Michael Matt's video is a must see. He presents the situation very well.
"The faith must survive in someone!...The thing that unites us is the Catholic faith itself.....God has given us, even in the midst of this darkness, He has given us oases of light....God has not left us orphans. He has not abandoned us, Yes the shepherd has been struck with the sheep. Maybe we don't need to scatter as much as we thought. Because God has provided us faithful shepherds....So what do we do? We support them.
Can anyone really deny that a state of emergency exists? If anyone is in schism it's the German bishops with their denial of fundamental truths and apostates in roman collars who preach another gospel, one that normalizes sodomy and adultery.
The SSPX has not abandoned the Church or the faith of our fathers. In fact, I offer a challenge. Go to an SSPX chapel. Talk to the priests. Have coffee with the parishioners after Mass. You will find the Church of the ages living out the faith as it was practiced for millennia.
Crisis Magazine recently published an article, The SSPX is Not the Problem. Darrick Taylor, the author, identifies the problem well:
The problem is that the Catholic Church has been attempting to modernize itself over the past six decades plus in order to accommodate itself to modern society; and one result of this has been massive confusion about what constitutes the Church. In practice, the Church has made so many alterations to virtually every aspect of its life that the average person has no idea any more what it means to be in or outside communion with the Church. If the SSPX vanished tomorrow, this problem would still exist; and it would still be just as dire and far from resolution as it is today. The SSPX is a symptom of this problem, not its cause.,,,
Whatever its faults (it had many), the Church prior to Vatican II was easy to recognize. It possessed definite forms in both doctrine and practice that an average person could easily identify. The SSPX keeps growing not because its priests and their lay adherents are horrible monsters lusting to foment schism but because they practice a recognizable form of the Catholic Faith as it has been known historically in the West.
This is significant because in many places in the contemporary Church there is precious little that marks them out as Catholic in its historic sense. The Church is plagued by what Martin Mosebach called “formlessness” in regard to liturgy, the lack of definite identity brought on by modernization. This same critique easily applies to doctrine, governance, identity, political messaging, etc. This absence of form—of identity—is the result of the Church’s attempt to remake itself for the consumption of the modern world, which redrew the map of Catholicism as it were, leaving its boundaries fluid and its stability questionable.
The Church wants the faithful to serve her: to donate time and treasure and to sacrifice large portions of their lives to her. But no one is going do this if the faith they want to pass on to their children is going change with every pontificate, or the parish they worked so hard to build is going to be deconstructed by the next bishop for being too “backwardist” or insufficiently loyal to Vatican II.
We are, indeed, in a crisis! Michael Matt does a good job of explaining the history of the crisis and the current situation. Since 1988, things have become much clearer about the Providential decision of Archbishop Lefebvre to ordain bishops to save the priesthood and for the salvation of souls. Going forward, I think many who previously criticized his move, including Cardinal Burke, may change their minds and come to the defense of these faithful sons of the Church. Let us pray for that and not fear the ordination of new bishops by the SSPX to continue their work of forming priests and working for the salvation of souls.
I'll close with this quote for Taylor's article:
the SSPX...will continue to grow, since within it one can still find communities practicing something like the historic Catholic Faith rather than the lifeless gray goo that is force fed to most Catholics....I believe it is the hierarchy and the leadership of the Church that is ultimately responsible for this impasse. For they have the authority and, thus, the responsibility before God; so the blame for the crisis which birthed the SSPX must fall at their door. It is because so many of them have neglected if not abandoned their flocks—where they have not actively tried to drive them out—that so many have sought pasture outside of their fold.
It's hard to argue with that!
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