Pope Benedict XVI has recently overturned the excommunication of four schismatic bishops, one of whom is a Holocaust denier. In an interview with NPR, John Allen, senior correspondent with the National Catholic Reporter, said:
The Vatican fears schism like almost nothing else, because you have legitimate bishops who are able to ordain other legitimate bishops and in effect kind of reproduce the schism. Over the centuries Popes have moved heaven and earth, literally, to heal these wounds in the body of the church, and I think Benedict XVI’s decision to lift the excommunication of these four would be a case in point.
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The spin coming from the Vatican in these days clearly is that this decision does not betoken anything broader about the direction of the Church. This has been presented as an act of peace on the part of Benedict XVI to heal this internal wound. But I think a lot of even moderate and even some conservative Catholics would look at this as symbolic of a kind of course change in Catholicism, and in what many would see as an overly, kind of permissive outreach to a group of traditionalists who not only reject the celebration of the Mass in the vernacular languages, as opposed to the older Latin, but who have much deeper objections to a lot of what the Catholic church is the last 50 years has come to stand for, one of those things being the effort to promote unity with other Christian churches and other religions, the other being the recognition of religious freedom and a separation between church and state.
Listen to the full interview here, and see the comprehensive coverage of this event at Get Religion.