Congar Saw It Coming

On July 1, the Society of St. Pius X consecrated bishops at Écône without a papal mandate and against the pope’s explicit prohibition.

The response from Rome was swift: excommunications, and a formal declaration that the Society is in schism, including its lay adherents. On the very same day, the Likoudis Legacy Foundation released its 50th-anniversary edition of Yves Congar’s book Challenge to the Church: The Case of Archbishop Lefebvre, published through En Route Books, with a foreword by Dr. Larry Chapp and an afterword by Andrew Mioni.

Larry invited Andrew and me onto his Gaudium et Spes 22 podcast to discuss this news:

Watch: Larry Chapp, Andrew Mioni, and Andrew Likoudis discuss the SSPX and Congar’s book on Lefebvre

Congar wrote the book in 1976, after Lefebvre’s first illicit priestly ordinations—twelve years before the consecrations of 1988, and fifty years before this week’s. He foresaw where the movement’s logic would inevitably lead: a “state of necessity” hardening into a permanent parallel church, professing loyalty to an “eternal Rome” invented to override the actual one.

Congar’s confrer, Joseph Ratzinger’s question in The Ratzinger Report remains a sharp accompanying refutation of that novelty. He writes: “Is perhaps obedience to the Holy See divisible according to years or according to the nearness of a teaching to one’s own already-established convictions?” Hans Urs von Balthasar, another contemporary of Congar named the stakes of holding to this ecclesiological impossibility, writing in his book, A Primer for Unsettled Laymen that a protesting splinter group may claim to be apostolica and sancta, “but wants to be at the same time the una, which is impossible, and the catholica, which a mere opposition, of its essence, cannot be.”

In the conversation we get into all of it: the repeated papal overtures Lefebvre refused, from Paul VI to John Paul II; the misuse of Quo Primum; what Dignitatis Humanae actually teaches and what it doesn’t; the gap between the SSPX’s public presentation and its lived catechesis; and the question so many traditionalists are now asking—whether one may still attend an SSPX chapel—which is, frankly, the wrong question. I won’t rehearse the arguments here. Watch the conversation.

Fifty years later, the rupture Congar warned of is formal. The book is no longer a warning. It is a prophetic post-mortem.

Challenge to the Church: The Case of Archbishop Lefebvre is available now in paperback from En Route Books.