No immediate breakthroughs are expected in what will likely be a lengthy negotiation.
“In the best case, humanly speaking, we have several years of discussions ahead of us,’’ the society’s delegation leader, Bishop Alfonso de Galarreta, said on the society’s website.
De Galarreta and three other bishops were excommunicated in 1988 after they were consecrated without papal consent by the late ultraconservative Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Lefebvre founded the society in 1969, opposed to Vatican II’s reforms, which included outreach to Jews and other Christians and the celebration of Mass in the vernacular rather than Latin.
The society’s opposition to Vatican II, particularly its teachings on ecumenism and religious freedom, remains at the heart of the dispute with Rome and is the focus of the talks beginning today with officials from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Benedict laid the groundwork for the meeting starting in 2007, when he relaxed restrictions on celebrating the old Latin Mass, which the traditionalists had demanded. In January, he approved lifting the bishops’ 1988 excommunications.
