Hierarchy Hates Critics

And it really hates competition

In case you’re unclear on why Alphas don’t like Sigmas and why organizations simply can’t tolerate them for long, this papal plea for respect for the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church should help you understand the structural basis for their instinctive reactions.

Pope Leo XIV on Tuesday begged a breakaway group of traditionalist Catholics to call off its plan to consecrate new bishops without his consent, calling the move a schismatic act and a “sin of extreme gravity.”

“I plead with you and ask you with all my heart: please turn back!” Leo wrote in a letter to the Rev. Davide Pagliarani, the superior of the Society of St. Pius X.

Leo issued the letter a day before the society planned to consecrate four new bishops at its seminary in Écône, Switzerland. Under church law, the consecrations constitute a schismatic act and incur automatic excommunication for the four bishops and the bishop administering the consecration.

The society, known as the SSPX, was founded in opposition to the modernizing reforms of the 1960s Second Vatican Council. Among other things, the council revolutionized the Catholic Church’s relations with other religions and the laity and allowed Mass to be celebrated in vernacular languages rather than Latin.

In 1988, SSPX founder Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre consecrated four bishops without papal consent, a grave crime under church law. The Vatican promptly excommunicated Lefebvre and the four other bishops, and the group today still has no legal status in the church.

The Vatican has warned that a similar fate awaits the new bishops.

In his letter, Leo repeated the Vatican’s offer of dialogue and said that going through with the consecrations would be counterproductive for the SSPX faithful.

“I urge you to consider carefully the spiritual good of the faithful, because the schismatic act you are about to undertake would deprive them of the licit, and in some cases, even valid reception of the sacraments,” he wrote.

Despite the original 1988 schismatic act, the group has continued to grow and today poses a threat to the Holy See as a parallel, ultra-Catholic, pre-Vatican II church. The SSPX counts two bishops, 751 priests, 264 seminarians, 145 religious brothers, 88 oblates and 250 religious sisters representing 50 nationalities, according to SSPX statistics.

Now, I’m not Catholic, nor am I much concerned about the particular fate of the post-Vatican II organization or the bishop of Rome. Nor is this post a place for anyone to make the case for his particular flavor of Christianity in preference to all of the others.

But it is revelatory of the extreme hostility that any organization harbors for even the smallest group of people who refuse to recognize its authority. There are approximately 406,996 Catholic priests, so what possible difference does it make if less than one-fifth of one percent of all the priests in the world refuse to go along with all of the theological and ideological nonsense of the last 70 years?

Just kick them out and forget about them. But somehow, that’s something that no organization can ever do. SFWA never paid anywhere nearly as much attention to me as it did AFTER the board orchestrated my fake “expulsion”.

And this is something that Gammas should always keep in mind. If you’re not going to accept the authority of the hierarchy and if you’re not going to go along with its decisions, then the right thing to do is to leave.