Rorate Caeli

Italian Protestants: "a spirit of Counter-Reformation" has returned...

News from the Synod of the Valdensians and Methodists in Italy, assembled in Torre Pellice (Piedmont), on Summorum Pontificum and the recent Responses of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. From the text of the "order of the day" (motion), approved yesterday, which shows that the Italian Protestants understand the full meaning of the Traditional Mass:

"-considering the ecumenical situation created following the recent motu proprio entitled Summorum Pontificum, of Benedict XVI, which has restored the position of the Latin Mass according to the Roman Missal of Pius V (1570), characterized by the denial of all that the Reformation had affirmed on the matter of the renewal of public Christian worship, and the document entitled Responses to some questions regarding certain aspects of the doctrine on the Church...of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith , in which, among other things, it is affirmed that the only Church of Christ 'subsists exclusively in the one Catholic Church' of Rome and that the churches born out of the Reformation of the 16th century 'cannot, according to Catholic doctrine, be called 'Churches' in the proper sense'."...

"-We thank God for having liberated us, for eight centuries as Valdensians and for five centuries as Protestants, from submission to the Roman Pontiff, whom we recognize as a brother in Christ, but not as a teacher of the faith, realizing additionally, once again, that the Papacy and the Roman Curia are today, as in the 16th century, an obstacle to Christian unit;"...