The Case of the "Hawaii Six"
By Matthias Sevigny
On February 11, of this year the Archdiocese of Maceio in Brazil released a note in which they declared that any Catholic of the Archdiocese who attended a Traditional Latin Mass other than the one approved by the Archbishop would be committing a public schismatic act, for which the penalty was automatic (latae sententiae) excommunication ipso facto.1
This was the most aggressive attack on Traditional Catholics who love the Latin Mass and the Traditional Faith since the motu proprio Traditionis Custodes of Pope Francis in 2021.
Attending an unapproved TLM (SSPX, diocesan priest without “approval,” even an Ecclesia Dei priest in a private home) would be “configured a public act of schism.” This obviously shocks the mind. Not just because it is so obviously unjust and cruel for a bishop to do this to his flock, but because it confounds the rational mind as to how in such juridical-sounding language a diocese could make this judgement -even in the Church of Vatican II.
Such an act is cruel in a way that has become all too well known to the Traditional Catholic, but more so what probably strikes a lot of Traditional Catholics is that this bishop’s cruel decree seems to hold even less legal water than others. That at least was my first thought.
Almost immediately I began to see in my mind a repeat of the episode from almost 35 years ago, which in the annals of the Society of Saint Pius X has gained the moniker -The Case of the “Hawaii Six.” In the coming months, we very well could hear of the public excommunications of some Catholics in Maceio for attending one of these “unauthorized masses.” Could we see again even in this desolate ecclesiastical landscape a “redo” so to speak of the “Hawaii Six?” Only time will tell, but for now let’s take a step back to one of the most intriguing episodes in the fight for Tradition after Vatican II. In 1991 the ecclesiastical landscape was very different, and probably just as bleak as a lot of Traditionalists feel about our own times. It was over three decades since the end of the Second Vatican Council and Tradition was still an outcast in Rome. The disastrous effects of Liberation Theology had already irrevocably damaged the Church in South America, as the Jesus Movement had led its way across the United States, and on the whole Pentecostalism was experiencing massive growth in the West, and Catholicism already on the slow march to Institutional death that it is still on today.
The complicated results of the Vatican’s policy of Ostpolitik was coming to its slow end as the fall of the Soviet Union was already underway. And the momentous year of 1988 was still felt all through the Church world.
