Break not the bruised reed or The Unrealistic Realist

Terence Fulham at www.olfatima.com, who speaks more sense than the entire, independent, traditional Catholic movement combined - and who has also a better sense of fun; may he soon be regularized -, has just posted a video of Bishop Richard Williamson of the Society of St Pius X (SSPX) on his websbite. The video has been produced by a seminarian from St Thomas Aquinas Seminary as a tribute to the bishop who left STAS and took up his new post in La Reja, Argentina, a couple of years ago. It is a rather generous and personalized tribute which, if truth be told, I sense Williamson would not be particularly comfortable with.

But like it or not, Williamson is a man who provokes strong responses and about whom opinion is sharply divided. His official status as an excommunicate does not prevent him having many admirers both within and without SSPX circles. His selection as one of the four bishops consecrated by Archbishop Lefebvre against the orders of John Paul II still seems occasionally potty when contrasted with his capacity for advocating the kind of conspiracy theories popular with the barking mad from Boston to Baghdad.

One reason I appreciated the tribute on Youtube was because it reminded me of the three painful but enriching years I spent listening to Williamson on a daily basis (in point of fact, from about the position of the camera in the video). He is a beguiling and a forceful teacher capable of insightful clarity and, a moment later, of mind-boggling loopiness. He could hold a classroom spell-bound with a virtuosic analysis of an article from the Summa ('An article a day keeps the trick-cyclist away,' he once said to me). The very same day he could launch into a disquisition on the soon-to-be built concentration camps in North Dakota, justifying his eclecticism as a total defence of truth (how long I spent circling the seminary after that lecture, ranting my frustration in the ear of a kindly confrere!). Wary of anything remotely sentimental, he was capable of paternal kindness and, the very same day, of heavy-handed aggression. He's a leader of men, of that there is no doubt.

At his very best, Williamson reminds me of the wonderful character of Puddleglum from The Silver Chair, the sixth volume in Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia. When everyone is charmed by the soft words and riddles of the evil Queen of the Underworld, Williamson is the kind of man to stamp his bare foot in the fire and tell her where to get off. There's a kind of brutality in his claim on good sense, a ruthless lucidity in applying his principles, a stentorian stridence in his delivery.

Where does he go wrong? It is hard to say exactly. Perhaps there was an answer in my last conversation with him, over ten years ago now. I met him in the US shortly after the founding members of the fabulously idealistic (and latterly tragic) Society of St John had been chased out or fled from the seminary in 1997. 'Perhaps ideas get a little rarefied up here on Stockton Hill,' I suggested. 'I haven't really thought about it,' he replied. The conversation seemed to make him uncomfortable and ended shortly thereafter. Naturally, he wasn't about to let me invigilate his administration of the seminary!

What's wrong with Bishop Williamson is not the formal logic, it's the material logic. He's the master of compound syllogisms. He knows the Organum backwards and forwards. He probably reads it in the Greek for all I know. He started out after all as a Cambridge classicist.

Yet for a man who preaches about reality, for one who attacks the modern mind in its contempt for spiritual reality, he is something of what I'm going to call a moral abstractionist.

For example, in the video, you will hear him quoting his famous line from a discussion with Cardinal Hoyos in which he told Hoyos that 'we have two religions here'. But if there are two religions there, your Excellency, their adherents cannot belong to the same Church, can they? I feel sure I already know the bishop's answer to such a question. He would say that the SSPX and the Concilar Church are not formally two different religions, and that lack of advertance means that formal heresy is not adopted. But this would be a moral abstraction, not invalid in principle but an obviation of the need to examine the ecclesiological consequences of his position. What about the concrete, spiritual reality of the Church as a visible society, visible not because 'not invisible' but because visibly the Church? The question is not how can the Church inadvertently preach another religion (a moral question), but how can the Church officially preach another religion (an ecclesiological question)? It's a little like saying your coat is rainproof except when it lets in water. I'm not asserting that the individual members of the episcopal college are individually indefectible, but their ecclesial role as the teaching Church cannot be neatly packed away into a moral pidgeonhole of inadvertance.

Such moral abstractionism goes alongside a kind of intellectual abstractionism. Bishop Williamson talks often about the faith, but he does not talk much, if at all, about the faith of the Church. The implicit basis of his position is that the body of teachings called the Magisterium are the sufficient guide in and of themselves to the faith. The Magisterium, in the sense of the Teaching Church, just does not figure in any meaningful way. When Bishop Williamson talks about doctrinal discussions with the Vatican, what he simply and plainly means is that the SSPX will turn up in Rome, tell the pope's theologians where they are wrong, and then Rome must correct all its errors. Then, and only then, there can be a reconciliation with the SSPX and Rome. That is pretty much the long and short of it. The formal logic of the position is beautiful. It's the lack of contact with reality - the reality of the Church's visibility, her indefectibilty, her tutelage of Revelation - that is damaging. Could the good bishop recognise an error of fact in his thinking, even if he refused to admit an error of principle? He certainly has the humility to do so.

On the angelqueen site some months ago, Bishop Williamson invited questions from readers and I put this very point to him. I stated that the SSPX would not be able to make any agreement with Rome until it recognised fully and openly that the Holy See exercises a tutelage over the Catholic Faith by divine law. The question was one of many that went unanswered. Of course he couldn't answer them all.

And the shame is that, as long as Williamson remains where he is ecclesially, the Church is deprived of a free moving spirit who is not a party man. In the mainstream, he might not always get his points right, but he would always have the courage to make them. He wouldn't sit back, nodding his subservience like a clerical Andrex puppy. If my analysis is right, I think his are errors of excess and passion rather than malice. They are certainly not errors of indifference.

Our paths have parted some time since, but I'm grateful for Bishop Williamson in many ways. I hope there's a place for him somewhere in the Church, with the full absolution and benediction that only Peter's successor can confer.