The SSPX and Plato's Allegory Part II "Classic vs. New Coke"
On the theological problem the Society of St. Pius X cannot solve by being right.
Louis Massett
I have written elsewhere about my own exodus from the cave — the allegory Plato tells in the seventh book of the Republic, the prisoners chained facing a wall, the shadows they mistake for reality, and the one who turns around. That essay is called Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and it is about what it costs to leave. This one is about a different question — not what the leaving costs, but why the Society of St. Pius X was never authorized to build the cave in the first place.
Let me set the frame briefly for the reader who has not read the other piece.
The Society sees certain shadows on the wall of the cave, and it sees them clearly. It sees the Latin Mass. It sees the Baltimore Catechism. It sees reverence, and doctrinal seriousness, and large families, and habited sisters, and the culture of Catholic Christendom that existed for most of the twentieth century and has receded in a hurry from most American parishes since. What the Society sees is real. The shadows on the wall are not illusions. They are the projection of something.
What the Society does not see — or refuses to see — is the sun that casts them.
The sun, as I have said elsewhere, is charity — the love God gave to us first, that our parents’ love extended to us in the ordinary miracle of our birth, that we are called to extend outward to family, friend, stranger, and enemy alike. And the visible sacrament of that charity, in the specific form Christ gave it, is the whole Catholic Church, in communion with Peter, across two thousand years and every continent, in every language and every legitimate rite, exercised through the authority of the bishops in communion with the Roman Pontiff. The shadows the Society venerates — the Latin Mass, the classic catechesis, the culture of reverence — are shadows of that reality. They are not the reality itself. They cannot be made to substitute for it. They cannot be produced apart from it.
And here is what the Society has done, over the last thirty-eight years, in confusing the shadows for the sun. It has decided that because its own perception of the shadows is clear and reverent and beautiful, it has the right to produce those shadows itself, outside the authority of the sun that casts them.
Which brings me, in a way I do not think Plato would have anticipated, to a story about a soft drink.
New Coke
In April of 1985, at a press conference in Manhattan, Coca-Cola CEO Roberto Goizueta stood in front of a bank of cameras and told the American public that after ninety-nine years of the same formula, the Coca-Cola Company was releasing something called New Coke. The old formula, he explained, would be retired. New Coke would take its place. It was sweeter. It was smoother. It had performed better in blind taste tests. The company had run the numbers. The company had made its decision.
The company had also, in the space of about ninety days, made one of the most catastrophic business decisions in the twentieth century
An imagined counterfactual
Now imagine, for a moment, that the story had gone differently in one specific way.
Imagine that inside Coca-Cola, in the days after Goizueta’s press conference, a small group of the company’s most senior flavor engineers — the men who had actually mixed the syrups for thirty years, who had been raised on the original formula, who had spent their whole careers producing it — decided that the corporate decision was not merely wrong but unconscionable.
Imagine that these engineers went further than resigning. Imagine that they held meetings among themselves. Imagine that they concluded that the original Coca-Cola, the classic formula, was too important to entrust to a board of directors that had already proven itself unfit to steward it. Imagine that the engineers pooled their resources, set up their own bottling operation in a warehouse in Georgia, and began producing the original formula themselves — unauthorized, unlicensed, outside every chain of corporate command that had been in place since the company’s founding in 1886.
And imagine, further, that these engineers went on television and told the American public two things.
One: what Coca-Cola is now selling under the name “Coca-Cola” is not really Coca-Cola.
Two: the real Coca-Cola is being produced, in defiance of the company, by us — the men who love it best — and you should drink ours instead of theirs.
Now — here is the question the metaphor is doing its work to raise.
Are the engineers right that the classic formula is better?
For the sake of this argument, let's say it is.
Are the engineers right that the customers prefer it?
Almost certainly.
Are the engineers right that the corporate leadership blundered?
By any reasonable evaluation of the historical record, yes.
Does any of that, individually or together, give the engineers the authority to produce Coca-Cola?
No.
Why not?
Because Coca-Cola is not a formula. Coca-Cola is a company.
The formula is owned by the company. The trademark is owned by the company. The right to determine what is sold under the name “Coca-Cola” is owned by the company. That right is exercised, in the ordinary corporate sense, by the CEO and the board of directors. It is not exercised by individual employees, however talented, however loyal to the original vision, however correct in their assessment of the market.
An employee — even a very senior employee — who unilaterally decides to keep producing Coca-Cola outside the corporate structure is not producing Coca-Cola. He is producing a bootleg beverage that resembles Coca-Cola. He may believe that his formulation is closer to the true product than what the company itself is currently selling. He may be right about that. But the authority to distribute a beverage under the name Coca-Cola is not derived from being right. It is derived from the corporate charter, from the delegation of authority within that charter, and from the chain of command that runs from the founding of the company in 1886 to its current officers.
When a bootleg operation opens across town — however well-intentioned, however faithful to the original recipe — the company has one option. It expels them. It sues. It shuts the operation down. Not because the bootleggers are wrong about the product. Because the bootleggers are wrong about the authority to produce it.
The SSPX--and Catholic Bootleggers
The Society of St. Pius X — the breakaway Catholic community I was raised inside and have written a book about — has, for four decades now, argued a version of the flavor-engineer defense.
The argument, boiled to its essentials, is this. The Catholic Church, in the reforms following the Second Vatican Council, changed its formula. What is being served on Sunday mornings in most American parishes is not the true Mass. It is a modernist replacement — sweeter, smoother, easier on the modern palate — and, in the view of the Society, spiritually inferior. The Latin Mass — the classic Mass, if you will — has been shelved. The people, if they knew what they were being asked to drink, would prefer the classic. Many still do. And so, in the summer of 1988, and again on July 1 of this year, four bishops were consecrated by another bishop, without the mandate of the Pope, to keep the classic formula alive.
The Society, in its own telling, is the flavor engineer.
I do not want to spend much of this article arguing whether the Society is right on the efficacy of the Latin Mass--suffice it to say there is a philosophical principle--when two things aren't the same, one must be greater than the other. I have written elsewhere that many of the things it preserves — the Latin Mass, the Baltimore Catechism, the culture of reverence, the seriousness about sin and hell and heaven — are things any serious Catholic ought to admire. On the merits of the product, the Society has a case. That case is not what this article is about.
This article is about the authority.
The Salza argument
The Catholic apologist John Salza, in his careful theological work on the Society’s canonical status, has made an argument that I think is decisive on this point. Salza distinguishes between two things a Catholic priest needs in order to legitimately exercise ministry.
The first is apostolic succession — the unbroken line of episcopal consecration running from the Apostles to the priest’s own bishop. The Society has this. Its bishops were validly consecrated. Its priests were validly ordained. The sacraments its priests confect are, in most cases, sacramentally valid. Baptism, penance, the Mass, the anointing of the sick — these things happen when a Society priest performs them, in the sense that the sacramental effect occurs.
The second thing a priest needs is apostolic mission — the delegation of canonical faculties from a bishop in communion with the Pope, or from the Pope himself, that authorizes the priest to exercise his ministry within the Church. This is what the Society does not have and has not had since the 1988 consecrations.
Apostolic succession is the classic formula. The engineers preserved it. It is in the syrup.
Apostolic mission is the corporate charter. The engineers do not have it. They cannot confer it on themselves. They cannot vote themselves the right to distribute Catholic ministry under the name of the Church.
The distinction is old, and it is well-attested in the tradition. St. Cyprian of Carthage in the third century, St. Jerome and St. Augustine in the fourth, the entire scholastic apparatus of the medieval Church, and every serious ecclesiologist since have understood that valid orders and legitimate ministry are two distinct things. A priest can have the first without the second. The result, when he does, is a man who can produce a sacramental effect without having the authorization of the Church to exercise a public ministry in her name. In canonical language, this is called ministry without mission. It is exactly the Society’s situation.
Why being right is not enough
This is the theological core of what has been broken for thirty-eight years and was broken again on July 1 of this year.
The Society may be right that the "classic" (Latin) Mass is better. It may be right that many Catholics prefer it. It may be right that the post-conciliar Church has, in some respects, misread its own market. It may be right about a great many things concerning the merits of Catholic worship, catechesis, family life, and cultural formation.
None of that gives them the authority to consecrate bishops.
Because the Catholic Church, like the Coca-Cola Company, is not a formula. It is an institution — a divinely constituted institution, but an institution nonetheless — and the authority to determine what is authentically Catholic worship, what is authentically Catholic ministry, and who exercises episcopal office in the Church’s name is not distributed to every man who is theologically confident that he is right. It is distributed through the office of Peter, and through the bishops in communion with Peter, and through the canonical mechanisms that govern the delegation of ministry within that communion.
The Society, when it consecrated four bishops in 1988 and four more this July, did what the flavor engineers in the counterfactual did. It concluded that its own assessment of the product was so certain, and the corporate leadership’s failure so evident, that it had the right to produce the product itself, outside the chain of authority that had made it the product in the first place.
The company’s response to the flavor engineers, in the counterfactual, was inevitable. Expulsion. Cease-and-desist. Legal action.
The Church’s response to the Society, in 1988 and again this month, was likewise inevitable. Excommunication ipso facto. Not because the Society was wrong about the Mass. Because the Society was wrong about who owns the formula.
The last thing worth saying
Some readers of this article, if they have followed me this far, will want to say that the metaphor breaks down. That the Catholic Church is not a corporation. That Coca-Cola is a beverage and the Mass is a sacrament. That comparing the Vicar of Christ to a CEO is undignified.
They are, of course, correct on all three points. All analogies limp. The metaphor breaks down at exactly the place metaphors always break down — at the point where the analogy meets the reality it was constructed to illuminate.
But the metaphor is doing one specific job, and the job is this. It is drawing the reader’s attention to the difference between being right about the product and being authorized to produce it.
The Society may be right about the Mass. It is not authorized to produce it in defiance of the Pope. The two questions are separate, and confusing them — for forty years — is what has produced the schism the Society insists is not really a schism, the parallel jurisdiction the Society insists is not really parallel, and the four bishops consecrated this July who insist, as the four bishops consecrated in 1988 insisted, that they are still Catholic bishops in good standing.
They are not. Not because the Mass they celebrate is wrong. Because the authority they claim to celebrate it under does not exist outside communion with Peter.
The engineers can produce the syrup all they want.
They cannot produce the company.
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Louis Massett is the author of Traddyland: Memoir of a Radical Traditional Catholic, now available on Amazon.