TRAVELERS' TRIBUNAL: GAME TWO

Welcome back, intrepid Traddie travelers! Although today's game has elements similar to last week's, there are important differences. The whole family will have hours of fun teasing them out before rendering the guilty verdict and passing harsh sentence on a thief. Today's case is shorter than last week's, so now's the time to have one of the crumb-crushers read. For a refresher on how to play the game,  see last week's post.

Ready? Let's get rolling with case #2:

Immediately after Sunday Mass, a rotating sede priest orders the chapel's coordinator to turn over to him the collection baskets (a practice theretofore unknown). Upon delivery, the sticky-fingered priest snatches sundry large bills and greedily stuffs them into his pocket without telling the lay coordinator how much he has taken. The stunned layman is too meek to protest. Several other lay people witness the misdeed and are gravely scandalized. Learning of the pilferage, many chapel members vow to curtail their weekly offerings.

In your deliberations, consider that in this case the priestly delinquent makes no attempt to diminish his culpability by shifting the moral burden to a layman, as last week's clerical miscreant did. Here the criminal priest engages in outright stealing. Will that difference influence your sentence? In considering the punishment, be sure to discuss the effect upon the chapel's social order when the priest's larcenous behavior was tolerated without grave moral sanction. For this case, you may decide whether the villain must make restitution. (Also you may pull off the road to ask a policeman or park ranger his opinion.)

WE URGE THE MOBILE TRIBUNALS TO 

 "THROW THE BOOK"
 AT THIS THIEVING PIECE OF FILTHY, CLERICAL TRASH SPAWNED BY THE VILEST SCUM OF  THE LOWEST SOCIAL CLASS!

TRAVELERS' TRIBUNAL: GAME ONE

To help pass those long, tedious hours on the interstate to this summer's vacation destination, Pistrina releases its Traddie family-fun, educational game Travelers' Tribunal. While Tradistan's lawless, unsupervised clergy will never be accountable in this world for all their bad behavior, you and the kids, for a few, carefree hours, can pretend to mete out sorely needed justice by adjudicating selected cases ripped from painful sede memories or, in our last game, the newspapers.

Here's how to play:

1. Before your road trip, print out each of the four cases we post.

2. Take turns reading the cases out loud in the car. Mom can start, then the kids, and, when Dad's not driving, he can read, too. (Brutalized, true-blue culties might have to invite a literate relative, friend, or care-giver to do the reading for them.)

3. Once everyone understands the elements of the case, let the fun begin!

Your objective as a Catholic family is to (a) scrutinize the facts, (b) render a guilty verdict, and then (c) determine the appropriate punishment: (i) defrocking, (ii) time-out in a Carthusian monastery, (iii) referral to secular authorities for prosecution and incarceration, (iv) indefinite confinement in an ecclesiastical dungeon, or (v) all of the above.

4. You must pronounce final sentence on each case by the time you arrive at your destination. Don't worry. You needn't know anything about canon law. For one thing, it doesn't apply during the Sede Vacante and for another, renegade sede clergy don't abide by it anyway. You may use the principles of moral theology, but remember that in Tradistan those principles bind only the laity, not the clergy. On the whole, you'll do perfectly fine if you just follow the notions of right and wrong learned at your mother's knee or in the sandbox.

Let's get started with case #1:

A sede priest arrives at his icy Minnesota mission unprepared for the sudden onset of bone-chillingly cold weather. The lay coordinator offers to take the shivering priest shopping to buy a winter coat. Inasmuch as the priest claims to have no money with him, the layman volunteers to lend him the cash out of his own pocket. The priest gratefully promises to repay the man. The weeks pass without the priest's saying so much as a word about repayment. Finally, the distraught layman begs the priest to reimburse him for the purchase of the coat. With characteristic sang-froid when the funds of the faithful are involved, the rascal-priest coolly replies that the layman should reimburse himself from the mission's collection money, of which the layman was the custodian.

As you mull over the punishment(s), ponder not only the fact that this scumbag cleric unjustly postponed payment of his personal debt and thereby increased the seriousness of his sin, but also the fact that he placed the poor layman in moral and, possibly, in civil  jeopardy in order to escape his obligation. Also consider that the layman has left the traditional movement in disgust with the sleazy clergy. (This last fact could be viewed as an objective good, which might mitigate the sentence: his immortal soul is a lot safer outside Tradistan and the reach of its grasping ministers.)

HAPPY MOTORING AND, YES, YOU HAVE OUR PERMISSION TO BE...

J U D G M E N T A L.

(INDEED, WE INSIST.)

TRAVEL ADVISORY

Travelling is the ruin of all happiness! Burney

As the summer vacation season begins, many traditional Catholics will be journeying far away from their home chapels. During their travels, they will assuredly look for a Latin-Mass center near their vacation destination. A number of the visits will pass uneventfully, some perhaps joyfully. However, on the basis of a recent account, Pistrina must warn travelers to avoid any chapel under the control of the Ohio and Florida cult masters, "One-Hand Dan" and "Big Don."

It seems that one visiting out-of-state family was asked which chapel they attended and then advised to leave it because, according the the cultists, their home clergy were poorly trained. Not only is this a stunning instance of the pot calling the kettle black, but it's an intolerable offense against decency, hospitality, and charity.

The cult-master riffraff have no business talking about poor priestly formation.  Here are six facts travelers should bear in mind about the level of formation of the SW Ohio-Brooksville clergy:

1. No one can be certain that the 14 men "ordained" by Dubious Dan are valid priests. 2. One of the cult "priests" whom Deacon Dan ordained in 2012 never attended even the make-believe Florida  "seminary" operated by "Big Don." This guy "studied" privately with a busy independent pastor, left him, and then "studied" privately with Erroneous Antonius. 3. At least one of the cult's "priests" never attended an accredited high school. 4. One of the completers of the Florida "seminary" omitted the consecration at Mass. 5. Another completer was so inept he couldn't bless holy water. 6. Another was unable to perform correctly a graveside service.

First-hand reports inform us that one of these incompetents who worked in Europe was dismissed by his Italian superior owing to the laity's complaints.

Therefore, the cult masters' poisonous tales are without any foundation. Their goal is to rustle sheep for fleecing. In the particular case of the unlucky visitors mentioned above, we know that their clergy have an excellent secondary education as well as a solid background in theology and liturgy. (Some even know Greek.) Never once have any of them forgotten to consecrate the Host and Chalice!

If the only chapel in the area you will visit is affiliated with the discredited Ohio-Florida cult, you're better off staying at your hotel or RV, saying the Rosary, and making a act of perfect contrition.

On your hard-earned vacation, the last thing you need are weirdo, money-hungry creeps disturbing your family's Sunday peace.

ANUNCIO ESPECIAL

Queremos informar a nuestros amigos de habla española que la traducción del resumen de los argumentos en contra de la certeza de las ordenes del americano Daniel Dolan está disponible aquí o arriba en la página titulada 9 RAZONES PARA DUDAR LAS ORDENES DEL "MANCO" DANIELITO.

Les rogamos el favor de pasar la voz a todo el mundo sobre la posibilidad de los sacramentos inválidos de Dolan. En unos meses publicaremos en español nuestra completa refutación del panfleto con que "Manco" Danielito se defiende.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO US

The time was out of joint, and he was only too delighted to have been born to set it right. Lytton Strachey

The day before yesterday, June 5, marked the fourth anniversary since the Readers first tumbled down the rabbit hole into Tony Cekada's dark Blunderland. Our four-year slog has taken us a long way through the feculent nether world of false scholarship, priestly malformation, terminally ignorant clergy, dubious orders, and all-'round "Let's Pretend" Catholicism. And we still have miles to go before we make a clean sweep of the filthy nest.

In celebration of the occasion, a little back-patting seems in order with respect to our initial series -- the systematic exposure of all the shameful errors and scholarly shortcomings of Tony Baloney's embarrassingly amateurish Work of Human Hands. We're rightly proud of our accomplishment. We're also equally proud of the prediction we made time and again that the Novus Ordo (along with the SSPX), not Sedelandia, will furnish the legitimate scholars (like Fr. Stefano Carusi) who will produce the substantive (and transformational) critiques of the conciliar liturgy and theology. (See, for instance this post from late 2010.)

Our comprehensive inventory of the blunders in Work of Human Hands should have been enough to consign that cringe-worthy monstrosity to the charnel house. But if it wasn't, that is, if all we did was to wound it mortally, then surely the 2013 publication of Dr. Lauren Pristas's The Collects of the Roman Missals of 1962 and 2002 administered the sorely needed coup de grâce.

What hopeless Bonehead Tone hoped to achieve but couldn't in his laughably inept chapter 9, Prof. Pristas, a genuine academic with a doctorate from Boston College in systematic theology, successfully realized in his book-length study. In fluent, well-structured prose written in the appropriate register,  she lucidly engages, through a comparative examination of the collects of the two missals, the "question of 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" (p. 3). Along the way, Dr. Pristas unpacks the sede fiction, chiefly promoted by "One-Hand Dan" and windbag "Big Don," that the Blunderer can make a contribution to the discussion.

It's telling to observe that Dr. Pristas does not cite Cekada in her bibliography. Moreover, she writes (emphases ours):

No careful comparative examination of the texts of each missal has been published that shows whether the pre- and post-Vatican II missals assume the same posture before God, express the same convictions and sentiments about him (sic), present the human situation in the same way, beseech God for the same or similar graces -- and if they do not, in what specific ways, and to what extent, they differ (p. 2).  

So there you have it: Erroneous Antonius's 2010 junk scholarship isn't worth a glancing mention in the world of the truly learned and properly educated. Only a cathectic "Gertie" or a spasmodic MHT "seminary" completer would ever be so stupid as to imagine that Checkie's careless, combative, incompetently executed, error-plagued Work of Human Hands has any credibility outside the intellectual desert of Tradistan.

WHH's uncredentialed author does not bear mention in the same breath with professionally trained, authentically learned scholars like Prof. Pristas or the late Dr. László Dobszay, who despite their affiliation with Nu-Church serve the traditional cause better than Tony Baloney, whose squealing failure of a book makes a strong case against the traditional position. (Anyway, who wants to side with half-wits?)

For those who would like to witness how a real scholar, not an alien to academia, treats the material, but who might find the $45 Amazon price a little steep, here's a link to an earlier paper by Dr. Pristas (2005 -- published five years before Cheeseball's fatal embarrassment and 14 years after his absurdly shallow Problems with the Prayers of the Modern Mass).

In Dr. Pristas's pages, you'll find no smarmy asides, no sophomoric witticisms. The tone is sober, and the style obeys conventions of academic exposition. In making inferences, the professor is judicious; the conclusions are deftly nuanced, phrased so as to provoke thought, not controversy. To advance the argument, Dr. Pristas marshals quantitative and textual analyses by means of data-rich, visually effective yet simple graphics.

Best of all, Dr. Pristas possesses what no American sede cleric has, viz., a sensitive, rigorously informed, well-educated theological imagination. Indeed, although she sedulously keeps her personal voice in check, in the end, Prof. Pristas manages to give us a convincing (and profound) theological critique of the disastrous Vatican-II experiment, something that WHH rashly promised in its subtitle but which its over-matched author could never hope to deliver.

The work of formally-trained scholars from many fields is coming together to argue ineluctably that the council represents a violent rupture with the Church's past. With Bergie as pope, their work won't change things in the Vatican establishment. However, it may awaken a critical mass of faithful Catholics in the Americas, who at last will see that modernist Rome has no intention of turning back the clock.

God willing, these bitterly disappointed souls may act. And if they do, it will be the result of the work of rigorously-prepared, intellectually honest Novus Ordite or SSPX academics, not marginal sede pinheads who don't recognize their own severe handicaps. Not one of these clerical phonies will ever make it to the footnotes of the history of the struggle for the restoration of the faith, unless they're listed as hindrances.

IF ANYONE IS THINKING OF AN APPROPRIATE BIRTHDAY GIFT FOR US, THEN STARVE THE BEAST AND DON'T GIVE THE CULT MASTERS A DIME TOMORROW --  "REPUDIATION SUNDAY."

GETTING PRIORITIES STRAIGHT

The cabbages are coming now.  Betjeman

About a month ago, Michael Brendan Dougherty posted a much admired article at "The Week" censuring Catholics for "becoming party apparatchiks." In today's distorted celebrity culture, he notes that Catholics "tend to treat the pope as their 'party leader,' and to treat 'the world' as an opposing party." This contemporary mindset is flawed, for it tempts the faithful to rally behind the leader at any cost:

Party membership and church membership are not alike at all. Party bids its members to spin, minimize, and explain away supposed contradictions between one party leader and the next, to hide deviations by party leaders from the party platform. Because party members cannot know the outcome of the next election, crimes, oversight, or simple mismanagement by the party leader are treated as much less serious offenses to the cause than the scandal that would come from admitting or publicizing them in the sight of the opposing party.

The reflex to defend the leader at any cost is psychologically and spiritually dangerous: 

Catholics conditioned by the last 50 years of life in the church are totally unprepared for the eventuality of the pope or a papally approved Synod (i.e., a governing council) issuing a "policy" that flatly contradicts church teaching. For many of them, many good men, it will just be a new party line. Or perhaps, more insanely, they will claim, in an Orwellian turn, that the new policy was always the church's real policy. 

Dougherty's article is well worth reading in its entirety for its insight into the current "Catholic Party" mentality that adheres to Bergoglio even as he sets into motion policies that will do away with the last remnants of orthodoxy in the Vatican Establishment. However, the piece unwittingly sounds a warning to Traddies, who in their partisan defense of this or that sede tribal chieftain, are blind to their radioactive masters' greed, arbitrary decision-making, invented doctrines, prejudices, ignorance, mind-control schemes, and ill will. They behave like the fanatical followers of Hillary Clinton, who, as party loyalists first, willfully ignore the scandals of Travelgate, the Whitewater controversy, Filegate, the Bosnian-sniper-fire tall tale, the Benghazi massacre, and so on and so on.

Traddies often ask in exasperation how citizens can be so blind as to support political hacks whose public record would consign them to oblivion if we inhabited a virtuous country. Yet they, too, thoughtlessly prop up equally reproachable cult leaders. It's not as though the truth about sede bosses lies hidden. It's been either made public or can effortlessly be learned by asking around. In many cases, the party faithful of Tradistan have heard all the stories -- and they know they're true. Nonetheless, these bewitched folks close their eyes and keep on funding the sede Svengalis in spite of the evidence. A classic example are those degenerate zealots who witnessed the repulsive SGG School scandal and yet remained at the cult center, choosing cardboard personalities over Catholic principles.

Such blindness is a dereliction of a Catholic's duty to the faith. Personalities are not the faith, nor do they represent it. They do not possess immunity from error or from criticism when they do err. More importantly, no Catholic needs, even in these dire times, personalities to retain their faith, which comes from God, not from some malformed huckster with a dubious pedigree. If Bergie and the grasping sede mountebanks flew away together to Neverland to re-unite with the other lost boys who weren't clever enough to stay put in their prams, you'd still possess the faith as pristine as ever. (In fact, it would be stronger, for you wouldn't have to fear losing it because of the head honcho's hypocrisy.)

Embracing the cult of a leader's personality -- whether you live in Pyongyang, Washington, Rome, or a pinprick of a town on the map of Ohio -- is the default setting of a lazy, diseased, and terrified mind incapable of demanding that self-appointed bosses conform to what is objectively right. It's a mind that refuses to think critically lest it be unsettled by howling contradictions.  As manifested among the Novus Ordites and Traddies, the mental disorder makes vulnerable Catholics confuse a one-dimensional cartoon character for the substance of divine faith. Most reprehensible of all, the confusion prevents the mentally fragile from fulfilling their obligation to condemn unworthy leaders who offend religion.  As Dougherty counsels:

Sometimes, the duty of a faithful Catholic is not just to rebuke and correct those in authority in the church like St. Catherine of Siena, but to throw rotting cabbage at them, or make them miserable, as we once did, with the connivance of worldly authorities, during the deadlocked papal election in Viterbo.

If you aspire to be a traditional Catholic of any stripe, you must first refuse to join the Catholic Party. Insist you belong to the Catholic Church, albeit you can't quite see her clearly nowadays. Do your duty: This time, instead of lobbing putrid veggies at crackpot pontiffs playing fast and loose with doctrine or at self-mythologizing, under-educated clerical entrepreneurs playing fast and loose with the laity's generosity, make them all miserable by denying these third-raters all the cash and material resources they must have to complete their squalid agendas.

You'll preserve the faith as surely as did the great saints who knew better than to put their trust in mere men -- especially vipers like these so deserving of the Catholic community's scorn.

SPRING MAILBAG #5

Editor's Note: The last letter in our spring mailbag series. 

I am very upset about Dolan meddling with the priests who left the Trento Society. Mexico has preserved the Traditional Faith and True Sacraments longer than in the US. It is wrong for him to go down there and stir up trouble and division.

When I go back to visit, I want to warn the people that Dolan may not be a priest or a bishop so the confirmations he gives may not be valid so they should stay away.

I have read your articles about one-hand ordinations, but can you give a simple explanation that the average person could understand?

We're glad to help, although it seems our correspondent's already mastered the gist of the argument. Someone has to stop Dannie from trying to poach the faithful in other countries. He's no longer welcome in France, so it's time for our good neighbor Mexico to slam the door on his silly face. Were it not for Mexican leadership in the first place, Dannie wouldn't have been able to wrangle a consecration.

Here's the argument in a nutshell, written for easy translation:

1. In 1990, nine American priests sent Dolan a cautionary letter. In it, they wrote, "Since your ordination was done with one hand, we must hold your ordination to be dubious, unless evidence can be brought forth that one-handed ordination is certainly valid." They urged Dolan to "diligently...research the problem" and report his findings.

2. Anthony Cekada researched the problem and claimed that priestly ordination with one hand was valid. In 2000, he privately printed and circulated a pamphlet that contained his defense of one-handed conferral of priestly orders.

3. For a time, most American and foreign clergy uncritically accepted Cekada's "findings." 

4. In 2005, a wandering bishop suspected that Cekada had gravely mistranslated Pope Pius XII's definition of the matter of the sacrament of priestly orders for the Latin rite (found in the 1947 apostolic constitution Sacramentum Ordinis, which decreed the imposition of both hands for valid ordination). A subsequent analysis by a trained Latinist confirmed the translation was erroneous.

5. In 2013-14,  the blog Pistrina Liturgica published a series of posts refuting and/or rebutting Cekada's "findings." In additiion, the blog exposed many other serious errors of scholarship and Latin.

6. As a result, today no one may use Cekada's pamphlet to uphold the validity of one-handed priestly ordinations: the original positive doubt raised by the 1990 letter of the nine priests remains in force. 

7. Since valid priestly orders are generally held to be a requirement for the valid reception of the episcopacy, Dolan may not be a bishop if one-handed imposition invalidates his priestly ordination.

8. Since the Church cannot decide the problem until the Restoration and since, in the case of the sacraments, Catholics are obliged to pursue the safer course, the Catholic attitude in practice towards Dolan's priestly and episcopal orders must be that they enjoy no presumption of validity. Consequently, both his priestly and episcopal orders must therefore be treated "null and void."

9. If Dolan is conditionally re-ordained a priest and re-consecrated a bishop by a valid bishop who correctly follows Pius XII's ruling, then he may be considered a valid bishop.

Within a few months Pistrina will publish in English and Spanish a summary of its posts from May 4, 2013, to January 11, 2014, in a simple, reader-friendly format. After that we hope to publish French and German translations. Our goal is to distribute these versions widely so the faithful can be informed of the truth. We also hope that the clergy ordained by "One-Hand" will see how necessary it is that they be conditionally re-ordained, too.

In the meantime, Dubious Dan must be prevented from disturbing the peace in other countries. He needs to stay put in the U.S. anyway and defend his turf in SW Ohio. The new chapel in Lebanon, Ohio, is off to a great start, and it can offer masses where there's no doubt about the validity of the celebrants' orders. On the other hand, the cult center has three priests ordained by "One Hand," so there'll always be some measure of doubt at most Masses celebrated there. Dannie's got an uphill struggle in front of him, so he'll do himself a favor by letting Latin America be governed by Latin Americans, who are both better educated and more responsive to their faithful.