Below is a message from the website of the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer (“Transalpine Redemptorists”).
This community, who were at one point affiliated with the SSPX, made a canonical reconciliation with ecclesiastical officials under the now defunct Pontifical Comission Ecclesia Dei (PCED). They have been unjustly persecuted in these seventeen years during which they operated within approved ecclesiastical structures. They are present in Scotland (Papa Stronsay Island, one of the Orkney Islands), New Zealand (Christchurch, where their persecution was, as we understand it, most acute), and the United States (Montana).
Please pray for these devout spiritual sons of Saint Alphonsus Maria de Ligiouri. No doubt, they will be attacked and vilified for their actions — it has already begun, but this is, no doubt, only “the beginning of sorrows” (Mark 13:8). In light of that, simple justice prompts us to recall one important aspect of this occurence and the developments that will likely follow in rapid succession: being “canonically irregular” and “schismatic” (“out of the Church”) are distinct realities — differences not of degree, but of kind.
Dear Catholic Soul,
We have just concluded our General Chapter where we considered our Congregation and its vocation in the Church and in the Diocese of Christchurch, New Zealand where the Bishop had decreed its expulsion.
The attached letter expresses the convictions of our Congregation.
This is not a task we embrace lightly. We have considered the array of possible punishments that the hierarchy may use against us – all mentally terrifying really, yet buttressed in the knowledge that the hierarchy has broken with the chain of command, which renders it human, and spiritually null. But when Our Lord’s honour is at stake, silence becomes a form of betrayal. We therefore take up this work with trembling hearts but with firm conviction, desiring only to defend the Holy Name of Jesus Christ and the purity of His Spouse, the Church.
“Every one therefore that shall confess Me before men, I will also confess him before My Father Who is in Heaven. But he that shall deny Me before men, I will also deny him before My Father Who is in Heaven.” (Matt. 10:32)
Here is a PDF of the letter. Read it yourself.
Below are news links to sites with various perspectives on this major occurrence in the traditionalist world, most especially the “traddy” Anglosphere:
- Life Site News: Traditionalist Redemptorists issue open letter to ‘repudiate the Synodal Church’
- Katholisch.de: Traditionalist order breaks with “modern church” (site run by the Allgemeine gemeinnützige Programmgesellschaft mbH [APG], which is a non-profit media company owned by the German Bishops’ Conference)
- BIG NEWS: Transalpine Redemptorists ‘repudiate the Synodal Church’ as ‘distinct’ from the Catholic Church (edited by the traditionalist laymen, S.D. Wright and M.J. McCusker)
