STEP IV OF XII: GET THE TEAM READY

Before the first meeting with your priest, you'll have to prepare the steering committee for what lies in store. Unity is the key to success. If you don't hang together, then you'll all hang separately. So, to prevent the team from making a false start, be sure two essential points are clear in everyone's mind.

The first thing a lawless priest will argue is that lay-governance violates canon law. This ploy often catches law-respecting laymen off guard; indeed, they sometimes surrender as soon as they hear the lie. Yet there's a very simple rebuttal to the objection. Inasmuch as neither modernists nor traditionalists possess authority,  canon law is more than likely suspended:  no authority exists to hear cases, render binding decisions, or administer sanctions. Furthermore, in spite of some clerical impostors' claims, Sedes possess no formally trained, credentialed, and experienced canonists who could competently and objectively comment one way or another.

Many legal realities support this thesis. One that immediately comes to mind is the fact that Traddie priests cannot be "defrocked," no matter how grave the scandal or how serious the crime*. Neither one of the two canonical forms of degradation can produce its juridical effects in the Sede Vacante precisely because there is no authority to inflict the sentence**. Therefore, your priest's "canonicity objection" will be, at the very best, dubious; at the very least, untrue. Believe us, when you counter his protest with the example above, he won't be able to come up with a plausible response -- and you won't be made to feel guilty.

The priest's second maneuver will be to tell you that if he leaves (or banishes you),  you'll be home alone. No big deal, so don't flinch! Your soul--and certainly your wallet--will be better off at home than under the malignant influence of a malformed cultist about whose orders there are so many doubts. As Pistrina has pointed out many times, you may by no means be certain that "One-Hand Dan" has conferred the priesthood validly on the rector's pesthouse completers. Tony the Blunderer's defense of his master's one-handed sacerdotal ordination is too shoddy to be taken as the last word on the matter, and there's no report that Dan attempted to remove any doubt through a later conditional ordination. Therefore, staying home alone might well prove to be a spiritual benefit.

At home, you can maintain a rich Catholic life. Recite the Divine Office daily by subscribing to the Roman Breviary online. On Sundays, rather than listening to rambling, incoherent, irrelevant, and/or self-celebrating sermons, read a well-written one with authentic Catholic content; there are many collections of fine sermons available, for example, Dearly Beloved by the Capuchin friar Venantius Buessing. Furthermore, you have the act of perfect contrition, about which there is no doubt at all. Most importantly, you and your family have at your hands the rosary.


You will not be alone.

*As many of us know, prison terms, court judgments, and personal bankruptcies can't keep Traddie clergy from plying their priestcraft to earn their daily, well-buttered bread. When all is said and done, with their deficient education, they can't do anything else except sponge off gullible laity (naturally with the collusion of their clerical c0-conspirators).

**And besides, even if one of these over-reaching, drama-prone wandering bishops were whip out the Pontifical and try the second form, would any of the proud, hard-headed Traddie clergy undergo humiliating thumb-and-finger abrasions when they know that no authoritative sentence had been pronounced? They're well aware they owe ecclesiastical obedience to no one in the Traddie movement; they are under no man, except by way of a civil compact or as a hireling.