Word: vatican
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Founded by the late French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre to oppose the 1960s reforms of the Second Vatican Council, the Society became a breakaway movement when four bishops were ordained in 1988 in defiance of Pope John Paul II, and Lefebvre and his four new bishops were promptly excommunicated. The already thorny decision in January to lift the surviving bishops' excommunication became one of the lowest moments in Benedict's papacy when it coincided with a shocking television interview with one of the bishops. Questioned on his views of the Holocaust, British-born Bishop Richard Williamson told a Swedish TV reporter...
...with the mutual decision in 1965 by Pope Paul VI and Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras to lift their 900-year-old reciprocal excommunications between leaders of Christianity's two oldest churches. "We rejoiced at this gesture aimed at Christian unity," Levada says during a 45-min. interview in his Vatican office. "But the removal of these excommunications did not end the schism that continues to exist between Catholicism and Orthodoxy...
...outstanding points of contention with the Lefebvre followers center on what Levada calls "obedience to the magisterium," or teaching authority, of the Pope, and specific decrees of the Second Vatican Council. "The Council is vast, and not all decrees are on the same level," Levada says. "The decree on religious liberty is one of the key issues that the Society has problems with." Lefebvre always opposed the reforms aimed at reaching out to other faiths. Levada insists there is much ground to cover in order to find out if the breakaway group is ready to rejoin the fold. "We will...
...over the reins of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, which has for nearly two decades been responsible for dealing with the Lefebvre followers. The Cardinal says the process will benefit from his congregation's body of some 30 theological advisers as well as from regular consultations with other key Vatican offices...
Levada will replace Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, who had spearheaded the talks that led to the lifting of the excommunications. Castrillon has been criticized by many inside and outside Rome, including Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi, who said the Colombian Cardinal should have known about Bishop Williamson's troubling views on the Holocaust. Levada does not take sides in the dispute but concedes that the Vatican was "a human structure, with its limitations and possibilities for improvement." Levada is quick to add that his own congregation, which was run for 24 years by the future Pope, was functioning like clockwork when...