Defense of The Faith
‘The First See Is Judged By No One’: The SSPX and Papal Halakha
Without all the lawyering and loopholing, it would cease to be Roman Catholicism.
Recently, UOJ editor Michael W. Davis penned an open letter to members of the Society of St. Pius X. In it, Mr. Davis invited Society members to consider the parallels between their recent excommunication and the events that led up to the Great Schism.
Mr. Davis’s letter has some valid insights. In both instances, Rome showed great tolerance for “progressives” while pursuing a zero-tolerance policy towards dissident “traditionalists.” In both instances, those traditionalists were the papacy’s strongest supporters. And in both instances, the progressives were protected and promoted by worldly powers.
Nevertheless, I’m afraid that Mr. Davis’s appeal will fall on deaf ears. Unlike the Orthodox Christians of 1054, the SSPX is not steeped in the Apostolic and Patristic Faith. Rather, they are heirs to post-schism Latin legalism.
As such, their response to the excommunications has not been to SUBMIT TO ROME™. They have not, pace Mr. Davis, been moved to reconsider their papist worldview. Rather, they counter the Vatican’s “papal lawyering” with papal lawyering of their own.
And why not? This is all they know.
Papal Lawyering and Jewish Halakha
The point of Rabbinic Judaism is, essentially, to trick God by finding loopholes in the halakha: the 613 rules which they believe God imposed on the Jewish people.
For instance, the halakha says that Jews may not travel from one domicile to another on the Sabbath. They get around this by tying a string around their village or neighborhood; they treat this string as a “wall,” and say that the village/neighborhood constitutes a single “house.”
Clearly, this is not what God meant when He gave this commandment! Hence. St. Paul warning that “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Cor. 3:6). Also the Lord’s teaching, “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27).
The response of the SSPX and its supporters have taken the same attitude towards the papal excommunication.
For instance, the traditionalist Catholic blog Rorate Coeli has published an article by the “Canon of Shaftesbury” (a pseudonym), who claims to be a judicial vicar in a major archdiocese. Shaftesbury claims that the decree is invalid—or at least not fully valid—according to the current Code of Canon Law. The author makes four basic arguments:
