UNITED STATES
The Open Tabernacle: Here Comes Everybody
Posted on October 11, 2014 by Betty Clermont
The head of the notorious Society of St. Pius X, Bishop Bernard Fellay, met with Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, prefect of the powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, on Sept. 23, 2014, “with a view to the envisioned full reconciliation” with the Catholic Church. Known by its acronym, SSPX, the society “does not have a canonical status in the church [and] its ministers do not exercise legitimate ministries in the church.” Nevertheless, a French SSPX priest was allowed to say mass in St. Peter’s Basilica a month earlier.
The Vatican initiated “non-official” contact with the SSPX leading to an “informal meeting” between Fellay and church officials on Dec. 13, 2013, despite SSPX offering to hold the funeral Mass of a convicted Nazi war criminal the previous October and disrupting a November ceremony in Buenos Aires marking the anniversary of the beginning of the Holocaust.
Former S.S. Captain Erich Priebke had said he wanted a Catholic burial. Like thousands of other war criminals, he had escaped Europe via one of the Vatican ratlines and lived quietly in Argentina for the next 50 years until he was exposed by an ABC News investigative team.
Priebke was extradited to Rome and convicted in 1997 of participating in the 1944 Ardeatine Massacre of 335 Italian resistance fighters but remained unrepentant. He was put under house arrest due to his age where he died at age 100 on Oct. 11, 2013. When the Diocese of Rome, German and Argentine officials refused to bury him, SSPX offered to hold the funeral Mass but was prevented from doing so when “protesters surrounded the car which was carrying the body to their church.” Priebke was buried in an Italian prison cemetery.
In Buenos Aires, Catholics, Jews and Protestants hold an annual ceremony in the Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral “to mark Kristallnacht, the Nazi-led mob violence in 1938 when about 1,000 Jewish synagogues were burned and thousands of Jews were forced into concentration camps, launching the genocide that killed 6 million Jews.” SSPX members disrupted the Nov. 13, 2013, ceremony by shouting the rosary and the “Our Father” and distributed pamphlets stating, “followers of false gods must be kept out of the sacred temple.” Fr. Christian Bouchacourt, leader of the SSPX in South America, said his organization had the right to feel outraged when rabbis preside over a ceremony in a Catholic cathedral.
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