Guardians of Tradition? At Écône, they altered the rite to avoid telling the truth

This morning in Écône, four priests were consecrated bishops without a papal mandate. The candidates were asked the question prescribed by the rite: “Habetis mandatum apostolicum?” - “Do you have the Apostolic Mandate?” Instead of answering that essential question, a brief statement drafted by the Superior General was read out, in an attempt to “justify” what remains a schismatic act.

And that is precisely the point. The rite was deliberately altered by those who extol it and invoke it as a bulwark of fidelity to Tradition. It was changed so that they would not have to answer truthfully a question as simple as it was decisive: do you have the Apostolic Mandate? No. They knew that they did not. Yet they distorted the liturgy - they, of all people, who claim to present themselves as the most faithful guardians of the form, the letter and the immutability of the rite.

I do not believe that this detail is accidental. I believe that it offers the most honest summary of what took place today, and of what I have observed for some time, with growing unease, in certain circles that call themselves traditionalist and in which I was born and raised. Not only Lefebvrist circles, but also, in different ways, circles that call themselves modernist, progressive, or simply “other” than those who do not think as they do. The problem is not, or not primarily, doctrinal. It is a problem of coherence between conduct and action; between what is proclaimed and what is done. And this, before it is a theological question, is a psychological one: the capacity - or incapacity - to make what one says correspond to what one is.