Indeed, few of those Catholics who now hold the Pope explicitly responsible [e.g., Mundabor, CFN etc...] for the volt face that has returned us to the "point of departure" as Bishop Fellay describes it, would deny that there have been forces in the Vatican, predating the Council, who have often worked behind the scenes to the confusion of the faithful.
We go now from the encouraging words of Msgr Nicola Bux and others, to this cold, uncompromising and anti-rational insistence that 2 + 2 = 5 and that a document which almost no one in the clergy or the episcopacy obeys is somehow binding on the SSPX.
After reading that the new head of the CDF is like a goat to a gardener, by his own admission. I further noticed that he also likes a version of the "big tent" analogy often employed by American pro-abort politicians like Nancy Pelosi or any of their dissident confreres with collars and Sr. next to their name who refuse to leave the Church for greener, or at least more lunar, pastures spiritually speaking.
It is now an irony that the Society of St. Pius X, which was friendly to the Saint Benedict Center in better days, now finds itself at that same juncture which Father Feeney and the Saint Benedict Center found themselves in 1945, ranged against a mostly insensitive and unintelligent but effective opposition against the dogma that "there is no salvation outside of the Catholic Church", so flatly denied by Cardinal Cushing and the Jesuits who attempted to silence Father Feeney.
Cardinal Cushing was perhaps one of the earliest exponents of the Seamless Garment issue and continuing on in the Americanist tradition of his Irish forebears ++Gibbon and ++Ireland. He was interested primarily in satisfying the concerns of his Jewish friends, upset that Father Feeney and his band took the Apostolic Mandate to go forth and convert all nations seriously, were angry that their children were being brought under the Catholic fold. Certainly, the famous interaction of Bobby Kennedy, who was not friendly to the Center, was a significant concern to cause the "Court Chaplain of the Kennedies" to act decisively.
[True Compass A Memoir by Ted Kennedy] discussed it with our father one weekend at the Cape house. I well remember the conversation.
Dad could not believe that Bobby had heard Father Feeney correctly. “But,” he said, “if you feel strongly that you did, I’m going to go into the other room and call Richard. Maybe he’ll want you to go up to Boston and see him.”
“Richard” was Richard Cardinal Cushing. Dad and the cardinal enjoyed a long and profound friendship. . . .
Bobby said he felt strongly indeed. Bang! Dad called up “Richard” and arranged for Bobby to visit him. The cardinal, as nonplussed as Dad, sent some of his people over to hear Father Feeney’s Thursday evening lecture. When he found that my brother was right, Cushing banned Feeney from speaking there; Feeney refused to obey the order, and in September 1949 the archdiocese formally condemned the priest’s teaching. . . . In February 1952, Father Feeney was excommunicated.
It was one of many crude misrepresentations of the Catholic Church to come.
In 1945, Father Feeney was only taking Christ at His word and hadn't yet formulated his famous opposition to the theorizing of scholastics in the form of Baptism of Desire, Blood and Invincible Ignorance. Yet this was enough to get the SBC banned or fired from Boston College and Father banished from the Jesuits who had called him in 1942 to another position.
The words of Cardinal Di Noia and Archbishop Muller should be familiar to many in this controversy, for they are essentially the same words as employed by Cardinal Cushing and many detractors of both the St. Benedict Center AND the SSPX.
He says, incredibly:
The Council did say there are elements of grace in other religions, and I don’t think that should be retracted. I’ve seen them, I know them — I’ve met Lutherans and Anglicans who are saints.
