11 August 2014

Caserta and Collegiality

There appears to be a story among Vaticanologists that the Bishop of Rome ... as the Sovereign Pontiff likes to call himself ... planned to visit non-Catholics within the diocese of Caserta and to do this without any collegial reference to to his Venerable Brother the Bishop of Caserta; and that it was a week before he could be persuaded to nuance his plans.

This story, like so many stories about our Holy Father, may very well be badly garbled or even totally untrue. I hope it is. Because ...

... can anybody name another pontificate within the last two millennia in which such a thing could plausibly even have been imagined as happening? Pope S Damasus, for example, going privately to Milan, without informing S Ambrose, to tell the Arians how sorry he was about their ill-treatment? S Celestine I creeping into Hippo to cosy up to the Donatists while S Augustine slept unaware?

Will the SSPX now stop banging endlessly on about how Collegiality is one of the worst errors of the Council? They have ... if these improbable stories do have any truth in them ... apparently convinced the Pope himself.

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