Word: vatican
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When the Pope lifted the excommunication of four ultra-conservative Roman Catholic bishops earlier this year, he was plunged into one of the worst controversies of his pontificate. Since then, the Vatican has been trying - not always with success - to explain that the group isn't fully back in Rome's embrace...
...tapped by Pope Benedict XVI to lead Vatican negotiations with the Lefebvrite movement says the controversial group remains in schism with the Catholic Church and that only its acceptance of the Second Vatican Council and obedience to the Pope can bring it fully back into the fold. In his first public comments since Benedict lifted the excommunication of the four bishops in January, Vatican doctrinal chief Cardinal William Levada tells TIME that important, and potentially insurmountable, differences still separate the Vatican and the group known as the Society of St. Pius X. Pointing to the Pope's letter last month...
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...