The Old Guard vs The Swiss Guard

Fr Tim Finigan has some fun with dear, dotty old Hans Küng, who, in an "argument" decidedly reminiscent of the Lefebvrist one about the unchangeable universality of the frequently changed and never-universal Tridentine Missal, has claimed that an Apostolic Constitution of Paul VI invalidates any subsequent ordinations to the Episcopate according to the previous Roman Rite, such as those by Archbishop Lefebvre. (I myself await the judgement of the Holy Father as to whether it is possible to have a Catholic intention to confer the Episcopate contrary to the express will of the Roman Pontiff, as such. So there is a question of validity. Just not the one posed by Küng.)

But he goes further: if the Pope permits the reconciliation as bishops of those thus invalidly ordained, then he will have committed a schismatic act, and thus forfeited his position. Küng is not only a sort of Lefebvrist; he is a full-blown sedevacantist. Ha, Ha, Ha, and all that. But Küng is a nasty piece of work. His disparagement of Blessed John Paul the Great’s Polishness made and make them the authentic voice of the age-old Teutonic racism against the Slavs. He only gets away with it because he is Swiss. As a foreign preacher of hate, he ought not to be permitted to enter the United Kingdom. Blessed John Paul is a kind of litmus test, which Lefebvrists and all points right fail along with liberals and those, such as Küng, who have, in the words of the dissident American nuns, "moved beyond Jesus".

Yet the Swiss, by and large, are a Good Thing in the Church. It gladdens my Dominican heart that orthodoxy is robustly maintained at Fribourg, just as it does that English seminarians in Rome now receive their philosophical formation at the Angelicum. It was to Fribourg that Lefebvre originally directed disgruntled Francophone seminarians in Rome, although that institution, located right on the Helvetic Confederation’s internal linguistic border, is uniquely bilingual. And there are several solidly orthodox serving Swiss bishops. Like the professors, never mind the students, at Fribourg, they are really very considerably younger than Hans Küng.