Saturday, November 8, 2014

AD PERPETUAM REI MEMORIAM



REMEMBER, REMEMBER
THE MONTH OF NOVEMBER:
MADNESS, UNREASON, AND SWAT.

This month marks the fifth anniversary of the catastrophic SGG School Scandal. In November 2009, after a stormy year of impassioned protests over the harsh treatment of innocent children enrolled at the "school," Dannie made a colossal error: he fired the good guys who objected to the school "principal's" intolerable excesses instead of the man who caused the uproar.

In so doing, Li'l Dan mortally wounded the cult and all those associated with it. His suicidal misjudgment brought down upon all Tradistan a revolution, following which nothing has ever been the same.  Wee Dan lost half the SGG membership. In addition, his principal satellite chapels split apart like rotten pumpkins lobbed from the observation deck of a skyscraper. New, independent chapels were founded under different priests and bishops, never to return to his control, not even after the spectacular self-immolation of "the Reverend" Marvelous Ebola. Fed-up Catholics everywhere abandoned their restraint, characterizing His Idiocy in words they'd never dreamed of pronouncing before the 2009 calamity.

The fatal miscalculation put Wee Dan and the entire cult under the microscope.  The monsoon of revelations washed away the tawdry veneer of Tradistan. The ugly past returned to bedevil him. His problematic "ordination" leaped back into the public forum, as the Blunderer's inept defense of Dan's orders was decisively refuted/rebutted. A united movement emerged to expose him along with his grasping cronies. One of the first casualties was Tony Baloney's useless,* embarrassingly amateurish, and mistake-disfigured Work of Human Hands. Another was the swaggering, loud-mouth rector and his clown college in the stinking swamp. For Dannie and Big Don, money is harder to come by, and defections are on the rise. One important mission appears to be actively looking for a new pastor to replace the doubtful cult "priest" assigned to it.

Of late, Deacon Dan's been disclosing his concerns about declining participation. A few weeks ago, at a pity-party in his woolgathering "Corner," he wrote with bitter wistfulness:
... many of the stalwart old-time Catholics of the past are gone as well. “Demand is down,” as they say. Beginning in 1982, the enemy has provided limited “legal Latin Masses,” a clever bait to get Catholics to swallow the hook of the new Vatican II religion. Since then as well, our groups have divided and subdivided, and Vatican II “traditionalists” of varying stripes have multiplied.
Then again on November 2, he agonized:
And what a joy it is to see an unexpected face or two each year, so welcome to swell our thinning ranks!
If just one or two passing visitors a year can "swell" the cult's "thinning ranks," then Dannie's situation is dire. People are not showing up for Li'l Dan's big shows any more. Despite an occasional bump in reported collection receipts, donations since November 2009 have flat-lined, remaining stuck far below pre-scandal highs.

In this autumn of Deacon Dan's career, he should have an extensive, well-established organization. Additionally, his collections should be topping $10K a week, at the very least. Instead Dirtbag Dan finds himself trying to postpone the oncoming train wreck. He's barely hanging on, hemorrhaging scarce money for costly repairs to the collapsing cult temple, cutting back on luxuries, forsaken by the French, avoided by the Italians, and reeling from his many adversaries' criticism. And another polar vortex is coming to the Midwest with the promise of sky-high heating bills this winter. (Will that stop him from junketing to Mexicali, Mexico, to escape the cold? Will the same suckers bail him out again this year? )

At this point in his life, as he approaches his sixty-fourth year, he ought to be basking in the warm glow of general esteem, the subject of homages and admiring regard. His current predicament, however, is quite the opposite: since that fateful November of 2009, he's been reviled and ridiculed throughout the nation and the world by laity and clergy alike. He'll never receive the benefit of the doubt. Outside his diminished, savage cult following, he's as unwelcome as a rabid dog at Petsmart.

Gone are the heady days of steady revenue growth. The cherished pipe dreams of a luxurious, comfy-cozy retirement with a lasting legacy have vanished. At the rate he's losing supporters, the cult may close before he and the Cheeseball can escape to some fancy Southwestern digs in Old Santa Fe. His "golden years" won't have an ounce gold in them, just iron regret plated with tin nostalgia for what never was. All trust has withered, and as social scientists know, communities with low or no trust cannot thrive.

As Dan's lamentations confirm, there's a crisis of confidence in Tradistan. The heathens who remained after the November 2009 cataclysm are more guarded, less enthusiastic. The human waste who returned to Dannie after first leaving him in outrage is suspicious and tightfisted with money. He can incant "be generous, be generous" until Judgment Day , but his cauldron will never fill up.

The depraved Gerties come for the Sunday show, not the man. That's why attendance at events like Forty Hours is down: there's no sense of common purpose under righteous leadership to motivate the cultlings to do more than the minimum. No decent person wants to be at SGG except to fulfill the Sunday precept. Additionally, there are bound to be fewer in attendance at Mass since everybody knows that most of the resident "clergy" have doubtful priestly orders.

Five years ago, wretched Dannie failed to do the right thing for the children. He thereby proved himself unworthy to shepherd souls. It was an unforced error, and it was one of those life-changing blunders from which no man can recover.  The SW Ohio-Brooksville cabal  is a "dead man walking." The folly of November 2009 won't be forgotten. Good people will not allow the disgraceful events of that month to fade from memory. Furthermore, the darkly disturbing rôle "One-Hand Dan" played in that tragedy will keep morally grounded Catholics ill at ease with hardcore sede clergy for decades to come.

The price of one man's unprincipled misreckoning was the ruin of Trad Nation.

* Useless not only for its laughably faulty scholarship and superficiality, but also because Prof. Lauren Pristas's genuinely scholarly The Collects of the Roman Missals of 1962 and 2002 authoritatively and reliably settles the question whether Catholics who worship by means of the post-Vatican II missal receive substantially the same doctrinal, moral, and spiritual formation as do those who worshiped by means of the pre-Vatican II missals. For more on Dr. Pristas's work, see our post of June 8, 2014. This is the book Catholics must own and read, not Tony Baloney's third-rate, mistake-filled, ill-written embarrassment.

16 comments:

  1. What was the SGG scandal? Link to story?

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    1. The sites where all the details are available, sgginfo and Vipers of Vaudeville, are not longer active, but they are available through the "way back" machines on the web.

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    2. What are the exact web addresses, or wayback URLs, if I may ask? My search was not successful.

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    3. We'll try to find them. Some time ago, someone found them cached and sent us the URL.

      In the meantime, perhaps someone out there in cyberspace can help.

      If nothing is forthcoming, Pistrina will look into the possibility of putting all the material back online in a new site.

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    4. A quick update.

      We've only been able to find one small notice on the Internet Archive. We'll keep looking for the whole thing.

      Meanwhile, we have begun to explore the possibility of restoring the sgginfo.com to an active domain.

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    5. I hope you do find V of V & sgginfo & put it back up. It was a sad saga but also some of the most entertaining reading I've ever read in a long time! A religious soap opera if you will. I always eagerly looked forward to the next installment. Whoever wrote it was brilliant.

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    6. We think we have a backup stored in a safe-deposit box. We will go to the bank on Monday to be sure. If we have it intact, we'll buy new software to upload it (we've upgraded computers so we think we'll have to buy new software). It may taken us a week or so to get a new domain and upload, so we'll announce when ready as a SPECIAL POST. We'll add the site to "Important Links" on the home page.

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  2. Comments on "The Collects of the Roman Missals of 1962 and 2002":

    Firstly, this is comparing not the latin mass to the novus ordo but the John 23rd missal to the novus ordo. Sedevacantists/conclavists believe that "John 23rd"/Roncalli was a heretic before election, hence his missal was not authoritatively issued (neither was the novus ordo). So, a good study would really present the missal from before vs. John 23rd missal vs. novus ordo, or oldest missal vs. John 23rd, or oldest missal vs. novus ordo. I don't know all the differences between the old missal and the John 23rd one and if it's really just that St. Joseph was inserted into the canon; I thought there might be more changes, especially subtle ones.

    I agree Work of Human Hands could have made a better case, though I am only basing this off of the Youtube videos I saw online which are supposed to correspond to the book's contents.

    This is one of the footnotes from the article of Lauren Prista: "I am grateful to the Intercultural Forum for Studies in Faith and Culture of the Pope John
    Paul II Cultural Center, Washington, D.C. ... for the support and leave, that enabled me to research and write this article." This doesn't invalidate anything she says but with finite time to devote to study I would probably pass over her, knowing who she associates with.

    She says,
    "The result is not the revival of either a Roman or non-Roman Latin liturgical
    tradition that fell into disuse over the centuries, but something essentially new.
    ... While the deliberate confection of
    an annual cycle of collects is unprecedented as far as we know in liturgical history, the new
    corpus enjoys ecclesiastical approval and, on this account, is to be received by the faithful with
    the utmost respect. " So all she showed was that this was "new" and not "heretical" or "offensive to the faith". So I haven't extensively studied either author, but "Fr." Cekada seems to fail to prove the new missal to be heretical and that is his goal, and this woman succeeds in showing that the novus ordo is a novelty but also shows that it is approved and hence the faithful really have no right to oppose it. Does anyone win here?

    I think "Work of Human Hands" needs a competitor, maybe I'll get working on that. They both do?

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    1. To help you in your efforts, we suggest you read her book along side the Blunderer's Chapter 9, The Revised Orations:"New Values, New Perspectives," pp. 219-245. You'll find Prof. Pristas's methodology and scholarship to be superior by several orders of magnitude to the juvenile amateurism of Work of Human Hands.

      In spite of her outward allegiance to the N.O. (after all, she's on the faculty of Caldwell University, a N.O. institution of higher learning), a scholar who wanted to demonstrate the heresy of the new collects would find her work the best and most reliable starting place.

      The demonstration of novelty in the collects seems to us the logical first step toward a demonstration of heresy in the new collects. The thorough analyses she provides will save much preliminary work. From there, one can continue to tease out other heretical elements until at last there is an ineluctable case for the heresy of the new Missal.

      That's a lot of work. The under-educated sede clergy are manifestly incapable of such an effort. Perhaps you are. And if so, such a work would be of the greatest utility to traditional and conservative Catholics.

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    2. Ahh, I see what you mean! How about Fr. Wathan's "The Great Sacrilege"? I will peruse that. "The Great Sacrilege" is online : http://www.dailycatholic.org/issue/2002Mar/2002tgs.htm

      Upon further reflection, I'm not sure if any of these books are needed - they arose as part of the confusion. The retrospective sede vacantist argument is that neither John 23rd nor Paul VI were popes, so neither of their missals were binding. Hence, if one has this view (or conclavism, sedeprivationism, etc.), we don't really need to think any further into what they did. The sacraments are to be issued conditionally *if* any lawful clergymen become available, as regards Vatican 2 era "sacraments", and the older forms are still on the books for any new sacrament.

      I'm starting to collect ideas for books. I think something like a comprehensive [legal] case needs to be made of all the heresies of Vatican 2 with an exact prescription for how to restore the Church. While there are a lot of good critiques here and there, sede vacantism and traditionalism have always seemed "half-baked" to me. We need to put all the puzzle pieces together to definitively end the crisis. I see people write that they just "think something is wrong with the New Mass". We do need to write out exactly what's wrong with these different topics. We need something of a Summa Traditio, like the Summa Theologica; we need a comprehensive, logically laid out Summary of Traditionalism and to pin down the solutions to be implemented.

      O, God come to our assistance! O, Lord make haste to help us!

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    3. We think you're on the right track with your notion about the comprehensive legal case. The trouble is, we believe the only people capable of making it are conservative Novus Ordites or perhaps others outside Tradistan.

      Sede clergy like the Blunderer do not have the education or brains to undertake or execute such a work. All we'd get is the same unreliable, smarmy, high-school-level trash as Work of Human Hands.

      BTW, Wathen's work may be a good place to look for ideas, but don't rely on it as the basis for an integrated critique. You need to use first-rate scholarly sources.

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  3. Comment on ending the crisis:

    I guess Tuesday, November 11th is St. Martin's feast day, and this is roughly 40 days from Christmas. This is an opportunity to fast as a voluntary "second Lent" and is called St. Martin's Lent. This is short notice but maybe keep in mind for the future, or resolve to do other penances. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Martin%27s_Day

    'This fast period lasted 40 days, and was therefore, called "Quadragesima Sancti Martini", Latin for "the forty days of St. Martin."'

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    1. http://www.scribd.com/doc/246005725/Saint-Martin-s-Lent-2014

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  4. Pope Michael tipped me off to this.

    Also I found the "black fast", which we need more of too:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Fast
    http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02590c.htm

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  5. I just wanted to thank your for your recommendation of Prof. Lauren Pristas's excellent work on the collects of the Roman Missal old and new. I've bought it a while ago after you first spoke of it, and it is truly a scholarly book and indispensable for any critique of the New Missal on an academic level. It is needless to say that the Blunderer never was and never will be able to reach these olympic heights of true scholarship.

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    1. We refer to the book often. It is an example of what authentic, formally trained scholars can produce. And as you say, it is a reminder of what Erroneous Antonius will never, ever be able to pull off. It also puts to shame those outsiders like Dr, Hull, who failed to condemn Work of Human Hands for the junk that it is. After we read his review back in 2010, we lost all respect for him as an academician.

      Dr. Pristas may be a Novus Ordite, but serious traditional Catholics owe her a debt of gratitude. At last we have something solid and reliable upon which to build.

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