Pope meets excommunicated Archbishop to heal divide

The Pope met the head of the ultraconservative movement founded by the excommunicated Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre today amid a renewed push to bring the "schismatic" group back into Rome’s fold.

Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said the meeting between the Pope Benedict XVI and Monsignor Bernard Fellay, secretary general of the Society of St. Pius X, was held “in a climate of love for the church and a desire to arrive at perfect communion.”

“While knowing the difficulties, the desire to proceed by degrees and in reasonable time was shown,” Navarro-valls said in a statement.

Lefebvre founded the Switzerland-based society in 1969, opposed to the liberalising reforms of the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council, particularly its call for Mass to be celebrated in local languages and not the traditional Latin.

He was excommunicated in 1988 after consecrating four bishops without Rome’s consent. All four bishops, including Fellay, were also excommunicated.

Benedict, who also opposed what he considered excesses of Vatican II, had worked to head off the excommunication order, negotiating with the society to try to keep its members in the fold.

Just months before the excommunication order came down, Benedict, who was then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, signed a protocol with Lefebvre that had indicated reconciliation of the society with Rome was imminent. Lefebvre later rejected the accord.

With Benedict now Pope, some have speculated that there might be a new push to bring the society back under Rome’s wing.

Fellay, for example, welcomed Benedict’s April 19 election, saying there was a “gleam of hope” that the new Pope might find a way out of the “profound crisis” in which the Catholic Church currently finds itself.

Fellay has said he would ask Benedict at the audience, which he requested, to rescind the excommunication order and also allow Catholics who wish to celebrate Mass in Latin without having to ask permission first.

Today’s meeting took place at the Pope’s summer residence in Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome.

Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, who heads a commission that was created after the 1988 excommunication to try to negotiate with the society, attended, the Vatican statement said.

In a recent interview with the international website of the Society of St. Pius X, Fellay said a return to the Latin Mass would mark the start of a “change of atmosphere and spirit in the church,” which he believes has been spoiled by the Vatican II reforms.

However, in his 1997 book “Salt of the Earth” Ratzinger said a return to the Latin Mass wouldn’t resolve the problems of the church, even though he supported its expanded use.

“I am of the opinion, to be sure, that the old rite should be granted much more generously to all those who desire it,” he said.

“But a simple return to the old way would not, as I have said, be a solution.

“Our culture has changed so radically in the last 30 years that a liturgy celebrated exclusively in Latin would bring with it an experience of foreign-ness that many could not cope with,” he said.