There have been several controversies surrounding the Society of St. Pius X, many of which concern political support for non-democratic regimes and alleged antisemitism.
Contents |
There is an overlap in French society between the SSPX's constituency of support and support for reactionary political positions. In the French context, such positions include:
Archbishop Lefebvre's first biographer, the English traditionalist writer Michael Davies wrote in the first volume of his Apologia Pro Marcel Lefebvre:
In 1977, a group of SSPX priests and laypeople led by Monsignor François Ducaud-Bourget entered the parish church of St Nicolas du Chardonnet in central Paris and celebrated Mass. They subsequently refused to leave, and the church remains in the possession of the SSPX to this day.
The various French municipal authorities have had ownership of the older churches in France since the enactment of the 1905 French law on the Separation of the Churches and the State, though the buildings are permitted to be used by the appropriate religious denominations. Ducaud-Bourget maintained that the Traditionalist Catholics represented by the SSPX were the true heirs of the Catholics of 1905. Although the occupation was declared illegal by the French courts,[10] the authorities reached the conclusion that, by comparison with forcibly evicting the SSPX, the continuing occupation would cause less disturbance to public order. An SSPX attempt in 1993 to occupy another church in Paris, that of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, was unsuccessful.
There have been statements by some members of the society which have been widely interpreted as antisemitic,[11][12] particularly regarding Holocaust denial.[13] The society itself denies the claim that anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism is rampant in important circles of the Society[14] The Society stated that it has lay supporters and even a priest with a Jewish background, a reference to Father Florian Abrahamowicz, whose views on the Jews have been interpreted as negative,[15][16] and who was expelled by the Italian chapter of the Society in February 2009.[17]
The views of Bishop Williamson have been a particular source of controversy. For example, the bishop has written:
In an interview with Swedish Television in November 2008, whose broadcast on 21 January 2009, the date on which the Holy See lifted the excommunication of the four SSPX bishops, gained wide publicity, Williamson repeated his opinion that the generally accepted history of the Holocaust is wrong. He accepted an estimate of only 200,000-300,000 Jews who perished in Nazi concentration camps, and denied that any were killed in gas chambers.[19] Subsequently, former SSPX seminarians have come forward with additional information about Williamson's Jewish views. One former seminarian characterized Williamson as "a sick man" with "a horrible attitude toward women and a horrible attitude toward Jews." [20] The Vatican has repudiated Williamson's views as "intolerable and altogether unacceptable." [21]
Williamson's views on this and other subjects are controversial even within traditionalist Catholicism. After his interview, broadcast by Swedish Television on 21 January 2009, both the Superior General of the SSPX, Bishop Fellay, and the District Superior of the SSPX in Germany, Fr. Franz Schmidberger, stated that Williamson's views represented his own personal opinions;[22] and Bishop Fellay, as superior general of the Society, "prohibited him, pending any new orders, from taking any public positions on political or historical questions".[23]
Although the SSPX authorities have thus distinguished Williamson's views from those of the Society, the Anti-Defamation League has accused the Society of St. Pius X of being "mired in anti-Semitism",[24] and journalist John L. Allen, Jr. has said it would be misleading to consider Williamson an isolated case: Father Florian Abrahamowicz, who after being the superior in Italy has since been expelled from the Society, also said he was not sure the Nazis had used gas chambers for anything other than disinfection, seemed to cast doubt on the number of six million Jews killed, complained that the Jews had exalted the Holocaust above other genocides and called the Jews first "the people of God" and then the "people of deicide", to be converted to Jesus Christ at the end times.[25]
In 1989, Paul Touvier, a former Vichy French official and a fugitive wanted for war crimes, was arrested in a Society priory in Nice. The SSPX stated at the time that Touvier had been granted asylum there as "an act of charity to a homeless man".[26] In 1994, Touvier was sentenced to life imprisonment for ordering the execution of seven Jews at Rillieux-la-Pape in 1944, in reprisal for the French Resistance's killing of the Vichy minister Philippe Henriot.[27] On his death in 1996, a Requiem Mass for the repose of Touvier's soul was offered by Father Philippe Laguérie,[28] an SSPX priest who was then the Rector of the Parisian church of St Nicolas du Chardonnet.[29]
The SSPX was also accused of anti-Semitism in a 2006 report on Traditionalist Catholicism published by the American Southern Poverty Law Center. Defenders of the SSPX have strongly criticised the report and accused the SPLC of using accusations of anti-Semitism as a means of "silencing opponents of liberalism."[30] They have drawn parallels to similar accusations against Jewish scholars like Norman Finkelstein.
The society was reported to have perpetuated the Jewish deicide and Jewish world domination plot canards in its official newsletters and on several of its websites internationally (although the offending websites have been removed since the controversy surrounding the bishops' reinstatement).[31]
The website of the SSPX in the United States carried an article, which was subsequently removed but continues to be available elsewhere, written by the late British priest Fr. Michael Crowdy. In this article, entitled "The Mystery of the Jews", Fr. Crowdy argued that the civil rights of Jews should be curtailed, albeit on religious rather than racial grounds.[32]
One of the Society's four bishops, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, has stated that Pope Benedict XVI "has professed heresies in the past! He...has never retracted his errors. When he was a theologian, he professed heresies, he published a book full of heresies."[33] In the same interview, Bishop Mallerais said of the Second Vatican Council: "You cannot read Vatican II as a Catholic work. It is based on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. ...I will say, one day the Church should erase this Council. She will not speak of it anymore. She must forget it. The Church will be wise if she forgets this council."[33]
Similarly, Bishop Richard Williamson has said of Pope Benedict XVI: "His past writings are full of Modernist errors. Now, Modernism is the synthesis of all heresies (Pascendi, Saint Pius X). So Ratzinger as a heretic goes far beyond Luther's Protestant errors, as Bishop Tissier de Mallerais well said." Williamson added that the documents of the Second Vatican Council "are much too subtly and deeply poisoned to be reinterpreted. The whole of a partly poisoned cake goes to the trash can!"[34]
A number of groups whose following overlaps with that of the SSPX, such as the Scouts d'Europe, have been accused of extremist leanings.[35] In 1998, the Association Française de Scouts et Guides Catholiques faced international scrutiny following an accident at Perros-Guirec that claimed the lives of four marine Scouts and of a sailor who died in an attempt to save them.[36] A media frenzy followed, and it was alleged that Fr. Cottard, the SSPX priest responsible for the children, had subjected them to a harsh disciplinary regimen, forcing them to spend the night before their deaths sleeping on a pebbled beach. Fr. Cottard had also failed to call the emergency services for almost 8 hours, and did not take basic safety precautions such as properly checking the weather forecast.
Other controversies too have been linked to the Scouts:
In February 2008, Saint Mary's Academy, a school in Kansas affiliated with the SSPX, refused to allow a woman referee to officiate at a high-school basketball game in which St. Mary's was participating, reportedly on the grounds that it was not appropriate for a woman to be in a position of authority over male students. In response, the other referees refused to referee the game.[38] The school issued a statement denying that the refusal was due to the reported reason. It stated instead that "[the] formation of adolescent boys is best accomplished by male role models", and that "[t]eaching our boys to treat ladies with deference, we cannot place them in an aggressive athletic competition where they are forced to play inhibited by their concern about running into a female referee".[39]