"Let our crowds be fed on tear-gas and plate-glass..."

My inaugural post on a new blog.

I was doing some reading today and I happened upon a piece that I found intriguing. This is from John Farrow's Pageant of the Popes (1942):

"[Callistus was elected pope in 217AD] However Hippolytus, whose undeniable brilliance had won him a considerable following, declared the election to have been false and then allowed his own disciples to bestow upon him the title of Head of the True Church. Thus for the first time we have an Anti-Pope.

[...]

The pretensions of Hippolytus persisted after the death of Callistus, throughout the pontificate of Urban (222-230) and into that of Pontian. For the first five years of this Pope's reign, the struggle was bitter and grave, for Hippolytus was a dangerously skilled antagonist. Then, in a fresh outburst of persecution by an Emperor who took no trouble to differentiate between true or schismatic Christianity, both were banished to the Sardinian mines. In the stultifying confines of imprisonment, antipathies are usually intensified into deadly hatred: less commonly a friendship is formed, strong with understanding and loyalty. Happily, it was the latter case with Pope and Anti-Pope. Hippolytus acknowledged his error and made a complete and unconditional submission to Pontian, who, without rancor, received him back into the Church. Soon after, this new friendship was sealed with the bond of dual martyrdom." (p 13, 14)

The issue that this passage made me think of, of course, was the recent bout of dialogue with the SSPX. Granted: the SSPX has not set up an Anti-Pope and are not a schismatic group. Why, then, is it that their leader went to his grave without full reconciliation? Why do certain current heads of this group find reconciliation distasteful, even with a pontiff so friendly to their desires? I think that, while common persecution drew Hippolytus and Pontian together as brothers, the hierarchy of the SSPX has come to view the Church as their persecutor as much as the World. This is, of course, not objectively the case, however I think that, at the root of all of the much-bemoaned Traddy-Bitterness, you can see this schema of Church-as-Persecutor.

In reality, of course, we are both beset on all sides and must have "in essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity." I wonder how this can be attained, short of handing Fellay and Benedict XVI hard-hats and sending them to Sardinia...

"... 'cause a people united is a wonderful thing."

-L