Bishop Bernard Fellay The inclusion of the leader of a breakaway group among the signatories of a letter accusing Pope Francis of “promoting heretical interpretations” of Amores Laetitia, his exhortation on marriage and the family, has been described as “a tactical error” by a prominent papal biographer.
Billed as the first ‘filial correction’ of a Pope since 1333, and originally submitted to Pope Francis on August 11, the published 25-page letter is signed by 62 academics and clerics, the highest profile of whom is Bishop Bernard Fellay of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X (SSPX).
Dr Fellay was excommunicated when he was illicitly ordained in 1988, and although Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunication in 2009, as recently as this May the Vatican stated that the SSPX would not be in full communion with the Church until it met a series of conditions.
“It’s understandable why the signatories invited Fellay to sign, given that none of the world’s 5,000 sitting bishops in communion with Rome wanted to,” Dr Austen Ivereigh told The Irish Catholic. “But it was a tactical error. It proved what any observers of the names knew: this is a fringe group of traditionalists hostile to the whole path of the Church since Vatican II. The fulminations in the document against modernism and Lutheranism demonstrate the worldview.”
Loathing
Dr Ivereigh described the authors of the document as “a heterogenous alliance of disparate folk united only by their loathing of Pope Francis”, who were “criticising not just magisterial teaching, but one that is fruit of the largest and deepest process of ecclesial discernment by the college of bishops since Vatican II”.
Owing to the letter’s length and denseness, detailed responses to it have not so far been forthcoming from commentators, with attention so far focusing on the signatories.
These include Latin Mass Society chairman Dr Joseph Shaw and Fr John Hunwicke of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, both of whom were – with 16 other signatories – among the 45 authors of a letter to the cardinals of the Church last summer, urging them to ask the Pope to repudiate the errors they alleged were in Amores Laetitia.
“The technique deployed is to accuse Francis of heretical views and demand that he condemn them, and when he doesn’t, to use this as proof of heresy,” said Dr Ivereigh, continuing, “Torquemada would have been proud.”