Vatican intentions…lost and recovered

Even when intentions are clearly state, the Press can get them wrong or ignore them for more sensationalism.

But the Vatican has come to realize, in this week’s controversy, that they need to overhaul their “communications culture” to more clearly and fully tell their message in a sound bite culture.

Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican’s chief spokesman, has acknowledged that improvements are required in how the Vatican publicizes its actions…

The Vatican spokesman was speaking in the context of the continuing controversy that erupted late last month, following announcement of Pope Benedict XVI’s lifting of the excommunications of four bishops belonging to the Society of St. Pius X.

One of the four bishops, Bishop Richard Williamson, made Holocaust-denying comments on Swedish television immediately before the lifting of the excommunications was announced. The Vatican subsequently said the Pope was unaware of Bishop Williamson’s remarks when he acted on the excommunications.

Yes, this whole episode was mishandled by communications people, and by certain members of the SSPX in their reading of what it meant. Now, professional journalists are doing the best job of critiquing and explaining.

Sandro Magister, veteran Vatican watcher, critiques:

The lifting of excommunication followed other previous gestures of openness, also decided personally by the pope…

As he had done before, this time as well Benedict XVI did not demand in advance anything from the Lefebvrists in return. So far, all of his acts of openness have been unilateral. The pope’s critics have seized upon this in order to accuse him of naivety, or appeasement, or even of wanting to take the Church back to before Vatican Council II.

Here’s the key to understanding the essence of this whole thing:

In reality, Benedict XVI has explained his intention absolutely clearly, in one of the key addresses of his pontificate, the one delivered to the Roman curia on December 22, 2005. In that speech, pope Ratzinger maintained that Vatican II did not mark any rupture with the Church’s tradition, but in fact it was in continuity with tradition even where it seemed to mark a clear break with the past, for example when it recognized religious freedom as an inalienable right of every person.

And here’s the key to understanding the core issue in George Weigel’s analysis:

Williamson’s inanities, while deplorable and disgusting, are something of a sideshow, however. For the highest stakes in this drama hove into view when Bishop Bernard Fellay, the current head of the Lefebvrist movement, issued a Jan. 24 letter on the lifting of the excommunications to the movement’s faithful. It is an astonishing document, declaring as it does that “Catholic Tradition is no longer excommunicated” and that the Lefebvrists constitute those “Catholics attached to Tradition throughout the world.” The letter goes on to affirm “all the councils up to the Second Vatican Council about which we express some reservations.” And it implies that the talks that will now commence between the Vatican and the Lefebvrists, now that the excommunications have been lifted, will focus on those “reservations.”….. 

Father Federico Lombardi, SJ, the pope’s spokesman, emphasized to reporters on Jan. 24 that the lifting of the excommunications did not mean that “full communion” had been restored with the Lefebvrists. The terms of such reconciliation are, presumably, the subject of the “talks” to which Bishop Fellay referred in his letter.

[emphasis added]

Those talks should be interesting indeed. For it is not easy to see how the unity of the Catholic Church will be advanced if the Lefebvrist faction does not publicly and unambiguously affirm Vatican Council II’s teaching on the nature of the church, on religious freedom, and on the sin of anti-Semitism. Absent such an affirmation, pick-and-choose cafeteria Catholicism will be reborn on the far fringes of the Catholic right, just when it was fading into insignificance on the dwindling Catholic left, its longtime home.