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Pontifical Requiem Mass for †Fr. Anthony Cekada

As the last post on this blog, we thought we’d link to †Fr. Cekada’s Requiem Mass.  Father died on September 11, 2020.

The Pontifical Mass was offered by Bp. Daniel Dolan on September 17.  15 Priests (including 3 bishops) were in attendance for the Mass.   The clergy in attendance represented St. Gertrude the Great Church, Most Holy Trinity Seminary, CMRI, and a number of independent chapels.  

Music was performed by Saint Gertrude the Great Choir. Sarah Burns, Director.  Andrew Richesson, Organist.

May he rest in peace.  Amen.

Papa Pachamama’s Profession of the Modernist Heresy

Bergoglio receives the offering for the Pachamama.

“ALL THE Gods of the heathens are demons,” says Psalm 95 — but that didn’t stop Jorge Mario Bergoglio from sponsoring pagan idol worship of the Amazonian earth goddess, the Pachamama, in the Vatican gardens on October 4. Nor did it stop him, during the Offertory Procession of a Mass two weeks later, from smilingly receiving the traditional red-ribboned flower offering to the Pachamama — and instructing his Master of Ceremonies to place it on the High Altar of St. Peter’s, which stands directly over the tomb of St. Peter himself.

Heresy and apostasy, canonists and moral theologians teach, can be committed dictis vel factis — not only in words, but also in deeds. And if Bergoglio’s latest deeds aren’t proof that he has totally repudiated the religion revealed by God, the very words heresy and apostasy — and indeed the whole First Commandment — have utterly lost their meaning.

How did it become possible to justify these actions — ones which the martyrs refused to perform under threat of torture and certain death — and all in the very place where St. Peter himself died?

The answer, of course, is Vatican II, which taught that pagan religions are “means of salvation” used by the Holy Ghost. And this heresy, in turn, is the product of another: the modernist meta-heresy of the evolution of dogma.

So it was perfectly appropriate that, two days after Bergoglio installed the Pachamama offering over St. Peter’s bones, the Vatican Press Office published a clear and open profession of this heresy in an article entitled “Development of Doctrine is a People that Walks Together.”

Its source (the Vatican’s official news service), the timing of its release (following the controversial Amazon Synod) and topic it treats (a general rationale for sweeping changes in church doctrine and discipline) are meant to signal the article’s importance. It lays the broad theoretical groundwork for the changes Francis intends to introduce in his soon-to-appear post-synodal exhortation, which will implement the resolutions of his rigged synod.

Its contents are a bell that cannot be un-rung, and a nuclear bomb that cannot be un-detonated. It is now forever part of the permanent public record. While the article does not have Francis’ name on the bottom of it (in order to allow neo-con chumps to argue that the blame lies elsewhere), it has his filthy fingerprints and those of his fellow modernist theological thugs all over it. It is his work, his teaching, and theirs — and indeed is posted on the Vatican site under the heading of “Pope Francis” and “Papal Magisterium.”

“People that Walks Together” presents nothing less than the classic modernist argument for dogmatic evolution — the heresy which holds that revealed truths are not immutable, but are conditioned by and subject to change in light of men’s evolving “experience” in various ages. This heresy is everywhere in the Novus Ordo.

Dogmatic Evolution: A Real Heresy?

Why, one might ask, would such a notion be heretical? It doesn’t explicitly deny or call into question individual dogmas, such as Christ’s divinity, the Virgin Birth, or transubstantiation, does it?

The answer is, Oh yes, it does. Dogmatic evolution denies or calls into doubt every religious truth, because it renders the very idea of a religious truth impossible. It runs each dogma through the philosophical meat-grinder of relativism, subjectivism, psychology, personal experience and “historicism,” and turns it into mush. The truth that it expressed (we are made to understand) has been “surpassed,” gotten around, ignored in practice, or emptied of its essential meaning. “We are really beyond that now,” is the common refrain.

Dogmatic evolution, then, is not merely a heresy.  It is, as St. Pius X said, the sewer of all heresies, and practically speaking, apostasy, because it implicitly denies the possibility of objective truth in any dogma. (Continued)

The Italian Edition of “Work of Human Hands”

THIS NOVEMBER 30 marks the 50th anniversary of the Sunday in 1969 that Paul VI designated as the obligatory date for celebrating his New Mass; the following month this year is the tenth anniversary for me completing the manuscript Work of Human Hands: A Theological Critique of the Mass of Paul VI. 

It took me three decades to finish this book, and I was most gratified when it finally saw the light of day, thanks to the heroic work of its original publishers, John and Rhonda Lynch. 

Work of Human Hands received a wide array of positive reviews. Though officially ignored by its author’s enemies in the SSPX and R&R camps, the book is now in its third printing and has been a consistent best seller ever since it first appeared. You can purchase a copy for $24.95 plus postage from SGGResources.org.

For the more visually inclined, I produced a series of short, YouTube videos, Chapter Overviews of Work of Human Hands, that sum up some of the principal points in the book. These thirteen videos, as of this publication date, have had an aggregate number of 258,000 views.

Another project for the book is in the works. Over the past two summers, I have recorded the entire book for release on Audible. This will be a great benefit to the thousands who listen to books in their cars or as they work around the house, once the final version is edited.

Today, however, I am pleased to announce that my priest-colleagues at the Institute Mater Boni Consilii, Verrua Savoia, Italy, have just published a complete Italian translation through their publication arm, Sodalitium. (Continued)

Talking Sedevacantism with an SSPX Lay Kahuna

Following the SSPX wave…

Father: Even though I’ve figured out that sedevacantism is the only possible theological explanation for Bergoglio and the whole Vatican II mess, I still have a lot of friends and acquaintances in SSPX circles. Word of my change of position has gotten around, so the topic now comes up in conversations. Lay SSPX-ers agree with my arguments … up to a point. Their priests respond like they are brain dead, and either have no answer at all or tell me to read the Salza-Siscoe book.

Recently, though, a layman who is a respected major player in the SSPX empire invited me over to talk with him about sedevacantism. He’s an intelligent guy, and probably hopes to “convert” me back to R&R from the “errors” of sedevacantism. Any ideas about how to handle him?

LOOK ON IT as an opportunity to get him thinking about some of the unquestioned “givens” the Society has handed him about “evil, schismatic, proud” sedevacantism.

Like the SSPX priest, your friend also probably told you to read the Salza-Siscoe book, which is like Ambien in print. Zzzz. Instead of sending him links to Dead on Arrival and A Dignified Burial, my two videos refuting the book’s arguments,  I’d recommend you point him to a big wave coming from another direction.

A SEDE behind that smile?

I. Abp. Lefebvre in Favor of Sedevacantism?

For any SSPX kahuna, clerical or lay, the gold standard for explaining the state of the Church after Vatican II is supposedly “the position of Archbishop Lefebvre,” as if this were some great body of fixed and consistent teaching — which, of course, it was not. (See a 1984 article here.)

But since the notion of Lefebvre’s supposed authority casts such a long shadow in SSPX-land, you should meet your friend’s suggestion that you read the Salza-Siscoe book with another suggestion to him: that he take a close look at the material found at these two links:

Chances are, the lay kahuna will run this rather surprising information by an SSPX priest, perhaps even the District Kahuna himself. These priests — unlike me — did not know Abp. Lefebvre personally or hear him say these things, and they will not have a convincing way to explain them away for your friend.

So, an intelligent and reasonable man, having been told for ages that “the archbishop’s thinking” on Vatican II mess was nearly divine revelation, may indeed rightly begin to question the SSPX party line that sedevacantism is “schismatic.”

How could it be, if the the Iron Bishop himself so repeatedly spoke in favor of it?

The only conclusion if you say “true popes.”

II. The Real Problem: A Defecting Church

But serving up Abp. Lefebvre’s pro-sede statements is just a little hors d’oeuvre.

The essential argument against R&R and for sedevacantism is based upon ironclad principles of Catholic (i.e. pre-Vatican II) dogmatic theology concerning the indefectibility and infallibility of the Church — n.b. not just the infallibility of Roman Pontiff alone in rare ex cathedra pronouncements. I have provided a summary and application of the teaching in Resisting the Pope, Sedevacantism and Frankenchurch, and again in Section I of Sedevacantism: A Quick Primer.

The logical corner to force intelligent SSPX-ers like your lay friend into is the defecting Church.

(1) If Vatican II is error and the new laws are evil — as SSPX and R&R firmly insist —and at the same time, and the men who promulgated them somehow still had authority from Christ, the Church herself has defected, and Christ’s promises have failed — especially, “I am with you always.”

(2) But faith tells us this is impossible.

(3) The only alternate solution consonant with the Church’s infallibility and indefectibility is that the men who promulgated these errors and evils never received authority from Christ in the first place; they defected — not the Church herself — and became incapable of being validly elected popes or of receiving authority from Jesus Christ.

(4) The judgement that the changes were errors and evils is thus implicitly a judgment that those who promulgated them had no authority.

In other words, the errors and evils of the officially-approved changes is the smoking gun which leads to an unassailable and ironclad verdict: No authority, fake popes.

An Angelus Press bestseller?

III. Wait for the Lame Excuses…

Your friend will probably have heard the standard objections that SSPX has employed to get around this argument, and may repeat them to you:

(Continued)

The Remnant’s Latest: The Blathering of the Clams

 
RECENTLY I received a letter urging traditional Catholics to circulate a video produced by the R&R publication The Remnant, and calling for the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) and the Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP) to “unite in battle against our true enemy, the Modernists.”

In the video, Mission Impossible: Unite the SSPX and FSSP Clans, Remnant editor Michael Matt treats viewers to potted histories and fawning portraits of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, SSPX and FSSP. His is a whining, emotional appeal, entirely divorced from any discernible theological principle. We (all trads, but especially SSPX-ers and FSSP-ers) are all “brothers” because we go to the Latin Mass. Why, oh why, can’t we “just get along” to fight “the enemy.”

I addressed just this question in a 2008 sermon, Why Can’t We All Just Get Along? — because of Catholic doctrine, especially Catholic doctrine on the authority of the Roman Pontiff, which R&R outfits like The Remnant and SSPX have rejected both in theory and in practice. Moreover, the Church teaches that the principle for unity among Catholics is submission to the Roman Pontiff, who exercises authority from Christ to proclaim and protect the truths of the faith. (Continued)

A Short Musical Setting for the Creed

A PRIEST who is also a church musician quickly finds he has to balance pastoral considerations and musical aspirations without doing harm to either.

As a trained church musician who loves and wishes to preserve the great patrimony of the Catholic sacred music, he naturally wants to have his choir and organist perform as much splendid music as they can. As a priest, however, he learns that this must be tempered by the practicalities of running a well-ordered parish.

In the latter category, inevitably, falls the question of the length of church services, especially that of the Sunday High Mass. Before Vatican II, most harmonized settings of the Ordinary included a musical setting for the Credo. This was invariably the longest of the six movements; it took many rehearsals for a choir to learn, and it consumed a lot of time at the average Sunday parish High Mass.

As a teenager and aspiring church musician during the horrible period in the 1960s when the Vatican II changes were gradually being introduced and old-style sacred music was being dumped en masse, I haunted church music dealers in my home city, plowed through Mass settings that were being sold off for pennies, and bought what I considered to be the best. So here, more than fifty years later, I still have this collection with me, numbering well over two hundred scores.

When I purchased these Masses in the 1960s and again when I organized them about ten years ago, I noticed that in most cases, the Credo settings tended to be far less musically interesting than the other movements. Obviously, I’m not referring to the works of the great masters such as Palestrina, Victoria and Mozart, but those of the B, C and D list Catholic church music composers. I suspect that most of the inspirations the composers got came for the five shorter movements, and that the Credo setting was left till last.

Therefore, when I took over the church music program at St. Gertrude the Great in 2009, it occurred to me that if most musical settings of the Credo not only took a long time for a choir to learn and were usually musically inferior, but also consumed a lot of time for the parish High Mass, why not look for better alternatives? (Continued)

Spiritual Cooties: The SSPV Sacramental Penalties after 30 Years

Purely imaginary!

Coot-ie: n. informalUS. a children’s term for an imaginary germ or repellent quality transmitted by obnoxious or slovenly people.

JULY 4, 2019 marks the thirtieth anniversary of my departure from the Society of St. Pius V (SSPV).

Most traditional Catholics know that some sort of a conflict occurred many years ago among the priests who had left SSPX in 1983-84 and later formed the Society of St. Pius V (SSPV).

Few trads, however, know what caused the SSPV dispute. Fewer still know why the four priests who ultimately remained in SSPV (Frs. Kelly, Jenkins, Mroczka and Skierka), as a matter of policy, still refuse sacraments to lay Catholics affiliated with former SSPV priests such as Bp. Donald Sanborn and myself.

Normally, one would pass over in silence the details of such an ancient controversy. But thirty years on, a new generation of SSPV clergy still enforces this draconian penalty on a new generation of young traditional Catholics, and this naturally ought to raise a number of unsettling questions:

  • Why do you — a faithful twenty-year-old traditional Catholic from my parish or Bp. Sanborn’s, say — have to hide your affiliation if you’re traveling and want to receive Communion at an SSPV mission?
  • Why, if you’re a twenty-year-old former graduate of Fr. Jenkins’ school in Cincinnati, does Fr. Jenkins forbid you to receive Communion at Bp. Dolan’s parish when it’s convenient to do so?
  • Why, if you are a parishioner at St. Gertrude the Great, does Fr. Jenkins refuse to allow you to be a godparent for a nephew baptized at his church? (This incident actually occurred in late June, 2019 as I was writing this article.)
  • Why, if you’re a priest just ordained by newly-consecrated SSPV Bp. James Carroll, are you expected to enforce these penalties or prohibitions on your contemporaries, even though you can’t find the “crimes” they punish described in any pre-Vatican II canon law or moral theology book?

These practices, as we shall see, are all applications of what I call the “SSPV Spiritual Cooties Rule.”

Like the cootie of children’s playground fame, the SSPV cootie is an imaginary creature. You “catch” this cootie infestation by receiving sacraments from a traditional Catholic priest who himself caught a cootie earlier — from someone that SSPV declared cootie contaminated. It makes no difference how long in the past the contamination occurred. The rule has no statute of limitations, and the SSPV cootie has a very, very long arm.

When you step back from it even a bit, it is obvious that the Cooties Rule is nothing more than a punishment based on guilt by association. None of us who are old enough to remember the pre-Vatican II Church can ever remember anything like this going on.

Where did the rule come from and why is it still in place? The answer is quite different from what you might at first imagine, and the thirtieth anniversary of my departure from SSPV is the perfect occasion for me to explain.

The Daughters of Mary, Round Top NY. No canonical status and merely private vows.

The Daughters of Mary

In early 1984, a year after our expulsion from the Society of St. Pius X, Fr. Kelly announced he was going to found his own order of nuns, the Daughters of Mary. He promptly purchased a property for it in Round Top, New York, an isolated location nowhere near our numerous mission Mass centers and a three-hour drive from our Oyster Bay headquarters.

Before proceeding further, we should be clear on the principles in church law that apply to founding an institution like this in the post-Vatican II era.

(Continued)

For Neo-Trad Sedevacantists, “Sex Sells”

Alas…

As I noted a few weeks ago in The Errors of Athanasius Schneider, the “right” in the Conciliar Church — “conservatives” or, in the case of those who promote the old Mass in the Novus Ordo system, “neo-trads” — has become more and more vehement in denouncing Bergoglio. A mere six years ago, talk of papal heresy was routinely dismissed in these circles as “schismatic sedevacantist fantasies” or as “rejecting Christ’s promise that the gates of hell would never prevail.”

Now, however, we find establishment conservatives and neo-trads, in an “Open Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church,” declaring that “We are accusing Pope Francis of the canonical delict [i.e. crime] of heresy.”

Strong stuff, and a good development. It is encouraging to see conservatives and neo-trads finally begin to take seriously the notion that heresy itself – and lots of it — is behind the degeneration of faith and morals that came about universally after the Second Vatican Council. And it is likewise encouraging to see them acknowledge that heresy can and indeed does (at least in the case of Bergoglio) come from a putative pope.

But why now? It’s simple: “Sex sells,” says the adman. In other words, it gets the attention of our fallen human nature, one way or another.

Hence the shock and outrage that erupted last summer among Catholics everywhere over the clergy sex abuse scandals, both towards cleric-predators and towards their enablers: McCarrick, Cupich, Wuerl, Farrell, Maradiaga, Ricca, Zanchetta, and hundreds among the lower clergy. Because of the sexual component, the story caught fire in broadcast, print and social media, and shows no sign of petering out.

This would have been a volatile enough mix on its own, but it became linked in many people’s minds with Bergoglio’s more egregious heresies on sexual morality – divorce/remarriage, who am I to judge, the alphabet soup Mafia, “breeding like rabbits,” etc., coupled with his loony dissimulations about “clericalism.”

This combination overthrew the one constant that establishment conservatives after Vatican II felt they could always count on: unchanged official teaching on sexual morality which declared that divorce and remarriage, homosexual acts, contraception, abortion and similar practices were always sinful. While under Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, these official teachings were widely ignored in practice, they nevertheless remained “on the books.” For conservatives, it was as if sex was all that mattered for a true Catholic. (Continued)

Does the Pope Honorius Affair Refute Sedevacantism?

Pope Honorius I

THE MULTITUDE of theological errors and evil laws that have emanated from the Vatican II popes over the past fifty years — and that is exponentially increasing during the madcap reign of Bergoglio — has prompted many traditionally-minded Catholics to seek out ways to reconcile the notion of papal authority with the obvious destruction wrought by those in our day who claimed to wield it.

Sedevacantists like myself settled on the following explanation a long time ago: the very errors and evils officially sanctioned by the Vatican II popes demonstrate that they never truly obtained papal office (or authority) in the first place, and were therefore false popes. (For an explanation, see Sedevacantism: A Quick Primer)

Others — be they Novus Ordo conservatives, neo-traditionalists within the Vatican II establishment, or traditionalists of the Recognize-and-Resist (R&R) variety — shied away from this conclusion. They sought to reconcile “recognizing” the V2 popes as true Successors of Peter with simultaneously “resisting” them — minimizing any obligation to adhere to the teachings of the V2 popes, to observe their laws, or in practice, to submit to their authority.

To achieve this end and to negate the logical appeal of sedevacantism, the conservative/neo-trad/R&R camp sought to demonstrate two things:

  1. Since ordinary papal teaching lacked the “infallible stamp” that the rare ex cathedra papal pronouncement possessed, Catholics had no obligation whatsoever to submit or adhere to it. Ergo, you’re free to ignore Bergoglio’s (or for that matter, Paul VI’s) teachings and laws. 
  2. Some popes in the past (Nicholas I, Vigilius, Honorius, Liberius, Celestine III, John XXII, Alexander VI) were heretics, but nevertheless were always recognized as true popes. Ergo, a pope can teach heresy and still remain pope — take that, wicked sedes!

This is old stuff that the “right” subjected to constant recycling, even before Bergoglio’s Laudato Sì, and it always manages to float back, like gas from the landfill. I refuted point (1) in section 1 of 9/11 for the Magisterium, as well as in the introduction to my recent article, The Errors of Athanasius Schneider. I have refuted point (2) in a variety of articles listed in section 3 of my sedevacantist primer — and in so doing, please note, I have always pointed out that it was the Protestants, the Gallicans, and other haters of papal authority who raised these charges of “papal heresy” and were roundly trounced by an array of Catholic dogmatic theologians.

For the conservative-neo-trad-R&R camp, however, the historical case that seems both to provide a refutation of sedevacantism and to demonstrate the validity of points (1) and (2) is the case of Pope Honorius. From this, we are supposed to draw by analogy a principle for a course of action vis-à-vis Bergoglio and all the Vatican II popes that will allow one to recognize them as popes, but never, ever submit to them.

(Continued)

The Errors of Athanasius Schneider

The Most Rev. Athanasius Schneider, Auxiliary Bishop of St. Mary in Astana

SIX YEARS’ WORTH of the antics of Jorge Mario Bergoglio (aka “Pope Francis”) have left a lot of previously clueless Catholics really shaken. The radical and destructive nature of the Vatican II doctrinal and moral revolution, kept discreetly masked to a large extent under the regimes of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, finally emerged into the light of day once Bergoglio took charge in March of 2013 and began to implement the Council at full speed and with a vengeance (often literally).

The “right” in the Conciliar Church — those we will here call “conservatives” or, in the case of those who promote the old Mass in the Novus Ordo system, “neo-trads” — were at first stunned, then outraged by the breadth, depth, and sheer volume of errors that Bergoglio began to crank out by word and deed.

Lengthy and open critiques of Bergoglio started appearing in conservative and neo-trad opinion outlets. Soon even the words “heretic” and “heresy” began to pop up. But since Bergoglio’s critics in these circles had long pronounced sedevacantism to be utterly unthinkable, they had to create some sort of plausible theological justification for their overall position. This “third way” would somehow need to allow them to continue to do two things:

  1. Utterly ignore the errors and heresies Bergoglio teaches and acts upon, and
  2. Still claim Bergoglio is a true pope, the Successor of St. Peter, and the Vicar of Jesus Christ on Earth.

The justification the conservatives and neo-trads have come up with for squaring the circle is this: The theologians who taught that the pope receives some sort of special assistance from the Holy Ghost in his authentic magisterium — the teaching function that he exercises every day — were wrong. Similarly, theologians were likewise wrong in saying that Catholics must give “the assent of the intellect” to what the pope teaches through this authentic magisterium.

Poof — There you have it! Problem solved! The pope has no rights, and you have no obligations!

(Continued)