French Bishops Want to Abolish Summorum Pontificum
87 of the country's 92 dioceses replied. The majority of bishops want Summorum Pontificum to be reversed because it did not bear the "fruits hoped for".
The admission of the Old Mass in July 2007 poses for them the danger of a "split". The coexistence of the Mass in two forms is "two worlds that do not meet". According to one bishop, "The Eucharist, which should unite, divides." It is true that there is division in France but the Old-Rite Mass cannot be blamed for it.
The bishops criticise a "mentality of resistance" [to sterile episcopal modernism] among Old Rite Catholics. They deplore, "criticism of the Council Church" and the impression of "two churches".
Old-Rite-Catholics have monarchist and "rigorist” tendencies, the prelates complain. According to them, in most dioceses there are one or two Old Masses with allegedly 20 to 70 faithful. Four dioceses still have no Old-Rite Mass. The bishops say that in France 15,000 faithful attend Old-Rite Masses, thus rendering their theory of "schism" absurd as there are over 40 million "Catholics" in France. According to PaixLiturgique.com, 67,000 persons - PiusX included - attend the Sunday Old-Rite Mass in France.
Most Old-Rite Masses are celebrated in the dioceses of Fréjus-Toulon (10), Versailles (7) and Paris (6). In Versailles, 9% of all practising Catholics in the diocese attend the Old Rite.
For the bishops it is positive that diocesan Old-Rite Masses prevents an exodus to the PiusX. However, they notice that rarely PiusX faithful return to the dioceses.
Picture: © Mazur, CC BY-NC-SA, #newsOrqxhhdzsq
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