Deciding then to catch the schools out by visiting again when they were least expected, they found the children equally as good.

The Education Review Office has always given the schools good reviews, Principal Andrew Cranshaw said in the Wanganui Chronicle.

Cranshaw is also the superior of The Society of St Pius X in New Zealand.

Whanganui's St Anthony's Parish is made up of families from the Society of St Pius X.

It has two schools on its Alma Rd site. St Anthony Catholic Primary is for children in Years 1-6. St Dominic College is for girls in Years 7-13 and St Augustine College is for boys the same age. The two senior schools are together for convenience as St Dominic College.

There are 130 pupils in total.

Seventy of them are in the senior schools, including 10 girls from out of town who board with the traditionalist Dominican Sisters of Wanganui on the site.

The precise status of the SSPX is not clear. It isn't officially schismatic.

But on the other hand SSPX priests do not have faculties to exercise priestly ministry.

The Society of St. Pius X was founded by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1970 to form priests, as a response to what he described as errors that had crept into the Church following the Second Vatican Council.

In 1988 when Lefebvre consecrated four new bishops without papal mandate the four men and Lefebvre himself were excommunicated by John Paul II.

This excommunication applied only to these individual men, and not to the SSPX as a whole.

Pope Benedict lifted the excommunications of the four bishops.

But this did not bring with it a reconciliation between the Catholic Church and the whole institute of the SSPX, which remains a separate issue.

A distinction has to be made between the Pope's concern for the spiritual wellbeing of the four men who had been under excommunication, and who had respectfully petitioned the Pope to return to full communion with the Church; and the canonical status of the entire SSPX, which still has never been recognised by Rome.

Pope Benedict said "As long as the Society [of Saint Pius X] does not have a canonical status in the Church, its ministers do not exercise legitimate ministries in the Church…."

The Vatican and the SSPX have continued to talked to each other with a view to resolving dogmatic differences.

But the Vatican (most notably the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Archbishop Gerhard Mueller) has obliquely indicated that a reconciliation is not likely to come soon.

This stance has been echoed by some in the SSPX as well, who do not appear to be in a hurry to regularise their status in the Church.

In his letter for the beginning of the Jubilee Year of Mercy, Pope Francis established that those who approach the priests of the SSPX for the Sacrament of Reconciliation "shall validly and licitly receive the absolution of their sins" during the Holy Year.

Source

• Wanganui Chronicle
• canonlawmadeeasy.com
• radiovaticana.va
• Image: 3.bp.blogspot.com

The Associated Press reported that the case has become a flashpoint in the "ideological tug-of-war" in the Catholic Church over the pontiff's agenda.

The matter concerns the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, a small but growing order of several hundred priests, seminarians and nuns that was founded in Italy in 1990 as an offshoot of the larger Franciscan order.

The previous pontiff, Benedict XVI, launched an investigation into the congregation when five of its priests complained that the order was taking on an overly traditionalist bent.

The dispute goes back to differing interpretations of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which include the use of local languages in Mass that some considered a break with the church's tradition.

Benedict relaxed restrictions on using Latin for the service in 2007.

The Vatican in July named the Rev. Fidenzio Volpi, a Franciscan Capuchin friar, as a special commissioner to run the order with a mandate to quell the dissent within its ranks and get a handle on its finances. In the same decree appointing Volpi, Francis forbade the friars from celebrating the Mass in Latin without special permission.

Four tradition-minded Italian intellectuals wrote to the Vatican accusing it of violating Benedict's 2007 edict, saying the Holy See was imposing "unjust discrimination" against those who celebrate the ancient rite.

Volpi though was undeterred, and on Dec. 8 took action, issuing a series of sanctions in the name of the pope that have stunned observers, the AP report said.

Volpi closed the friars' seminary and sent its students to other religious universities in Rome. He suspended the activities of the friars' lay movement. He suspended ordinations of priests for a year and required those who wish to be ordinated to formally accept the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and its new liturgy or be kicked out. And he decreed that current priests must commit themselves in writing to following the existing mission of the order.

Pope Francis has called Benedict's 2007 decree allowing wider use of the Latin Mass "prudent," but has warned that it risks being exploited on ideological grounds by factions in the church.

A group of tradition-minded lay Catholics has started an online petition asking for Volpi's ouster.

Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi defended Volpi as a sage administrator and dismissed calls for his ouster.

Sources

Associated Press/Trib Live
AP/The Globe and Mail
Image: Reuters/Trib Live