Excommunicated all the way down to the pews, and with the faculties to witness marriages and to hear Confessions revoked, the Society of Saint Pius X and its adherents have become the Lefebvrian or Lefebvrist denomination. That is far smaller than it habitually claims to be, unless the True Church really were Invisible after all. At least one of its new bishops was born into it and entered its seminary when he was all of 18. Preaching yesterday, he made himself far from the first to have revived the ancient heresy of Donatism.
How should we relate ecumenically to these separated brethren? By praying for them, as we did for the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, or for the Old Calendarists, or for the other bodies that did not yet want to know. There are millions of Old Calendarists, as there are many millions whose position is the same as the Ulster Free Presbyterians'. There are at most half a million Lefebvrists, and quite possibly as few as 100,000. Even in their own terms, why do they need six bishops?
The real news from the real Church is the appointment of Fr Stephen Wang, the Rector of the Venerable English College in Rome, as the next Bishop of Arundel and Brighton, in succession to Archbishop Richard Moth, who was one of 35 new archbishops to receive the pallium from the Holy Father on Monday. Ad multos annos to all concerned.
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