Faithful Catholics must be different from the world. If we imitate Our Lord, we will not “fit in” with the world.

Sacred Scripture calls Our Lord a Sign of Contradiction, showing opposition between Him and the world. St. Luke’s Gospel, 2:34. If we imitate Him, we will be signs of contradiction too.

The world hates Our Lord and if we imitate Him, it will hate us too. He declared:

If the world hates you, know ye, that it hath hated me before you. If you had been of the world, the world would love its own: but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.

St. John’s Gospel, 15:18-19.

At Vatican II, the Church (in Her human element) sought to make peace with the world. That is, the human element of the Church tried to become loved (or accepted) by the world and cease to be a sign of contradiction.

This is why Pope Benedict XVI described Vatican II as an attempt to officially reconcile the Church with the world as it had become after 1789 [i.e., after the French Revolution].1

To reconcile with the world, Pope Paul VI stated that:

[A] wave of affection and admiration flowed from the council over the modern world of humanity. … [M]essages of trust issued from the council to the present-day world. The modern world’s values were not only respected but honored ….

Address of Pope Paul VI, December 7, 1965.

The “new” SSPX now also seeks to make peace with the world and with the conciliar church. As Catholic Candle has shown repeatedly, in many articles quoting the (new) SSPX and citing back to SSPX sources, the “new” SSPX tries hard to fit in with the world and with the conciliar church. The following tiny, partial list (gleaned from Catholic Candle’s long article list) is merely illustrative:

• Bishop Fellay said in 2008 that his excommunication causes him much suffering. By contrast, Archbishop Lefebvre declared it was a matter of indifference to him if the conciliar church excommunicated him.2 In 1988, the “old” SSPX’s major superiors asked Rome to excommunicate them in solidarity with their bishops. The “old” SSPX did not care about fitting in with the conciliar church, as Bishop Fellay does.
• The “old” SSPX used to teach that women wearing trousers is a sin of immodesty. The “new” SSPX now says it is fine for its women followers to wear trousers, if women who live around them wear trousers. This helps these women followers to look like and be part of the world.
• The “new” SSPX now praises the holiness of the post-conciliar popes and overlooks how destructive they were, preparing the way for the N-SSPX to have the same “heroes” as the conciliar world.
• The “new” SSPX adopts conciliar lingo (e.g., “parish” is now “community”) so that the N-SSPX will be using the same language as the conciliar world.
• The “new” SSPX joins with the secular and conciliar media obsessed with the physical violence of Muslim extremists, rather than the more important spiritual harm done to souls by the (false) Muslim religion. This conditions N-SSPX followers to share a common focus with the world.
• The “new” SSPX promotes and has joined with the so-called “conservative” wing of conciliar revolutionaries. The “new” SSPX usually remains silent on new conciliar pronouncements of errors except to quote or parrot the “concern” of those “conservative” revolutionaries on the “seriousness” of such issues and the possibility of “confusion” and “misunderstanding”. This aligns the N-SSPX on the “side” of the so-called “conservative” wing of the conciliar church.
• The “new” SSPX now watches and promotes movies, because to abstain from them would be much different from the world.
• The “new” SSPX now permits girls’ school uniforms to be miniskirts (inches above the knee), because the world and conciliar church are lax and immodest. The SSPX’s (previous) traditional standards of modesty are an obstacle to its followers looking like everyone else.

The “new” SSPX has now given us yet another example of its attempts to fit in with the world and with the conciliar church. In the promotional video for the “new” SSPX’s St. Vincent’s Academy in Kansas City, Missouri, the priest-principal assures the viewer that the SSPX school is not different from other schools. These are his words:

Our school is very much like other schools and we use a very similar curriculum and we have a very similar structure to the day, hopefully more discipline than you might find in the run of the mill [school].

This video contains lots of smiling children raising their hands or kicking a ball, and a guitar-strumming sister. The video mentions “faith”, small class sizes, giving the students “vision”, and preparing the students to be Catholic adults.

But the video never mentions modernism, liberalism, Tradition, the conciliar church, modesty, Christ the King, Vatican II (or its errors), the crisis in the Church, or compromise (or avoiding compromise).

Let us pray for the SSPX which had been the salt of the earth but now has lost its savor, trying to fit in with the world and with the conciliar church.