the Redeemer, the one and only Way, Truth, and eternal Life. A perverse interplay between the actuality and virtuality of every “Greatness,” wishing to persevere in being, reminds every Ordinary of André Gide’s maxim regarding the USSR in 1937: “To be happy, conform!”

It is not surprising that the traditional Fraternities—whose legalized, or more accurately tolerated, existence would not have been effective without the 1988 consecrations, and some of which deny any debt in this regard at the risk of a questionable mythology—are tormented by the prospect of a costly choice between a rock and a hard place. Between their fidelity to the Church of all time, with its deferred reward, and the bitter pill of an imposed silence regarding the drama the Catholic Church has been experiencing since the disastrous Second Vatican Council—a silence rewarded day by day, albeit meagerly, by the local Ordinary. For the faithful worthy of the name—soldiers of Christ and not Swiss Guards—a clarification is on the horizon, though many torments will precede it. To ramp up the stress, Rame, following his “viral” logic, will do nothing other than what Rame has been doing since 1962: challenging men of good will to continue thinking as the Church of all time has formed them, at the risk of subjugation for minds resistant to the conciliar dogma. Rame remains the master of sanctions, however abusive they may be.