Ecclesia Dei — John Paul II

On 2 July 1988, two days after Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre had consecrated four bishops at Écône without papal mandate, Pope St. John Paul II issued a short, grave document that began with the Church’s sorrow: Ecclesia Dei adflicta — “With great affliction the Church has learned of the unlawful episcopal ordination conferred on 30 June last by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.” What followed could have been simply a sentence of judgment, and in part it was: the consecrations were named a schismatic act, and the canonical penalty of excommunication was declared incurred. But the motu proprio did not stop at the law. In the same breath it turned toward those Catholics who loved the old liturgy and wished to remain inside the Church, and it made room for them. Out of the rupture of Écône came the first structural home for the traditional rite in full communion with Rome. This is the merciful counter-move — the redemptive turn in the story.

The Law: A Schismatic Act

John Paul II did not soften what had happened. To consecrate bishops against the express prohibition of the Roman Pontiff was, he wrote, an act of disobedience that “implies in practice the rejection of the Roman primacy” and therefore “constitutes a schismatic act.” By the law of the Church (Canon 1382), Archbishop Lefebvre, the bishop-co-consecrator Antônio de Castro Mayer, and the four newly consecrated bishops incurred the penalty of excommunication latae sententiae — automatically, by the act itself. A Catholic in communion with Rome must say this plainly: the Pope was within his rights and his duty to uphold the order of the Church, and the schism was real. Nothing in the generosity that follows erases the gravity of what was done.

The Mercy: Rightful Aspirations

Then the tone changes. Having upheld the law, John Paul II reached past the small band who had broken with Rome to the far larger number of faithful who shared their love of the ancient liturgy but not their disobedience. To them he addressed words that traditional Catholics would carry for a generation: he wished, he said, to guarantee “respect for their rightful aspirations.” The word matters. He did not speak of a tolerated preference to be endured; he spoke of aspirations that were rightful — a claim to be honored, not merely permitted.

And he gave that will a concrete shape. Building on the limited indult Quattuor Abhinc Annos of 1984, he asked the whole Church for something warmer than grudging compliance:

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Respect must everywhere be shown for the feelings of all those who are attached to the Latin liturgical tradition, by a wide and generous application of the directives already issued some time ago by the Apostolic See for the use of the Roman Missal according to the typical edition of 1962.

— John Paul II, Ecclesia Dei adflicta, 2 July 1988

“A wide and generous application.” That phrase became a watchword. It would be quoted in petitions and pastoral letters for the next two decades, and it pointed straight toward the day, in 2007, when Summorum Pontificum would declare the older Missal never abrogated.

The Commission: A Structure for Communion

Words needed an instrument, and John Paul II created one. The motu proprio established the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, whose task was to collaborate with the bishops and the offices of the Roman Curia “for the purpose of facilitating full ecclesial communion of priests, seminarians, religious communities or individuals” hitherto linked to the Fraternity of Saint Pius X who wished to remain united to the Successor of Peter. For the first time there was an office in Rome charged not with merely policing the old rite but with welcoming those attached to it home.

The Fruit: The Communities Born

The most beautiful consequence came almost at once. Among the priests of the Fraternity of Saint Pius X, a number had never wanted schism; they wanted the old Mass and Rome. The opening John Paul II provided gave them somewhere to go. On 18 July 1988 — barely two weeks after the motu proprio — twelve priests and a band of seminarians, led by Fr. Josef Bisig and formerly of the SSPX, gathered at the Cistercian Abbey of Hauterive in Switzerland and founded the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP). They asked to live and serve in the Church under the authority of the Roman Pontiff. On 18 October 1988 the Holy See erected the Fraternity as a society of apostolic life of pontifical right, and that December its first priest was ordained in Rome.

The FSSP was the first of the “Ecclesia Dei communities” — institutes that would celebrate the 1962 liturgy in undoubted communion with the Pope, soon joined by others devoted to the traditional rites. They were the living proof of the document’s promise: that one could love the old Mass with one’s whole heart and remain wholly inside the Church. The seed planted in the summer of 1988 would be watered, nineteen years later, by Summorum Pontificum — and the flourishing of the traditional liturgy in the early twenty-first century traces back, in no small part, to a father’s generosity offered in the very hour of a rupture.

When the history of the traditional movement is told honestly, 2 July 1988 is not remembered chiefly as a day of excommunications. It is remembered as the day Rome first said, in a binding act of the Pope, that the aspirations of those attached to the ancient liturgy were rightful — and then built a house in which they could live.