Excommunicated!

To understand why this is a big deal, you have to know a little about the SSPX and hence about why excommunicating them is Pope Leo taking a stance that Pope Benedict (and Pope Francis) wouldn't.

The SSPX is traditionalist and when that term is used, it means antisemetic. Those in the church who want to dump V2 resented the changes that tried to get some of that antisemitism out of the liturgy. B16 was quite sympathetic to the SSPX and their views and tried to reconcile them. Here's the beginning of a 2009 article in The National Catholic Reporter ... Lefebvre movement: long, troubled history with Judaism

When the Vatican lifted the excommunication of four traditionalist Catholic bishops Jan. 21, it’s entirely possible Rome was unaware that one of those bishops, an Englishman named Richard Williamson, had just given an interview to Swedish television in which he denied that the Nazis had used gas chambers and asserted that no more than 200,000 to 300,000 Jews had died during the Second World War.

In retrospect, however, it would be disingenuous for anyone to feign surprise.

A troubled history with Judaism has long been part of the Catholic traditionalist movement associated with the late French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre — beginning with Lefebvre himself, who spoke approvingly of both the World War II-era Vichy Regime in France and the far-right National Front, and who identified the contemporary enemies of the faith as “Jews, Communists and Freemasons” in an Aug. 31, 1985, letter to Pope John Paul II.

Reacting to the furor over Williamson, the Vatican has stressed that lifting the excommunication is not an endorsement of his views on the Holocaust, and has repeated its firm commitment to Catholic-Jewish dialogue and to combating anti-Semitism. The pope’s outreach to traditionalists should instead be seen, spokespersons said, as an “act of peace” intended to end the only formal schism in the wake of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) ...

So, long story short, Pope Leo excommunicating the SSPX guys says most of all, the Catholic church should not be antisemetic. Good.

If you want to know more on this subject ... the SSPX and antisemitism, Vatican II and Nostra Aetate and the Jews, Pope Benedict and how his views affected his stance with the SSPX, I have a lot of old posts that have many links. Here are just a few ...

The Mid-East Synod, Maximos IV, and Nostra Aetate ... The pope, his book, and the Jewish people ... SSPX and Vatican II