This is the prayer that my wife and I have been using over the past few days, addressed to “one of the most remarkable men of all times” - and I’m not talking about Pope St. Gregory I.

O invincible defender of Holy Church’s freedom, Saint Gregory of great renown, by that firmness thou didst show in maintaining the Church’s rights against all her enemies, stretch forth from Heaven thy mighty arm, we beseech thee, to comfort her and defend her in the fearful battle she must ever wage with the powers of darkness. Do thou, in an especial manner, give strength in this dread conflict to the venerable Pontiff who has fallen heir not only to thy throne, but likewise to the fearlessness of thy mighty heart; obtain for him the joy of beholding his holy endeavors crowned by the triumph of the Church and the return of the lost sheep into the right path. Grant, finally, that all may understand how vain it is to strive against that Faith which has always conquered and is destined always to conquer: “this is the victory which overcometh the world, our faith.” This is the prayer that we raise to thee with one accord; and we are confident, that, after thou hast heard our prayers on earth, thou wilt one day call us to stand with thee in Heaven, before the eternal High Priest, Who with the Father and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth world without end. Amen.

I posted my thoughts on the current situation with the SSPX on Rorate Caeli the other day. I’m reposting them here while reminding you all to pray.

(In response to the charges that Bernard would capitulate to Rome in order to be clothed in the sacred purple:) “Bernard Cardinal Fellay” - now would make my day! and the day after, and the day after that, etc.

I just don’t think that it’s going to happen. The line in the sand has already been drawn, and it’s the question of religious liberty (and less so other doctrinal questions and issues, such as the liturgy). The SSPX has taken the stand that it is tantamount to abandoning the Faith for Rome to repudiate the teaching of Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X, Pius XI, etc. on the question of religious liberty.

But Rome is not going back, not in the next 50 years, maybe not in the next 100 years, on the question of Church and State, on the question of religious liberty.

Which makes me think that the SSPX schism will be perpetual, until it finally whithers and fades away, as all other schisms have through the course of history. But we might be taking about several hundred years.

I have increasingly come to see the situation of the SSPX - in whose chapels I have very often heard Mass, received Communion, and on a couple of occasions, made Confession - in the light of this example from Adrian Fortescue’s The History of the Early Papacy to 451. It concerns the Novatinianist schism - not heresy! - which I have posted here.

To say that the SSPX situation is like the Novantianist schism is to beg the question against the SSPX: they deny that the question is one of discipline and argue that it is rather one of dogma.

But even they must see that there is no such thing as a hundreds of years schism from Rome (and the Orthodox don’t count as an counterexample, because they’re clearly (by every Catholic standard) in the wrong). Every other schism has ended in disintegration and ended in complete disappearance - which is the route protestantism has been on for quite some time as well as, for that matter, the eastern Orthodox.

So if their plan is to stay in it “for the long run”, I think that history is against them. They might be the first, for all I know, they might an anomaly, but if you’re not in a position to make those kind of judgments, you can say, at the very least, that history doesn’t look kindly on a long term schism.