State of Necessity? But whose?
Aurelio Porfiri
As you know, a few days ago the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X announced the names of the four priests who will be consecrated bishops on July 1.
From the point of view of the Catholic Church, the consecration is illegitimate because these episcopal consecrations have not received the approval of the Pope.
I have read some statements from the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X in which they explained that this act of episcopal consecration should not be interpreted as a schismatic act or an act of disobedience toward the Roman Pontiff. They justify this decision — which they themselves understand to be very serious — by invoking a state of necessity.
At this point, some reflection is necessary.
They claim that, at the present time, the state of necessity that would justify these ordinations is even more serious than the one that moved Archbishop Lefebvre some decades ago (1988) to carry out the same act.
I believe that this appeal to a state of necessity is somewhat ambiguous, and I would like to explain why: who can truly judge that today the state of necessity is more serious than it was in the days of Archbishop Lefebvre? Because, if we reflect honestly, it is true that the Church is in a profound crisis. I have written this for many years, and it is something we can all observe. It is a crisis of identity, a crisis of liturgy, and a crisis of doctrine. There is no doubt that we are living through a deep crisis.
And I can also understand what moved Archbishop Lefebvre in the 1970s to try to create a reality in which a certain Catholic orthodoxy could be preserved, because we are speaking about the 1970s. Those years were truly terrible for the Catholic Church. They were years in which one heard every possible thing. The immediate post-Conciliar period was genuinely traumatic: priests abandoning the priesthood, the Dutch Catechism, various ideological claims, left-wing Catholicism. It was therefore a profoundly dramatic period.
It was also a dramatic period for the liturgy. We had come from the so-called liturgy of Saint Pius V, and then suddenly found ourselves with Masses accompanied by guitars, Masses with commercial-style music, priests inventing all kinds of things, and grassroots communities. In short, it was truly a time of great internal revolution within the Church.
Therefore, I can understand that Archbishop Lefebvre, in what we might call a desperate act, decided that it was necessary to establish a reality that would oppose this course of events. The state of necessity to which Archbishop Lefebvre referred in 1988 was probably related above all to the internal situation of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X. Archbishop Lefebvre realized that he was growing old, and therefore he wondered what would happen to the Fraternity after his death.
That is why this concern led him to ordain bishops illegitimately — four bishops.
Thus, this state of necessity did not concern so much (or not only) the situation of the Church, which certainly had its own serious problems and difficulties, but rather the survival of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X.
Now let us come to the present day.
