Join the Conversation
Send your thoughts to Letters to the Editor. Learn more
Last summer, I wrote these words:
A Council unleashes a variety of centrifugal forces and after most Councils, the subsequent years, when the Council is being received by the entire Church, are times when the Church reintroduces centripetal forces. Many progressive Catholics have felt alienated by this reintroduction, starting with Humanae Vitae and continuing, even accelerating, during the pontificates of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. (It took more than 150 years after Trent for Rome to condemn Jansenism, a long simmering aspect of quasi-heretical and eventually thoroughly heretical reform efforts unleashed by Trent, but we live in faster times!) Progressive Catholics thought they were moving in one direction, only to be told to head back to the center. Something similar happened to the Lefebvrists, only it happened immediately after the Council. The direction in which they had been going since their youth was suddenly foreclosed. They experienced the Council as a rupture, just like their liberal counterparts, but they hated the new paths that were opened and which the liberals were moving down as fast as they could.
Many people, on both the left and the right, took umbrage at my equating the Lefebvrists with the Progressives in their shared attitude towards the Council, but I stand by the observation.
Now, this report at Vatican insider explains that I am not the only one who is making that observation! Welcome to the club Abp Muller and be prepared for the attacks.
