‘I have not moved’: Bishop Strickland’s test for Vatican II, set beside the Church’s own texts

The quoted sentences come from the middle of the letter, directly after Strickland discusses Benedict XVI’s 2005 contrast between a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture and a hermeneutic of reform, and Benedict’s refusal either to freeze the Church’s teaching authority at 1962 or to sever Vatican II from what came before. Strickland calls that distinction essential and presents the demand for demonstration as something he adds to it. He opens by telling readers who feared he had changed that he has not moved, and says he is trying to speak the truth more precisely, not less willingly. Neither standard explanation of the crisis is sufficient on its own, he writes: that Vatican II caused it, or that the Council was sound and only its implementation failed. He wants to establish what the Council said, what it did not say, and what was done in its name. He says he and his readers will read even the documents that raise more difficult questions about their relationship to earlier teaching beside Scripture, Tradition, the Fathers and Doctors and the previous Magisterium, and ask whether each can stand within the Faith the Church has received. He describes this as examining Vatican II in the light of Tradition rather than the reverse, and says that if something cannot be reconciled, the Church must eventually have the courage to address it. He presents the work as part of a bishop’s responsibility, writing that the bishops of today cannot indefinitely pass these questions to the bishops of tomorrow. He asks defenders of the Council not to treat serious questions as disobedience and to acknowledge any reform that exceeded what the Council called for. On Lefebvre, he does not withdraw his earlier favourable words and recalls having said he believes it possible that the Church will one day recognise his sanctity, while saying that judgment belongs to the Church. He is grateful that what might have been lost was preserved, but says Lefebvre’s calling need not be his own; he describes his task as building a bridge between divided Catholics, not a compromise between truth and error. OnePeterFive’s editor’s note points readers to his Vatican II Reading Challenge, which opens by citing Pope Leo XIV’s call to Catholics to return to the Council’s documents and read them anew (Pillars of Faith). Earlier in 2026 he published “The SSPX and the Question of Apostolic Continuity” (3 February) and “The SSPX: A Love Story” (25 June), which LifeSiteNews republished the next day as an opinion piece under a headline saying that love, not defiance, had been the driving force behind Lefebvre and the SSPX; the letter itself speaks of the love that has inspired the Society’s sacrifices (Pillars of Faith; Pillars of Faith; LifeSiteNews).