Catholic Church, in Today's News 10.16.09

Catholic Church. The Vatican announced today that the dialogue with Society of Saint Pius X will take place on October 26. The Vatican said the initial talks would focus on unresolved doctrinal issues. The Vatican also stipulated that the content of the meeting(s) would remain 'strictly private.'

Bishop Bernard Fellay, head of the SSPX, said the talks with the Vatican could take a long time.

So lets hope the SSPX knows what it is doing. The SSPX has agreed to a long series of talks with the Vatican that are private. In other words, the discussion in the Church over Vatican II that the SSPX has long wanted will now be confined to a few SSPX leaders and senior staff members of the Vatican.

The Vatican officials are schooled in double-talk and double-think. It will be quite easy for them to tie these talks up for a long, long time, perhaps endlessly. A skilled negotiator knows how to string out a discussion to the point of meaninglessness.

The situation almost looks like a trap. The SSPX is stuck in an arrangement that potentially has no end-point and that is unlikely to solve the issues. The only way out of the straight-jacket is to walk out of the talks.

Perhaps this the aim of the Vatican: to keep talking until they are able to force or to provoke the SSPX to split. The cards are certainly laid out to facilitate such a maneuver.

Bishop Fellay has proved himself in the past to be ingenious about parrying the Vatican's attempts to isolate him and the SSPX. We will now see what he will do in this latest set-up.

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The SSPX should expect that the Vatican will push, push, push on the issue of relations with the Jewish religion. The SSPX's failure to defend Bishop Williamson when he was under world-wide attack has left the SSPX vulnerable on this issue. The Vatican will not fail to exploit this opening in an attempt to put the SSPX on the defensive.