Cardinal Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 2012 to 2017, critiqued the Society of St. Pius X’s rejection of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council on religious liberty, as well as the Society’s decision to consecrate new bishops on July 1.
“From a purely human and theological perspective, too, it is inconceivable that two thousand bishops at the Council and all the popes to date have erred in dogmatic matters or deviated from the apostolic tradition, save for a single bishop who, through illegal episcopal ordinations alone, ensures the survival of the Church, which Jesus promised to the Apostle Peter,” Cardinal Müller said in an interview with the Austrian news agency kath.net.
He added:
One would hope that the FSSPX will not remain confined to its own circle, but instead look to the Church as a whole and learn from the mistakes of Church history. The Fraternity should not follow the path of the Donatists, the Jansenists, and the Old Catholics. One extreme does not justify the other.
Neither so-called progressivism, which surrenders the revealed truth of Christ to the shifting currents of the zeitgeist, nor traditionalism, which reduces the entire tradition of the Church to a few fixed ideas, can be the way of the Church that the Risen Lord has chosen as a sacrament, that is, as a sign and instrument.