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Notes -
You gave an effortful and illuminating reply, so I'll do my best to answer your question.
When I say 'normalized', I suppose what I'm after boils down to two points.
A consensus that the SSPX is not schismatic and that attending their liturgy and receiving the Eucharist is fine and not illicit. This lets more people attend the TLM in parishes / dioceses that lack one.
The ability (built on point number 1) for SSPX clergy to evangelize and catechize. Regardless of one's political opinions regarding the SSPX, their seminarians come out extremely well educated and theologically solid. This cannot necessarily be said about many diocesan seminarians - with the major caveat that the variance across the USA can be quite large. I don't need to recapitulate the how and why of really bad liturgies emerging in the 70s and 80s, but suffice it to say, part of the cause was sub-par seminary training and study for priests of that generation. Although it does seem like the younger generation takes it more seriously, I met a friend-of-a-friend priest in his early thirties who, beer in hand at a wedding, announced he was "really into astrology." I'm not going as far as saying he's heretical or satanic. Quite the opposite - he was "father friendly / youth pastor / acoustic guitar" levels of spiritually flaccid. I wasn't scandalized, I was disappointed that this was a fairly recent product of a seminary.
The SSPX, I believe, has ordained just over 1,000 priests now (USA and rest of the world). That's 1,000 theologically sound clergymen who could be used for a whole variety of projects that require a strong theological foundation.
Regarding your excellent outline of the political realities regarding the SSPX, Vatican, and various groups of bishops, it all makes sense to me and I understand exactly the odd situation of conservative American Bishops. As a country, we always kind of make whatever the 'thing' is into our own, don't we?
Online tradcaths are mostly that - online. If every rando posting DEUS VULT memes would simply go to Mass regularly, we'd probably see some real demographic change across parishes. IRL tradcaths are too busy having big families and experimenting with various levels of crunchy-ness (small scale farming, local produce, raw milk etc. etc.) The theologically rigorous folks I try to spend time with also frame TLM discussion exactly as you did; TC isn't popular and needs to be loosened, but we probably aren't going to revert to Summorum Pontificum. My bet is that we'll get to a spot where any parish that goes to the trouble of requesting approval for a TLM probably gets it from their Bishop unless there are very peculiar circumstances. This would, I hope, lead to more diocesan priests seeking training in the Extraordinary Rite.
Again, what do you mean by ‘consensus’? The Vatican does not consider them in schism. The people who call them schismatic are mostly unhinged polemicists, either of the sort that unironically use phrases like ‘schismatic from the council’ or boosters of particular movements which have unrelated bad blood.
Diocesan bishops can give whatever faculties they want to SSPX priests, same as for FSSP or ICK priests. This happens at lower, but not much lower, rates. American and French bishops like using priest who regularly celebrate both rites for major diocesan initiatives but you don’t find FSSP priests doing this stuff either, even if they’re over represented as exorcists.
I didn't know these things.
Can you provide any good rec's for a "State of the SSPX vis-a-vis the Vatican" at present?
No comprehensive, up-to-date, source exists.
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