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"I Excuse the Council"

Three months of unretracted 2012 statements of His Lordship Bishop Bernard Fellay

(by Fr. Francois Chazal)

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-  April 14th : “We must not make of the Council a super heresy” (April 14th Menzingen letter) 

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- April 15th: “the entire Tradition of the catholic faith must be the sole criteria and guide of the understanding of the teachings of the Council of Vatican II, which, in its turn, enlightens some aspects of the life and the doctrine of the Church that were implicitly present in her but not yet formulated. The affirmations of the Council of Vatican II and of the posterior Pontifical Magisterium concerning the relationship between the Catholic Church and non-catholic Christian confessions must be understood in the light of the entire Tradition.” (Extract of a Menzingen doctrinal declaration quoted publicly by Fr Pfluger in St Joseph des Carmes on June 05th) 

 

- May 11th: “Many things which we would have condemned as being from the Council are in fact not from the Council, but from the common understanding of it. (…) The Council is presenting a religious liberty which is in fact a very, very limited one. A very limited one. It would mean our talks with Rome, they clearly said that to mean that there would be a right to error or right to choose each religion, is false.”(Bishop Fellay, CNS interview in Menzingen) 

 

- June 08th:“As for the Council, when they asked me the question, “Does Vatican II belong to Tradition?”, I answered, “I would like to hope that that is the case.”” (Bishop Fellay, DICI, Interview) 

 

-July 14th: Insinuation that the Council of Vatican II is only tainted with error, but not to be discarded altogether on account of heresy, explicit or latent. (Declaration of the General Chapter in Econe) It is quite weaker than the Declaration of 1974. 

 

It must be said that these quotes are only five, and intermingled sometimes with quotes condemning somewhat the Council of Vatican II. But many similar quotes, for and against Vatican II, can also be found in the past. 

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So which Bishop Fellay is the real Bishop Fellay? 

 

It is the one that indicates regularly that there can be an understanding of Vatican II in the light of tradition, that the SSPX goes along with 95% of the text of Vatican II (DICI, may 18th 2001), that allows the watering down of the Angelus (compare with the current editions of Fideliter), ordered to Fr Kenneth Novak to expunge the “sspx.org”website and whose mouthpiece is DICI, a website that is becoming more and more similar with other Ecclesia Dei websites. 

 

It is the Bishop Fellay that is constantly pushing for the placing of the entire work of Archbishop Lefebvre under the new and modernist Rome without placing the condemnation itself of Vatican II as a sine qua non condition as the Archbishop did after June 1988, but just as a personal liberty to reproach or study the errors of the Council. 

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