GOD BLESS OUR POPE: The contested excommunications are finally lifted

with acknowledgment to Gerald Warner

Benedict XVI grows in stature by the minute. To the achievement of the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, he has now added the sensible and overdue lifting of the always contested excommunications imposed on the four bishops of the SSPX. Although there was always widespread skepticism about the validity of those censures, their lifting removes a major roadblock to the restoration of the Church.

In the children’s animated cartoon, the Ice Age, a wooly mammoth, one of the principle characters, believes that he is the last of his species. However, half way through the story he is dlighted to find a female wooly mammoth to which he immediately takes a shine. Unfortunately, the female wooly mammoth his suffering from the delusion that she is a sloth and spends her time hanging upside down from trees, with disastrous consequences! Happily, with the aid of friends, she is persuaded over time that she is a mammoth. The final eureka moment comes when she realizes that her shadow is similar to that of the male wooly mammoth and they both live happy ever after.

What I found fascinating was watching the reaction of my grandchildren. They were fidgeting with frustration with this animal’s delusion. When the mist cleared and she accepted her “God given” nature, the collective relief was palpable.

The Church is the Ark of Salvation, the Body of Christ, the one true faith, the one true Church, founded by the God who threw the stars into their orbits and knit you and me together in our mother’s wombs; indeed, she is the very reason for the existence of the universe.

Yet for the past forty years, the Bride of Christ has been behaving as if there was no such thing as truth and error, right and falsehood, she was merely another religious tradition or one church among many. This widespread delusion and apparent insanity of our mother caused many orthodox Catholics to squirm with frustration. The lifting of the excommunications suggest that our mother is recovering from these delusions and her eureka moment may not now be far away. Then we shall all be able to breathe an enormous sigh of collective relief.

Not everyone will be dancing in the street of course: the Staff of the Tablet will probably need counseling - poor dears. Anything that moves the malign spirit of those who, without any conscious irony denominate themselves "liberals" to misery has to be great news.

Recently, a handful of Catholics, more noted for their mad optimism than solid faith, have been striving to persuade us to throw a party to "celebrate" the 50th anniversary of the calling of the Second Vatican Council. What sort of Catholic, one wonders, wants to celebrate the fact that in England and Wales in 1964, at the end of the Council, there were 137,673 Catholic baptisms; in 2003 the figure was 56,180. In 1964 there were 45,592 Catholic marriages, in 2003 there were 11,013. Mass attendance has fallen by 40 per cent. In "Holy" Ireland, only 48 per cent of so-called Catholics go to Mass. In France, there were 35,000 priests in 1980; today there are fewer than 19,000.

In the United States, in 1965, there were 1,575 priestly ordinations; in 2002 there were 450 - a 350 per cent decline. In 1965 there were 49,000 seminarians, in 2002 just 4,700. Today 15 per cent of US parishes are without priests. Only 25 per cent of America's nominal Catholics attend Mass. Worse still is the erosion of faith among those who ludicrously describe themselves as Catholics. Among US Catholics aged 18-44 (the children of Vatican II) as many as 70 per cent say they believe the Eucharist is merely a "symbolic reminder" of Christ.

To call this unparalleled implosion of the Church a "renewal" is a sign that one is as close to being a raving lunatic as one can get short of eating one’s own shirt - and to attribute it to the Holy Ghost is blasphemous.

The Catholic Church is in the same position as an alcoholic: until she admits that she has a problem, no cure is possible. The lifting of the contested excommunications is a sign that the Church is returning to mental health. Hopefully once the SSPX is back fully in the fold, they will be able to help prod our mother towards that final eureka moment when she once again fully and openly acknowledges and confesses her own God given nature.

Further down the road, another exciting prospect is that, once the final agreement is worked out, it opens the door to the canonization of Archbishop Lefebvre; that sadly I will not live to see.

In the meantime we can all look forward to sitting back and enjoying some innocent fun reading all the revisionist history being written by those who have been calumniating the SSPX for 20 years. Funniest of all will be the mental gymnastics of the post-Conciliar popeologist. These are the folk who if the Pope was to declare the sky green, would be peddling round excitedly telling everyone what a delightful shade of green the sky actually is.