SQUEAKING AND GIBBERING IN THE STREETS OF ROME

The pathetic almost always consists in the detail of little events. Edward Gibbon

The want of genuine spiritual formation, the lethally incompetent pedagogy, the woefully under-prepared faculty, the heavy-handed reliance on chastisement, the unsettling whimsy of the rector, and the septic defects of the curriculum are sufficient reasons in themselves to condemn Most Holy Trinity Clerical Vocational Program. Nevertheless, the Reader would be remiss to pass over the absence of what Tertullian called Romanitas, the Roman manner, Roman-ness, and now the thorough coloring of Roman ecclesiastical culture, without which practitioners of the Latin rite are shrieking, gesticulating apes.

The virtue of Romanitas rests squarely on mastery of the Latin language. It’s not enough to get the gist or even be able to puzzle it out it with a fair amount of accuracy. The practitioner has to be thoroughly at home in its idiom. As the grossly stupid blunders in Work of Human Hands testify, Anthony Cekada (MHT’s liturgy and scripture “specialist,” LOL) is not at all at home in Latin. In this post, the Reader submits that Latin is also fundamentally alien to the rector, and hence to MHT.

We don’t intend to embark upon a head-spinning linguistic discussion. (If you’re interested, you may wish to read Pistrina Bids the Rector to School.) Indeed, we'll keep it simple. One very small example will be more than enough to make our point. You know, even the Readers have to take a deep breath when some of their colleagues enter the grammatical lists.

As with all mastery, it’s the little things that count. Any vapid late-night comedian can mimic superficially salient features. We know it’s not real, for the essential details are missing. That’s why we laugh. (Otherwise we would marvel.) The obvious failure to model significant, subtle traits and mannerisms betrays the poseur, the impostor, the phony, the mountebank, the faker, the bunyip (for our chorus of Down Under reviewers). Getting right the characteristic and apparently insignificant marks takes years of living a culture authentically, of becoming fluent through assiduous study and practice. As the following note makes clear, the rector, like his shallow pal Anthony Cekada, didn’t sweat the small stuff that virtuous Romanitas demands:

The Reader recently came across a copy of an MHT certificate of ordination. It was all tricked out with polychrome print, an elaborate border, and fancy fonts. The text was virtually the same as the Reader has seen on old certificates issued by Archbishop Lefebvre (a vigorous promoter of Romanitas) and the SSPX. However, the rector’s amateur hand was plainly visible in one word (twice printed!): Brooksvillense (the swampland breeding ground for MHT pests).

He meant the word to mean “at Brooksville.” However, in Latin the suffix -ensis makes an adjective of locality, not a noun! The rector's word formation, then, is completely off base. Moreover, even if you could make Brooksville (the city) a Latin noun with that suffix (and you can’t), the case ending –se is wrong: in the locative, it would have been Brooksvillensi. (You wouldn't write that you spent the summer "at [or in] Bostonian," would you? Again, all this is explained in excruciating detail in Pistrina Bids the Rector to School.*)

The seemingly microscopic error—like the rector's ignorance of the right Latin word for ‘time’ when it refers to the time-slot cell on the class schedule (see the Jan. 30 post, footnote)—declares that neither the rector nor MHT is capable of transmitting the Church’s enduring Roman culture. All MHT can produce are impersonators of the Roman Catholic priesthood.

* Sanborn's buddies, "One-Hand" Dan Dolan and Blundering Tony Cekada also don't understand that the ending -ensis is an adjective, not a noun, for in one certificate issued from the SGG cult center, we find in archidiocesi Cincinnatensis. It looks as if those two pinheads think that Cincinnatensis means 'of Cincinnati.' The correct form is Cicinnatensi, an ablative so that the adjective agrees with the noun it modifies (viz., archidiocesi). Had they just copied the ending shown on their own ordination certificates from Archbishop Lefebvre (dioecesi Sedunensi), they wouldn't have made themselves so ridiculous. (BTW, the SGG certificate also contains a few other howlers as well; maybe we'll post them soon, if you'd like. Ordinati: demand corrected documents from those clowns!)

MATERNAL INSTINCTS

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success. Sigmund Freud

The rector’s February MHT Newsletter is a veritable downhill race of Freudian slips. He begins with a recent sighting of a miniature, remote-controlled helicopter photographing his pesthouse. We’ll wager that scene occasioned something like an acid flashback! Certainly he must have recalled the anxious reports he heard of that day in Michigan when the stuttering, resonant drone of slashing rotor blades announced a plague of media whirlybirds swarming like angry, metallic locusts over his Mary Help of Christians Academy. On that day long ago, an eager press corps had come looking for answers to hard questions. This time, in the swampland, a robot mechanically captured stark images of the sepulchral, white outlines of a dying enterprise.

Rattled (or addled) by those haunting memories, the rector next launches an attack against Catholic mothers and young men “excessively attached to their mothers.” According to his half-baked historico-sociological analysis, today’s moms don’t encourage their sons to live independently. They mollycoddle them; they smother them with their suffocating motherly attentions. As a result of the mommies’ refusal to let their pampered sons face life like men, the boys, in the rector’s amateur opinion, are nest-bound, ineffectual, emotionally stunted, unconfident, and indecisive. All these tight apron strings, so muses the rector, are obstacles that mothers put in their male offspring’s way to the priesthood.

Well... from our experience, the rector’s description of today’s youth sounds a lot like the feckless, undereducated, timid, unsure, crybaby, wimpy completers of Most Holy Trinity Clerical Vocational Program. When a real man from a loving family enters MHT—that is, someone with genuine schooling, a decent and normal background, informed courage, a healthy psyche, and a sense of independence—he usually faces expulsion!

History and personal experience confirm that a man’s success in life is very often the result of a nurturing mother, because, as we’ve said on these pages before: no one ever makes it alone. The Reader knows several devout Catholic mothers who love their sons so much that they would no sooner allow them to enter MHT than they would permit them to travel in a cholera-ravaged, third-world country in the midst of a bloody civil war. Each of us owes his or her life to a mother’s uncanny intuition when danger loomed; we are all now profoundly grateful for Mom's proactive intervention in behalf of our body and soul.

The truth is, MHT is disfigured by its notorious reputation. No mother wants to dissipate the family treasure or imperil her son’s future by paying tuition to a third-rate institution that mistreats young men to whom God may have given a priestly vocation. A mother’s resistance to MHT is not over protectiveness. It’s just Mom’s sound prudence. She doesn’t want her son bullied and harassed in an environment inimical to spiritual growth. She doesn’t want her boy to become one of those priests who fail to consecrate or can’t conduct easy ceremonies. She doesn’t want her son associating with all those comatose MHT underachievers and the program's inept faculty. Above all, she doesn’t want her son working for the likes of “One-Hand” Dan Dolan and blundering Tony Cekada.

Mothers, in the end, have but two wishes: (1) they want their sons to be successful in life and (2) they want to be proud of their sons as men. Any mother’s sixth sense screams that MHT will deny her both fundamental hopes.

The rector’s heartless savaging of Catholic motherhood perplexes us. Those of you who know his history are aware that he himself hasn’t snipped any apron strings. If nothing else, the rector is a model of filial piety – just ask the priest who had to vacate his quarters at MHT. We’re impressed. It’s obvious that maternal devotion didn’t stand in his way to an assertive, independent life. We ask, then: Why can’t other Catholic men be devoted to their mothers without suffering the rector’s vilification? Even more germane: Why can’t other Catholic mothers love their sons and want the best for them without being pilloried for thwarting a good?

Edna Ferber got it right when she titled a story “Mother Knows Best”: Mom knows that MHT is not a fit place for a son to become a holy priest – or a good man.

A DESERT PLACE

In this decayed hole among the mountains/In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing/Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel/There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home. T.S. Eliot

Ed. Note: Over the past two months, Pistrina has revealed that the Most Holy Trinity (MHT) Clerical Vocational Program is an intellectual and liturgical desert. This post exposes the pesthouse as a spiritual wasteland as well. The problem lies not simply in weak or inept spiritual formation. Rather, as the following pasticcio of anecdotes from MHT survivors suggests, the institution itself may be radically opposed to Catholic spirituality in any form.

By the rector’s misguided rule, MHT seminarians were forced to choose from a very limited number of priests as spiritual directors.* Accordingly, sacramental confession was infrequent. First-year seminarians were advised to take the clone (the “vice rector”) as their spiritual director, but the problem was that the clone only showed up about once monthly. Apart from the few occasions for confession, there were no other pious exercises. **⁽⁵⁾ Even thanksgiving after Mass was often restricted to a few brief minutes, as seminarians were fearful that lingering in prayer**⁽¹⁾ might result in a fierce scolding from the irascible prefect. The administration often canceled Vespers**^{(1), (3)} or the Rosary**⁽¹⁾ for more important and pressing matters -- like attending to household cleaning chores.

Seminary staff often irreverently reinforced the official MHT aversion to spiritual growth in every way possible. It was not uncommon to hear celebrants snarl sharp corrections duringMass! **⁽¹⁾ Once, Scut the Prefect, with the Blessed Sacrament in his hand, harshly ordered a seminarian to go to his proper place to receive communion.**⁽²⁾ On another occasion, when a seminarian sang the wrong note, the horn-mad prefect loudly interrupted the chanting of Vespers**⁽¹⁾ to discipline the offender sternly. In another instance of shocking behavior, as a seminarian silently prayed the Holy Rosary in the car during a drive, the prefect's toady assistant (a.k.a.Grover Dill) savagely barked: “Don’t pray in the car!” **⁽¹⁾ In addition, there were no annual retreats**⁽⁴⁾ other than the almost spontaneously scheduled ego-fests presided over by the discredited “One-Hand” Dan Dolan whenever he needed to escape the bleak Ohio weather or the wrath of former parishioners. (Dolan once publicly gushed how solicitously the seminarians attended to him and served his meals, so you can imagine that no retreat is ever held for the young men’s spiritual benefit.)

Bottom Line: The MHT pesthouse is dangerous to the interior life of young Catholic men with a vocation to the holy priesthood. The place is a spiritual frozen tundra, which decent young men must avoid or from which they must escape.

The laity must not support MHT, its clergy, or its rector in any form. The time is past. Starve the beast. Do not be a benefactor. Tell prospective seminarians you know to run for their spiritual lives. If you live in Europe, find out the names and email addresses s of the three young men in France whom the rector is recruiting: Warn them before it's too late.

* It’s instructive how the rector cannot adhere to authentic Catholic tradition. Here’s a quote from the canon-law commentary of Bouscaren, Ellis, and Korth regarding seminary confessors:

In addition to the ordinary confessors, others are to be designated to whom the students can freely go (c. 1361, §1). If these confessors live outside the seminary, and a student asks that one of them be called, the rector must call him without inquiring in any way into the reason for the request, or showing any displeasure; if the confessors live in the seminary, any student may freely go to them, without prejudice to the discipline of the house (c. 1361, §2). When there is a question of admitting any student to orders, or of expelling him from the seminary, the advice of the confessors is never to be asked (c. 1361, § 3).

** Compare to Bouscaren, Ellis, and Korth note on the exercises in piety required by canon law:

The Bishop is to see to it that the students: (1) every day, say morning and evening prayers in common, spend some time in mental prayer, attend Mass; (2) confess at least once a week; (3) receive communion frequently, with due devotion; (3) on Sundays and feast days, attend solemn Mass and Vespers, serve at the altar and practice sacred ceremonies…; (4) every year, make the spiritual exercises for several days continuously; (5) at least once a week, hear a spiritual instruction closing with a pious exhortation (c. 1367).

TABOOED BY ANXIETY

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. William James

Ed. Note: One of the most straight-forward ceremonies of the Church is the Ordo Ad Faciendam Aquam Benedictam (rite for making holy water), printed in both the Roman Ritual and the Roman Missal. Outside Mass, the rite requires the bare minimum: a book, a dish of salt, some clean water, a loaded aspergil, a surplice, a violet stole. You don't even have to light a candle.

The ordo itself is a study in simplicity: a mere five prayers. You can bless both the water and the salt or the water alone, if exorcised salt is available. If you're just blessing water, skip the first two prayers and begin with the third. After the fourth, take salt in your closed hand, drop some into the water three times, tracing three crosses as you say the formula Commixtio salis etc. Then, recite the salutation Dominus vobiscum, and finish up with the final prayer. Voilà, l'eau lustrale! Should the priest lack sufficient training to understand and execute the brief rubrics, vernacular explanations may be found in readily available handbooks.

Easy, right? Not if you're a completer of the diseased swampland's MHT Clerical Vocational Program. Read on, and either weep or burst out laughing:

Our French priest (see Feb. 20 post) shares with his Mexican and Argentine classmates their abysmal ignorance of sound priestly praxis. They all learned at the feet of the infamously unable Anthony Cekada, so there should be no surprise here. Certainly the oppressive malformation at dysfunctional MHT has produced a soul racked by paralyzing self-doubt and crippling second-guesswork. His pathetic sermons are no more than labored "readings," not painstakingly crafted, heart-felt messages to the soul; his confessions are 20-30 minute marathons of aimless uncertainty. In sum, he is a man bereft of confidence, as you will read in the following report:

According to an overseas reporter, one Sunday after Mass, a French parishioner asked our MHT dunce to bless some holy water for home use. The knowledgeable layman understood the MHT alum had been crushed under the intellectual and moral burden of the priesthood, so he helpfully assembled all the basic materials: a Rituale Romanum, a bottle of water, and some already exorcised salt.

The MHT underachiever, with his customary affected gravitas, returned to the little sacristy to gather his surplice, stole, and another copy of the Roman Ritual. He came back looking somewhat embarrassed, behaving as though he were missing something. He hesitated. He gestured clumsily; his posture seemed uncertain while he readied--or steadied--himself to conduct what is one of the simplest of rituals. But just as he started to pronounce the opening versicle, he melted under the fervid heat of his torrid doubts and burning scruples.

He first fretted whether it was permitted to use salt that had already been exorcised. If so, he wondered aloud whether he could omit those prayers. Then, in irresolute self-torment, he debated exchanging the blessed salt for unblessed salt. Next, he agonized over the diameter of the neck of the water bottle: Was it so narrow that he might not be able to make the sign of the cross as he introduced the salt?

"It would have been easier," he lamented feebly to the astonished layman, "to have poured the water into a large bowl in order to make the sign of the cross while simultaneously commingling it!"

After this paroxysm of doubt had abated, he returned to the opening versicle and commenced, insecurely, fearfully, hesitatingly. His pace was numbingly slow. At length, after 15 long minutes (!), he removed his stole. With a look more of relief than of satisfaction, our shaken, malformed MHT simpleton gasped, "Voilà, it is finished!" Then, beset once more by a plague of refreshed uncertainties, he added waveringly: "I hope it's valid."

Sick! Sick! Sick! These guys don't know what they're doing.

Reverend Rector: Close that pesthouse down!

A NOISOME PESTILENCE

The flesh of the land-tortoise is employed for fumigations. Pliny the Elder (tr. Bostock & Riley)

After reading the February 20 post, you now understand that will take a very powerful compound to fumigate Most Holy Trinity (MHT) Clerical Vocational Program to rid it of rapidly fatal plague. Nothing less than the complete removal of its staff and administration is required. The following brief anecdote about the rector’s clone, who is also the vice rector, will prove that no one in that pest house has the foggiest notion about good teaching. To a man, they are less than amateurs, and we have come to know them by their spoiled fruits.

An industrious seminarian teaching in the “parish” school attached to MHT used to prepare outlines and study guides for the children to facilitate their mastery of the subject material. When the clone learned of this, he reprimanded the seminarian, severely chiding him that he was making it “too easy” for the students. Since the seminarian didn’t want to be expelled, he complied with the clone’s wrongheaded demand.

A teacher’s job is to help his students learn. He does what is necessary to assure mastery. Every real teacher knows that easing the task of learning does not mean making it easy on the student. It is clear that the clone is an incompetent educator who embraces the culture of punishment characteristic of MHT’s rector and disturbed staff. If this misguided priest just stayed in his little school with its miniscule enrollment, the Reader wouldn’t comment. However, given that he is also closely associated with the MHT leadership, we completely understand how the clerical vocational school produces the nincompoops we have exposed.

P.S. Why not register for RC-Corner? (See yesterday's Post)

A FORUM BRAVE AND NEW

Now all the Athenians, and strangers that were there, employed themselves in nothing else, but either in telling or in hearing some new thing. Acts 17:21

The Readers interrupt their normal publishing schedule to announce a brand-new Catholic online forum:

RC-Corner at www.rc-corner.net

Register and start a thread or join the conversation on the existing threads!

Already we like the tone and style, and it appears as though the "Super Moderators" have the wit and verve to keep up a lively and insightful conversation. We certainly hope to find some hard talk about Anthony Cekada's blunders, the pestilent seminary, and its unsavory personnel. (Don't worry: we'll keep posting on Pistrina, and we'll be back in a day or two with a nice little tale out of school about that pestiferous "clone.")

THE FRENCH CONNECTION

For in a madhouse there exists no law. John Clare

The plague flag flutters fitfully not only above laughing-academy American chapels but also over transatlantic missionary bedlams, thanks to the aggressive malformation at Most Holy Trinity [MHT] Clerical Vocational Program. In this post, the Reader will this time show you something more than canonically irregular ignorance and malign stupidity. You’ll read an account of behavior so neurotically bizarre, so pathologically disordered, so chronically erratic, so morally unworthy that it renders our subject unfit to continue serving as a Catholic priest. We will narrate the account straightforwardly in the hope you may perceive the unfiltered horror of a lost clerical personality in deep distress.

It was during early Spring 2009 that Anthony Cekada announced to several hopeful traditionalists in England the possibility of establishing an “English Sede Mission.” During May, on the recommendation of Cekada, a number of these expectant traditionalists had made contact with a certain French priest who had completed MHT. By July, our Frenchman affirmed he would be able to return regularly after the September ordination of a seminarian studying in Italy. Therefore, starting in October, he began serving the newly established mission every second Sunday. By the next month, some rather alarming behavior had become manifest.

WEIRD EPISODE I. According to prior arrangements, the Frenchman would normally contact the mission upon arrival in England so the people could prepare everything for Mass. Late on a November 2009 afternoon, after the mission coordinators had heard nothing from the priest at the expected hour, they texted him without response. They next attempted to phone him, also to no avail. Despairing, one of the coordinators decided to secure the keys to the priest’s guest-house room before the cut-off time when all would be too late. When he arrived at the guest-house, however, the landlady informed the man that the priest had arrived almost two hours earlier. The gentleman was kindly shown to the room and thus knocked at the door for nearly two minutes. Finally, the exceedingly drowsy and bleary-eyed Levite appeared. Upon questioning the sleepy priest, the Frenchman insisted he had arrived at the guesthouse just five minutes beforehand!

WEIRD EPISODE II. During this visit to England, the MHT-trained Frenchman decided to contact a Belgian “parishioner’s” friend, who opportunely lived in a city not far from the mission. This friend and her daughter, it turned out, were in fact practicing Novus Ordites. During the priest’s visit to this family, he said Mass in their home and distributed Holy Communion to the Modernist pair.

WEIRD EPISODE III. When the scandal broke out at St. Gertrude the Great Church in Ohio, the Frenchman “demanded” that a Yorkshire family not talk anymore with the Rev. Mr. Bernard Hall (a friend of the family and a fellow Yorkshireman), who had protested the shameful abuses at St. Gertrude School.

WEIRD EPISODE(S) IV. In March 2010, in order to save on costly lodging fees, an English family had purchased a sofa-bed, which they offered for use to the visiting Frenchman. At first he reluctantly accepted, but soon after it appeared that he had begun to regard the sofa as his bed and their home his private hotel, apparently considering such as part of a ‘deal’ in respect of his visits there. In May 2010, after his travel arrangements were fouled up, he arrived at the home in an ugly mood and, near the conclusion of his visit, threw what can only be described as a mini-tantrum. Strangely, for his next scheduled visit in June, he had inexplicably altered his usual departure time, leaving a day early (ostensibly to save money on vehicle rental), but by October, he had bizarrely announced he would resume his former departure schedule. When pressed about his reasons by the confused family, the priest became irate, unexpectedly arose from the dining table without answering the question, and stormed out of the house, slamming the door behind him, all of which was performed in front of the now scandalized parents and children alike. To his very evident chagrin, the Frenchman found he had to return, rather sheepishly, a few minutes later to acquire his forgotten travel-expense money.

WEIRD EPISODE V. For this same October 2010 visit, the French priest had invited a young man to assist at the evening Sunday Mass, albeit failing to take into account certain inconveniences that were presented to the hosts thereby. However, the generous English family cordially received the cheerful visitor to their home. Later they learned that their guest was traveling back home quite late the following Monday afternoon, even though he wasn’t staying for the Mass of that morning. The family asked the priest why the devout young Catholic had made such odd travel plans. In the Frenchman’s words, the young man was unable to plan things well because that was how he was “in the mind.” It was with dismay that the family later learned the young man had made the inopportune travel booking on the advice of the priest!

WEIRD EPISODE VI. After the aberrant behavior of October 2010, the mission heard nothing more from the French priest about his already booked and confirmed November visit, scheduled for five weeks later. A month passed by, and, by happenstance, a third party informed the sponsoring family that the priest was now unsure about visiting them because the family had a new dog. The priest had never mentioned that ‘a new dog’ would present any sort of problem. Then to the family’s shock, they learned from their mutual associate that, behind the family’s back, the priest had been attempting to arrange to say Mass that November weekend for other traditionalists in another part of the country. The family e-mailed the Frenchman to determine whether he intended to honor his commitment, whilst candidly sharing their defensible frustration and disappointment over the priest’s anomalous behavior. After a flurry of flimsy excuses and awkward attempts at misdirection, the priest finally assailed the family for breaking the aforementioned ‘deal’ by acquiring a dog! He concluded his criticism by writing, “I am sincerely surprised at your frustration…I have to find a way to overcome that you will have a new pet in the house.” Needless to say, our Frenchman never did say Mass for the family that November, and indeed, hasn’t arranged to serve them since.

Deplorably, this is not the end of this depressing story, but discretion restricts what we can further report, only to say that one of the families involved has learned that they have now been tarred by our French priest with the calumny of ‘mental illness’ so often favored and employed by the Triumvirate and their MHT completers.

You don’t need to be a Sigmund Freud or a Richard von Krafft-Ebing to recognize that something is very wrong here. To be sure, the problem goes deeper than the man himself, for he shares the same characteristics with other MHT completers, affiliated clergy, and its management. Lying, failure to keep promises, irrational outbursts, sudden reversals of practice, extreme defensiveness, abuse of discretion, charges of mental illness and the like are all behaviors sadly too familiar to Catholics who have had any dealings with the Dolan-Cekada-Sanborn cabal.

As an institution, MHT Clerical Vocational Program has for years been in a steep social and intellectual decline. In the opinion of many priests and laymen, the place has hit rock bottom. It is becoming clear now that it should be closed, but as long as Catholics keep sending the rector money, he can keep it running and continue to produce misfits like this man. Only good Catholics can put an end to this mockery of priestly formation. Please ignore Sanborn’s appeals for more and more cash. If your chapel sends money to MHT, speak to your priest and demand that he stop immediately. Should he refuse, withhold your contributions to the chapel. Instead of a check, put a protest note in the collection basket, and encourage your fellow Catholics to follow suit. If you know people who contribute privately to MHT, advise them in Christian candor to cease for the good of their soul and the survival of the traditional movement.