Official Confirmation: SSPX meeting in Rome

From DICI comes the following press release:

Having been invited by Rome, Bishop Bernard Fellay will meet with Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, during the second half of September 2014. This interview was presented to the Superior General of the Society of Saint Pius X as an informal meeting to review the relations between the SSPX and Rome, which were discontinued at the departure of Cardinal William Levada, Cardinal Müller’s predecessor, and the resignation of Benedict XVI. This will in fact be the first meeting between Cardinal Müller and Bishop Fellay.

On September 3, 2014, on his website the Vatican Insider, the Italian journalist Andrea Tornielli announces this meeting and noted that the new District Superior of France, Father Christian Bouchacourt had the opportunity when he was superior of the District of south America, to meet Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, then Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Since then they have had contact on purely administrative matters concerning the District of South America.

The Superior General of the Society of Saint Pius X will go to Rome, following the example of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who always accepted invitations of the Roman authorities. What will be said at this meeting is obviously unknown, yet Bishop Fellay will not have forgotten what Cardinal Müller said about the SSPX, as reported in the Corriere della Sera on December 22, 2013 : « The canonical excommunication of the bishops for their illegal ordinations was revoked, but a de facto sacramental excommunication remains for their schism; they put themselves out of communion with the Church. After that we are not closing the door and never will, but we are inviting them to be reconciled. But they too must change their attitude, accept the conditions of the Catholic Church, and the Supreme Pontiff as the definitive criterion for membership. »

And surely the Superior General will have in mind the declaration made with the Society’s other two bishops on June 27, 2013, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of their episcopal consecration : « It was love of the Church which guided Archbishop Lefebvre and which guides his sons. It is the same desire to “pass on the Catholic priesthood in all its doctrinal purity and its missionary charity” (Archbishop Lefebvre, Spiritual Journey) which animates the Society of Saint Pius X at the service of the Church, when it asks with insistence for the Roman authorities to regain the treasure of doctrinal, moral and liturgical Tradition. »