Popes in the wings
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Reaching Pope Pius XIII involves first communicating with Robert Cardinal Lyons, whose telephone was answered, to my great surprise, by the cardinal's wife.
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The self-styled "His Holiness Pope Pius XIII."
"He should be home around 4," she said.
It was already 4 p.m. where I was.
"Where, exactly, are you?" I asked.
"We're in Texas," she said.
I went ahead and phoned the pope, who, as it turns out, lives in Springdale, Wash., 1,500 miles from his only cardinal.
Pius XIII, once known as Fr. Lucian Pulvermacher, a Capuchin priest, turns 87 this Wednesday. The cardinals of the other Roman Catholic Church, an establishment located in Rome, will gather five days later to select a successor to John Paul II, who died eight days ago. Pius XIII views himself as the successor to Pius XII, who died 47 years ago. Pulvermacher never accepted the changes of Vatican II, which brought the church into the 20th century, a venue in which he and an uncertain but sometimes noisy number of coreligionists find inhospitable for an eternal faith.
"All the teachings the church had up to that time became irrelevant. They would say 'you're old-fashioned. That's negative thinking,'Â " he said.
Pulvermacher, who was a missionary in Japan at the time, fled to Australia where he connected with the sedevacantist movement. The word is from the Latin sede vacante -- vacant seat. The group holds that John XXIII, in convening Vatican II, erred against church truths. Because the pope is infallible, an error could only mean one thing: John XXIII was not the pope.
To some, this would seem to be the ultimate undistributed middle term in a syllogism. To men such as Hutton Gibson, the conspiracy-brained father of the schismatic movie director, it became the basis for an entire movement away from Rome and back to the Tridentine Mass, with its older wording, Latin language and abhorrence of the errors of ecumenism and modern thought. The unacceptable break was the Novus Ordo, or "New Order" Mass, said in vernacular languages, with the priest facing the congregation.
First Published April 10, 2005 12:00 am
