What is happening in the world of Catholic traditionalists (due to vaccines)?
The intervention of Michele M. Seeler
Perhaps only the most attentive and sensitive observers have noticed a series of conflicts that have emerged within the world of the so-called Catholic traditionalists in recent months. What is happening?
The Christian world has become well accustomed to the separations and ruptures of religious unity since the birth of Christianity. Since then we can count as many as 12 of separations, schisms and "ruptures". Will the 13th be the one within the traditionalists in the 21st century? In the second half of the 19th century, in full revival, with Pope Pius IX reigning, the separation between modernist and traditionalist Catholics began to emerge, leading the Pope to even write a magisterium document against modernism.
This "dialectic" continued for another 50 years until the pontificate of Pope Pius X, who was forced to tackle the problem with another magisterium document ( Notre Charge Apostolique , 1910) in which he indicated the traditionalists as true friends of the people. After the Second Vatican Council, an apparently irreversible rupture between traditionalist and progressive Catholics finally took place. But the phenomenon we are witnessing today is even more complex and disturbing. Today it seems that a break is taking place within the world of traditionalists.
And what makes this break curious is that it is not taking place on doctrinal issues of a "strict sense". It is not happening, for example, on the liturgy of the Mass "vetus ordo" towards "novus ordo", or on the communion given in the hand or in the mouth, or on the meaning of obedience to the Pope and on the doctrinal evaluations of his Magisterium. No . The break is taking place on the moral lawfulness of Covid vaccines and on the intentions of their use. On the one hand, Catholic fundamentalist theologians and intellectuals justify vaccines by warning of scientism and inviting us to distinguish between reasons of sanitary precaution and those of objective moral law. On the other hand, other equally fundamentalist theologians and intellectuals condemn them because some of these vaccines use cell lines from aborted fetuses (35 and 48 years ago) and with the justified suspicion that the use of these vaccines provokes the temptation to repeat their use. . To this consideration, however, there are less justified suspicions about plots to carry out genetic modifications to vaccinated people, and more …
These considerations, which should be discussed in a scientific-moral public debate, have instead been a source of heated conflict and have fomented excessive behavior within the traditionalists. On the one hand, those who are convinced of the also moral legitimacy of the vaccine consider those who do not want to be vaccinated dangerous for infection and invite them to do so for the common good. On the other hand, those convinced of the moral and scientific illegality of the vaccine accuse the other vaccinated of being dangerous for the infection, precisely because they are vaccinated. But not only that, even for suspicion of heresy for being vaccinated. Curiously, today the greatest break among the traditionalists is on the vaccination plot and it seems that they are less concerned at this moment with defending the “depositum fidei” according to the divine, apostolic and ecclesial tradition. Thanks to Covid , a new rupture is being caused, the 13th, for facts that are not clearly doctrinal, morally and scientifically controversial and with excessive use of conspiracy imagination.
And whoever sees traditionalists as smoke and mirrors enjoys it.
Have they thought about it?
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/che-sta-succedendo-nel-mondo-dei-tradizionalisti-cattolici-causa-vaccini/ on Tue, 08 Jun 2021 21:42:48 +0000.