THE ALLEGED EXCOMMUNICATIONS

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     It is a principle of the Church’s philosophy that every act is specified by its end.  What an act is - its quiddity - is a function of why it is done, of the end it exists to serve.  To understand the nature of the declared ‘excommunications’, then, one must know why they were declared.

 

Apart from his function as holder of the office of successor of Peter, Vicar of Christ, Head of Christ’s Church—which is of God— Pope Leo XIV holds another office.  He is the chief executive of a secular entity its members regard as identical with Christ’s Church, although it is not.  This entity, which has had various names since 1965, is recognised almost universally now, as the Church of Vatican II.  It is a counterfeit of Christ’s Church, a creation of man, and the devil.  It is a counterfeit because, instead of proclaiming, and promoting, Catholic principle, it promotes the nostrums of the Modernist heresy which the Church condemned in 1907.

 

In announcing the ‘excommunications’, Pope Leo, through Cardinal Fernandez, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, purported to speak as Vicar of Christ, purported, that is, to exercise the Power of the Keys.  Why did he do so?  Ostensibly, to punish the bishops of the SSPX, their priests and faithful, for refusing to comply with a directive to refrain from consecrating bishops without a papal mandate.  Actually, that is, in fact, he exercised, or purported to exercise, the power because the bishops refused to accept the determinations of the synod held between 1962 and 1965, labelled a ‘Second Vatican Council’.  They refused because those determinations were riddled with elements of the Modernist heresy.

 

In these circumstances, did Pope Leo exercise the Power of the Keys for the end intended by Christ, the welfare of His Church and of the Catholic faithful?  Or did he only purport to do so, acting all the while as chief executive of the counterfeit for the merely human ends of that diabolical entity?  This is the question for the faithful.

 

Why determines what: why someone does something determines the character of what he does.  Since the act was performed not to advance the interests of the Catholic Church, but the heretical interests of its counterfeit, the character of the act was not Catholic but heretical.  Therefore, the claim that it was done as an exercise of the Power of the Keys, is false.

 

In his authoritative text, The Church of the Word Incarnate published in 1955, Charles Journet, Professor of the Major Seminary at Fribourg, wrote:

“In conferring on Peter the supreme authority Jesus admonishes him that its use is to be governed by love; he is to feed, not to oppress; and to feed sheep, not goats or wolves; sheep that belong to Him, that are His.  Peter's care for them is to reflect that of Jesus.  If he fails Jesus will judge him; we are not, for all that, dispensed from obeying him, unless indeed something manifestly immoral should be commanded—a thing which… will be possible only in the sphere of particular decisions.”[1]

 

The SSPX called on Pope Leo in charity to allow them to consecrate bishops unsullied by the Modernist protocols of the Vatican synod, that they might maintain the fulness of the Catholic faith and their adherence to Catholic principle in the Millennial Roman rite of Holy Mass.  Its members appealed to him as the Shepherd of Christ’s sheep that they might be fed.  He refused to listen to them, first.  Then he refused their appeal.  This refusal amounted to oppression because, implicitly, it required them to submit themselves and the faithful in their care, against their collective will, to the protocols of Modernism via Modernist bishops and priests.  But, worse than this, because it required them to do something against their Catholic faith, it required them to obey him in something manifestly immoral.

 

In these circumstances, the theological principle exposed by Fr Journet, afterwards Archbishop and Cardinal of the Catholic Church, exposes the decree as ineffectual and its purported penalties, likewise, as ineffectual.

 

There is a supplementary consideration.  In support of the alleged ‘excommunications’, Cardinal Fernandez purports to rely on the authority of the motu proprio of John Paul II, Ecclesia Dei (July 2^nd, 1988), which detailed the ‘excommunications’ of Archbishop Lefebvre and the bishops he and Bishop Castro de Meyer, consecrated on June 30^th, 1988.  The defects of that document have been exposed by this writer[2] as well as by others.  Its ineffectuality was tacitly acknowledged by Pope Benedict XVI when he lifted these ‘excommunications’ in January 2009.  He resiled, in his explanatory letter of March 10^th following, from his predecessor’s allegation that Archbishop Lefebvre, his co-consecrator, and the bishops consecrated, were guilty of schism, when he did no more than say that episcopal ordination lacking a pontifical mandate “raises the danger of schism”.  Cardinal Fernandez, and by implication, Pope Leo and his various advisers, have simply ignored the document’s shortcomings in their appeal to it as justifying the declarations.

 

There is a further consideration: Pope John Paul did not extend his purported exercise of authority in 1988 to the detriment, or apparent detriment, of the faithful served by the Society of St Pius X.  The prudence that attended his conduct is missing in the conduct of Pope Leo.  There is a reason for this, a worldly reason.  The Society, and its burgeoning influence among the Catholic faithful, present a growing challenge to his authority.  He thinks it a challenge to his papal authority.  It is not.  The Society and each of its members, support him as Pope.  What the Society challenges is his worldly authority as head of the Church of Vatican II.  It is that challenge that he cannot tolerate.

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     There is an alternative, and simpler, way of looking at the charade played out in Rome on July 2^nd.  The Pope’s declaration of excommunication succeeds, but only to this extent: it serves to excommunicate bishops, priests and faithful of the SSPX from the Church of Vatican II.  Since none of them have ever been members of that appalling institution, the declaration need not trouble them.

 

 

Michael Baker

July 5^th, 2026—Sixth Sunday after Pentecost