On the same day that Lefebvre and his four co-conspirators were excommunicated, John Paul II established a new Curial office, the Ecclesia Dei Commission, to bring back into the full communion of the Church those Lefebvrist priests and lay people who could not stomach a formal break with Rome. Over time, Ecclesia Dei became the Curial interlocutor, not only with Lefebvrists who wanted to return to Rome, but with the Lefebvrist movement (typically known as the SSPX) itself. The problem, which became glaringly apparent in January, was that the Ecclesia Dei Commission was a Curial free agent - a loose cannon, rolling around the deck of the Barque of Peter, accountable to no other Curial office.

The current head of the commission is a Colombian, Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, a brave man who once confronted the cocaine kingpin, Pablo Escobar, by posing as a milkman. On gaining entry to Escobar's home, the doughty Castrillón demanded that the notorious drug lord confess his sins. Cardinal Castillón is also, alas, remembered for having given the worst Curia press conference in living memory. It was 2002, and his task was to present John Paul II's annual Holy Thursday letter to the world's priests. When reporters raised the inevitable questions about the clerical sexual abuse scandal in the US, Castrillón brushed them aside and said that the pope had far more important things to worry about, like peace in the Middle East. It was not a persuasive argument, and it ill-served the pope. Castrillón will turn 80 in July, and it seems that he had become determined to pull off a career-capping spectacular: the reconciliation of the Lefebvrist schism. That cause was also close to the pastoral heart of Benedict XVI, who knew that the majority of Lefebvrist faithful cared little for church-state theory but simply wanted to worship according to the old Latin rite. Thus Benedict, again defying media stereotypes of the papal rottweiler, was prepared to make the opening, public gesture by lifting the excommunications of the four bishops whom Lefebvre (who died in 1991) had illicitly ordained, the assumption presumably being that a similar graceful gesture would come from the Lefebvrist leadership.

It did not. On the contrary, Bishop Bernard Fellay, Lefebvre's successor as head of the SSPX, issued a letter to the faithful, in which he crowed that "the Tradition is no longer excommunicate" - an astonishingly arrogant formulation that seemed to imply that it was the rest of the Catholic Church, not the minuscule sect of Lefebvrists, that was in schism. Moreover, Fellay indicated that the SSPX still had grave difficulties reconciling the teaching of Vatican II with "the Tradition" (always capitalised), as the SSPX understood it. Whatever negotiations Cardinal Castrillón had conducted had not, evidently, received agreement on that crucial point. And that, rather than the media circus over the Holocaust denial of an internationally-known crank like Richard Williamson, cut to the heart of the matter. For it opened up the possibility that, just as the "cafeteria Catholicism" of the progressives was dying of its own intellectual and pastoral sterility, a new cafeteria was being opened in the fever swamps of the Catholic Right. As the media uproar faded, Jewish groups outraged over Williamson's antics were reassured of what they already knew: Benedict XVI was a philo-Semite who would defend living Judaism with his life, and would do so for the strongest of reasons-because he believes, as Vatican II affirmed, that God does not break his covenantal promises. That understanding, and the Church's commitment to religious freedom, was what was being put in jeopardy by a dangerously ill-prepared and likely premature reconciliation with the SSPX.