Saint Joseph Catholic Church

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From Today's Gospel: "I give praise to you, Father, Lord of Heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to little ones. Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him" (Matt 11:25-27).

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Archbishop Georg Gänswein, the private secretary of the late Pope Benedict, decried the illicit consecration of four new SSPX bishops and said that “the story of the Lefebvrists is not a liturgical question,” as “their understanding of tradition is not tradition.”

“Rather, they cement the Catholic tradition up to Pius XII,” explained Archbishop Gänswein, now apostolic nuncio to three Baltic nations. “After that everything was over for them, that’s it, from that moment there were only mistakes.”

In remitting the excommunications of the four bishops illicitly consecrated in 1988, Pope Benedict was “like a father who tries to create peace—an outstretched hand that, unfortunately, they did not accept,” Archbishop Gänswein continued. “There was a radical fringe that prevailed.”

The prelate called for the repeal of Traditionis Custodes, Pope Francis’s 2021 apostolic letter restricting the extraordinary form of the Mass: “a wrong decision can and must be corrected ... I believe that Pope Francis has made a mistake, without realizing it.”

Condemning the Vatican’s decree of excommunication as “objectively unjust and invalid,” the superior general of the Society of Saint Pius X said in a letter to Pope Leo XIV that what the SSPX “has done, and will continue to do, is nothing other than an extraordinary initiative for the salvation of souls, amidst the doctrinal and moral confusion into which the Church is plunged.”

“We in no way claim to substitute ourselves for the Church, and we have no ambition other than to remain faithful to her,” Father Davide Pagliarani wrote in his July 3 letter. “In conscience, we did not believe we could evade the moral duty we owe to souls.”

“We are certain that one day You yourself, or one of Your successors, will wish to adopt the program of Saint Pius X: ‘To restore all things in Christ,’” Father Pagliarani added. “On that day, the Holy Father will discover, with great joy and profound consolation, authentically Catholic souls whose bond with the Church was never founded upon the shifting sands of an ambiguous dialogue, but upon the rock of the faith of Peter.”