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vel in lautumiis vel in pistrino mavelim agere ætatem
ON BREAK
Pistrina will be away from cyberspace for a little while. We're moving to an integrated all-Mac platform, but we have to wait for our tech guru to come back from her family visit in Mexico before we purchase and install.
In addition, we're hosting the 2015 Lay Governance Conference, so we'll have our hands full with all the management chores necessary for the event to come off successfully: Sedelandia needs a new sheriff badly. All our current PC's and laptops will be made available for the convenience of conference attendees.
This year we'll have delegates from 15 states and six foreign countries, representing all forms of traditional Catholicism. The conference theme is
(Click on the title to see just how apropos that theme really is.)
In the meantime, we invite everyone to visit the bi-weekly blog The Lay Pulpit to keep current on all the nasty tricks and cheap theatrics of the cult's un-Catholic clerical buzzards. The editor tells us they've got some fun but hard-hitting posts slated.
See you soon!
The Readers
*Click here for an explanation.
Editor's Note: To close out this summer series, here's a recent note we received:
Thank God for your blog. I don't want to criticize, but not all Gerties are the "slack jawed, bug eyed" mindless cult subhumans you describe. There are some good people down here with common sense who are not as blind or stupid as you think. Some made big sacrifices to get to SGG, volunteered a lot but now understand what you blog about each week. Believe me they are waiting for the right moment to leave. The problem is that so much is at stake in some families, specially with those with younger children. Just wanted you to know. Keep up the good work. We are praying for you.
Yes, we know personally there are some Gerties who hate the situation they're in at the infernal SW Ohio cult center. We truly sympathize with them and can understand their hesitation. (See our post of July 25, IT'S OK TO STAY AWAY.) At times, it's true our posts do sound as though we can't imagine there's anybody at SGG with a lick of sense. Let us here and now reassure everybody -- in particular the poor souls who are waiting for the right time to make their move -- that we stipulate some Gerties do not belong to the hateful undead.
Common sense says we have to.
Statistically, it's impossible for every Gertie to be a cult zombie. Despite the cult's diminishing membership, the whole of the remainder can't fall in the area under the farthest tip of the intelligence curve's left-hand tail. These people really don't need Pistrina to open their eyes: Dannie's "Bishop's (?) Corner" with its weekly clerical travelogue alone is sufficient to awaken the most trusting victim.
Just take a brief look at the expenses.
Monthly there are three, perhaps four, round-trip flights to Milwaukee, where His Profligacy once kept a priest permanently. Then there are the missions in Minnesota and North Dakota as well as the occasional visit to the chapel in Louisiana. Next there's Checkie's monthly trip to "teach" in the "seminary," and let's not forget Dannie's periodic "pilgrimages" to chic Santa Fe, New Mexico, and his winter holidays abroad in the sun.
If you throw in the cost of rental cars or depreciation on the cult auto along with food and lodging, you've got a lot of dollars supporting clerical wanderlust. (Next time you read the bulletin, hop online and get estimates of airfare for all these venues: Boy, it really adds up!) Moreover, since it's unlikely that many of the small missions can cover the entire cost of the travel, you can bet the cash-strapped faithful get stuck with the tab for a sizable chunk of the monthly travel outlay. So, in addition to the scandal-ravaged "school" and its "principal," the flat-broke Gerties have to underwrite the "missions," too.
So long kids' college fund!
But seriously, now. We DO empathize -- because we've all had the same experience. When you encounter the SW Ohio-Brooksville cult for the first time, your senses are overloaded with the endless pageantry, paraliturgical activities, pious talk, and clerical self-promotion. If you came of age after Vatican II, you say to yourself, "This must be what it was really like back then." If you're old enough to have come of age well before Vatican II, you say, "This must be what it was like back then, only it's been so long that I've forgotten." So you get involved, hoping your enthusiasm, financial sacrifice, and surrender of autonomy will help you belong to what seems at first blush to be a true Roman Catholic community.
Then, after the first few years, however, a disquieting unease settles on your doubtful mind, especially if you've worked closely with the cult "clergy." The chintzy veneer of ersatz Catholicism begins to flake and peel away. You now see things that aren't right. The clergy's cynical, condescending explanations ring hollow. These bloodsuckers, you begin to suspect, are in it for themselves. You learn to read the subtext in your friends' guarded remarks, or you talk to others like you who confirm your suspicions with unsavory horror stories of their own.
You want to leave, but you don't know where you can go, especially if you've made a big sacrifice to be near the cult. Furthermore, you worry whether your children will lose their faith if you exit. Most importantly, you want to leave on your terms, with your head held high, and not frog-marched out as a doctrinal delinquent with your name plastered all over the Internet in a cult-master fit of non-Catholic peevishness.
At this stage in the self-deprogramming process, you're deeply ashamed you haven't left the tyrannical, money-thirsty cult fiends. That's entirely understandable. Actually, it's part of the natural process of freeing yourself and your family. Just remember that almost everyone who's left the cult, including some of the Readers, felt the same way at one time or another.
In the meantime, you can help ward off the ghoulish cult masters even though you haven't yet walked out. First, give less and less money each week. Plead financial hardship if the collection-police come a-calling. Second, refuse to attend all the "really big shows." Go only to low Mass on Sundays and holy-days, and never volunteer again.
Attendance at their extravaganzas and your donations are the life essence these clerical vampires need to sustain themselves. Deprive them of those, and they'll soon turn to dust.
Editor's Note: In July, a correspondent drew our attention to a new fatwā against facial PIERCINGS, solemnly issued by the sede Ayatollah of SW Ohio. According to our source, such body art is now formally banned from the decaying SGG cult center.
Insofar as prohibiting facial piercings certainly means that anyone so marked setting foot on the premises must be removed along with the adorning body jewelry, we have some helpful, practical questions for the cult legislator's consideration:
1. Who'll do the inspecting, and who'll order the offender off the property? Must the celebrant wait until the sermon when, from the pulpit, he can survey the slack-jawed, bug-eyed crowd to descry impudently glittering nose rings, studs, septum clickers, ear cuffs, plugs, tunnels, labrets etc.? Will he then and there expel the disobedient, while a savage, twitching traddie mob hoots, whistles, and growls unintelligible slurs at the fleeing miscreants?
At communion, must a vigilant levite or alert acolyte watch for tongue rings? Should "clergy" interrupt the rite to summon a burly, foul-smelling usher to escort the skewered delinquent out to the littered, pot-holed parking lot? Or will the "principal" or his wife inspect each person upon entering the cult center, making sure to demand, "Open wide!" before anyone can take a seat? Or maybe Grand Panjandrum Dan himself will recruit the entire cultling horde to denounce any "holey" pew mates so they can be thrown out -- after the collection, of course.
2. But wait! On deeper reflection, since we're sure the cult masters didn't think this problem through, we ask whether by banning piercings Dannie meant that body jewelry only was prohibited. That is to say, if cult members remove the rings, studs etc., can they enter the cult center, even if the piercing holes on the face or tongue are still visible to a busybody's practiced eye? Or must the holes be surgically excised before readmission?
3. How will "clergy" treat the adult womenfolk who have normally pierced ears? We mean, if you're banning piercings, then you can't let these wanton Jezebels defiantly hang around after you've booted out the perforated punks, can you?
That wouldn't be fair!
And if a hair-splitting, wannabe cult "canonist" smarmily answers, as he looks down his nose at you, "We're only banning facial piercings -- ear lobes are not part of the face," does that mean the scruffy kid with a single zirconium stud earring gets a pass? Or how about young and old, male and female alike, who sport an ear tunnel or an ear plug? May they then remain thanks to the "canonist's" earlobe loophole?
These are tough, tough questions. Undoubtedly, they'll occupy the cult's meddlesome but uneducated "theologians" for some time to come as they research and debate the topic rather than minister to souls. Helping people is not as sexy as dreaming up new sins and levying draconian penalties: It just doesn't satisfy the itch to deny, butt in, scold, and control, does it?
The real question, in our eyes, is, Why do the sede cult masters waste so much time dreaming up Mickey-Mouse, intrusive rules sure to rub the faithful the wrong way? In the good old days, the Church counseled her clergy to refrain from trivial and invasive rule-making lest they provoke the laity. Along the same line, why do these clerical fainéants expend the little energy they have by engaging in senseless polemics with rivals or in proving to everybody that Bergie's a heretic? Competitors like the SPPX ignore them as you would a gnat at a picnic on a windy day, and all trads recognize Bergie for the menace he is.
This latest effort at granular manipulation is fruitless wheel-spinning at its worst.
Instead, cult "clergy" ought to spend all that extra time cooking their own meals, performing general maintenance on the cult center, cleaning their living quarters (especially the young Fathers' refrigerator), doing yard work, and providing pastoral care. The faithful would welcome the relief from all the petty meddling. They'd also rejoice in being free from the exhausting demands to serve the clergy rather than vice versa.
Editor's Note: We'll continue our summer mailbag series with a short-answer to a paragraph from a tiresome missive we received in response to our "Anniversary Special" -- tiresome because we've answered this and related objections many times, in particular in Question XXII in our refutation/rebuttal of Checkie, titled "The Dubiety of Ordination Conferred with One Hand."
Let me make this simple for you disordered wing nuts. The unnamed SSPX priest's testimony about Bishop Dolan as the only candidate of his class to receive one-handed priestly orders is USELESS, even if it be true. (Which I very much doubt.) "The episcopate is the fullness of the priesthood" or "the completion to fullness of the Sacrament of Holy Orders" and so it COMPLETES the priesthood. Get it, you freaking idiots? Any defect would have been "cured," as you pompously say, when His Excellency Bishop Pivarunas consecrated then Father Dolan in 1993. Therefore, in Catholic theory, His Excellency Bishop Dolan has no need to "seek conditional orders."
Whew! That was self-righteously angry, wasn't it?
As you regular readers know, we've said all along that it's disputed among theologians whether the leap from deacon to bishop results in a valid episcopacy. Some say yes, others no. And in our rebuttal of the Blunderer, we cited instances of the opposing positions.
Our own rebuttal to this correspondent's position -- to wit, that the episcopacy completes the priesthood and consequently does not require in its subject the presbyterate -- comes from the linguistically informed legal reasoning of the Jesuit G. Huarte.* His argument goes like this:
The espicopate has indeed always been a complementum of -- "something that completes" -- the priesthood. But by its very nature a complementum supposes the presence of something that has to be completed. Accordingly, it would seem, valid conferral of espicopal orders cannot in any way take place without presupposing the presence of the priesthood in the bishop-elect.
Therefore, the defect wasn't cured in '93, and in leaping he fell flat on his face.
As a reply to our cultling's bold assertion of "Catholic theory," we quote from Archabbot Stehle's chapter "De Supplendis Defectibus in Ordinatione Commissis" (lit. on supplying defects committed in ordination).**
In praxi, Ordinum collationem quod attinet, pars tutior semper est sequenda -- in practice, with regard to the conferral of orders, the safer course must always be followed. (Our emphasis.)
Again, as we've always said, no one can know whether one-handed orders are valid or not until the restored Church decides. But, in light of the doubts first raised back in 1990 by the nine priests and later by our refutation/rebuttal of the Blunderer's erroneous defense of such orders, the safer course for His Deficiency -- according to Catholic practice -- is conditional ordination and consecration.
ASAP!
The down-on-their-luck losers he's "ordained" are anxiously waiting to be fixed. And so, by the way, are the deeply worried cult followers, who piously insist they cannot live without the sacraments.
*Tractatus de Ordine et Matrimonio (3rd ed.), p. 103, Rome, 1931.
** In his Manuale Ordinandorum or Ordinatiion Rite According to the Roman Pontifical, p. 75, Beatty, Pa., 1917.
Editor's Note: As we begin August, we thought it time to catch up with some summertime e-mail correspondence. In this series, our answers will be brief, in consideration of the heat. Here's a doozy that came in last week:
How dare you demons tell people there is no obligation to attend mass on Sunday!!! You are urging Catholics to break DIVINE LAW. If one's conscience does not allow him to fulfill the Sunday obligation at a N.O.church, then he must do it at a nearby traditional mass center or die in mortal sin.
This message sounds as if came from one of the ratty, miseducated cult "clergy."
We have only a couple things to say.
First, we'll set our agitated correspondent straight by pointing out, in Fr. J.J. Guiniven's words, not ours: "The precept of hearing Mass on Sundays and Feastdays arises solely from ecclesiastical law." (Our emphasis.)*
Second, according to Fr. Guiniven's plain reading of the code's phrase sub dio, "any person who hears Mass outside of a church, public or semi public oratory, private cemetery chapel, or private oratory, does not, by reason of canon 1249, fulfill the precept, unless he attends a Mass celebrated in the open air." (Our emphasis.)**
That means the cultlings in Trad Nation who believe all the nonsense preached about the operation of canon law during the sede vacante have got a big problem: Since the cult centers are not canonically erected churches or oratories or private cemetery chapels, in all likelihood the faithful won't satisfy their obligation by assisting at sede "Masses" held in chapels, hotel meeting rooms, private homes, etc.
Of course, for those who share the view that canon law doesn't operate now, there's no problem. But then, the next time these same folks hear their cult-obsessed "priests" appeal to canon law to demand attendance or to club someone into submission, then they'd better stand up to their malformed "clergy" and correct them in public.
You can't have it both ways, you know.
*The Precept of Hearing Mass, p.163, Catholic University Press, 1942.
** Ibid., pp. 120-121. He cites Aeternys-Damen, Woywod, and others as supporters of this opinion.
Let my people go. Exodus
We know many of you are in the same position in which we once found ourselves: You're tired of the antics and hypocrisy of the SGG-Brooksville cartel, but your family is reluctant to leave the Mass. You're afraid that by leaving you won't find another Catholic home. You're scared that if you leave to set out on your own, you'll lose your faith and access to the means of obtaining sanctifying grace.
We understand.
After looking for the Catholic faith and seemingly finding it, you're loath to start all over again, although you realize the traddie cults aren't really Catholic. You think that by leaving you'll return to a spiritual no-man's land where your recaptured faith will vanish. It's hard to imagine how you can nurture that faith on your own. Although you feel contempt and anger towards these wretched "bishops" and their despicably loutish "clergy," you're not ready to cut the cord. So, against the clear dictates of your will -- and perhaps against the counsels of your conscience? -- you stay, hoping the situation will improve.
Tragically, it won't change. It will only worsen as the cult masters feel the increasing pressure. Sooner or later, if you are a good person, you will have to leave. To remain is to endorse all this unedifying, sectarian, non-Catholic behavior.
Consequently, the first thing to do is to accept that God wants you to distance yourself from these odious, pseudo-Catholic sects and cults. He will give you the strength and courage necessary, if you pray for those gifts. You're not a malcontent when you confess that the cults do not represent the Faith except in the most superficial ways. You have been given a gift of discernment.
Your dissent is not, in and of itself, evil, as the cult masters would wrongly have you think. Just consider the Cistercians: without their pious dissent, the Church would have been poorer. And since the cults of Tradistan are definitely not the Church, your disaffiliation is surely an act prompted by grace.
You've witnessed for yourself that at times the traddie cults approach a false imitation of true religion, an abuse condemned by the Council of Trent. Accordingly, you must interpret as a divinely bestowed grace your nagging desire to escape these sectarian vices so contrary to the virtue of religion. Inasmuch as every day you see on display the cult masters' hypocrisy, obsession with money, self-interest, and mean-spirited schemes, you have your own personal confirmation that your desire to escape is sound and holy. In addition, there's the additional witness of this blog, which has thoroughly documented the cult "clergy's" ignorance, malformation, and un-Catholic behavior. Something in the nature of things corresponds to the doubts in your mind.
So what do you do?
Simple!
Be your own Moses: set yourself and your family free from the bondage of the hard-hearted cult masters.
You'll find that breaking away is easy, if you do it in steps. First, cut your contributions in half or, better yet, make a token offering of a only few dollars. (Be sure you sit at the end of the pew and put the bills in a plain envelope so the ushers don't report you -- and so the Gestapo "clergy" can't identify you.) Second, don't volunteer to help, and only attend the cult's "Masses" on Sundays and days of obligation. Third, once you're comfortable with giving much less, stop contributing altogether. That's right: Don't give the filthy, grunting money-hogs a dime.
If you can afford it, donate instead to a worthy, well-managed charity of your choice. At the same time, if you can, attend Mass elsewhere on occasion, even the Masses of rival sects. (Ignore your "clergy's" prohibitions. They're only trying to corner the market.) Better still, just stay home and say the rosary or recite the divine office. (The Sunday precept* -- and all canon law -- doesn't operate during sede vacante anyway, although perhaps it's useful as a form of personal discipline.)
At this point, if the cult-clergy haven't tossed you out for resisting their strong-arm efforts to separate you from your cash, you're ready to walk away from the whole mess -- the blood-spattered tales of Caravaggio, the cult's feral cat; the invention of new mortal sins; the denial of sacraments to you or your loved ones; the hypocrisy; the remorseless, never-ending fund raising; Cheesy's head-shaking, jaw-dropping ignorance; Big Don's galactic, but unjustified, arrogance; and Wee Dan's terminal fecklessness.
All gone forever.
No more threats and coercion from the pulpit. No more name calling. No more scandals like that which occurred at SGG School in 2009. No more supporting financially the "principal" and his large family. No more underwriting the "schooling" of kids from just a few families. And -- this is important -- no more worry that you're offending God by assisting at possibly invalid Masses or confessing to possibly invalid priests.
When you walk away, you won't be alone. You'll have the act of perfect contrition as a consolation until you find an independent chapel with a valid priest unattached to the wolfish sede cult "bishops." Your faith will not only survive, it will grow -- even at home alone --once the noxious influence of the cult evaporates.
So start this Sunday. Start starving the beast, and take your first step toward a genuine Catholic life, the Promised Land of your holy wishes. The Japanese Catholics who survived the 1638 massacres kept the faith without clergy for some 200 years. You can keep your faith, too, outside the cults.
* We know that for many the precept of hearing Mass on Sundays and Feastdays represents a formidable obstacle to leaving a virulent cult center. While leaving is a decision for each individual conscience, we base our position on the 1942 study by Fr. J. J. Guiniven, C.SS.R., which teaches that "whenever there is a positive, objective doubt concerning the existence, force, extent, or cessation of the precept of hearing Mass, there is no obligation to attend Mass." For us, the law does not bind in the sede vacante. All we find locally are the repulsive N.O. outrages, the patently repellent imitation-Catholic cults, and doubtfully valid priests simulating a Catholtic rite. Furthermore, we believe that assisting at the cults' Masses involves "a notable harm or danger to one's own goods of ... soul...[that] suffices to excuse one from the precept of hearing Mass." Putting it as simply as possible, since we have doubt about a fact whose existence would induce an obligation to attend Mass, then we are not subject to the doubtfully binding law because liberty is in possession. You may come to the same conclusions.
At mihi, qui quondam, semper asellus eris ("But to me, you'll always be the ass who you once were"). Avianus, "Fable of the Ass in the Lion's Skin."
Some followers of this blog have gotten the wrong idea. We're not opposed in principle to admiring the clergy.
As a matter of fact, there are many traditional priests -- and a few bishops -- whom we steadfastly admire: Properly educated priests with a zeal for souls, and bishops who lovingly "feed the flock of God...not for filthy lucre's sake, but voluntarily: neither as lording it over the clergy."
But those good men live far away from the mean streets of dystopic Tradistan, U.S.A. The "clergy" who malignantly cruise those fearful byways -- particularly the "bishops," instantaneously transformed from low-life gutter trash to "men of God" simply by dressing the part -- merit nothing but contempt. But, then, you already know that. You remember we told you about the ridiculous self-styled "missionary bishop with universal jurisdiction" as well as the yellow-livered, quaking troll frightened of his own shadow who surfs the 'net all day long locked away in his office.
You also recall last summer's popular series "Travelers' Tribunal," which acquainted our audience with a gag-inducing smögåsbord of clerical misbehavior ranging from the grossly stupid to the emetically reprehensible. Anyone with a conscience and a sense of decency who read through those posts would find himself empty of admiration for the puny riffraff who pass themselves off as Catholic "priests" or as high-and-mighty "prelates of the S.R.E."
However, insofar as human beings are prone to forget, Pistrina would like to remind everybody again how unworthy of respect Tradistani "clergy" are. So, for your vacation displeasure, here's a little anecdote we heard from sources abroad:
When a member of the traddie nomenklatura made a little tour on the Continent, a couple originally from mainland Southeast Asia, as a gesture of humble gratitude for his visit, generously invited him to a local Indochinese restaurant. In a churlish rebuke to their kindness, it's reported the ill-bred, uncouth jackass badly disguised in clericals boorishly sneered that he definitely would not join them, cruelly adding, "you people only eat cats and dogs."
Any further comment on our part is superfluous. Like the Europeans who learned of this grim episode, American traditional Catholics, presented with such arrogance and incivility, must stand aghast in wincing horror. This piece of rotting sede garbage could buy everything Gammarelli's has in stock, but he'd still remain the gob of spit he was fated to be at his ill-starred birth. Doesn't this graceless cur realize how badly he reflects upon the mother and father who reared him? Probably not. That would require self-awareness and a rudimentary sense of decency.
The only suitable response is revulsion-- and a firm resolution to get out of the cult immediately. It's more than O.K. to stay away when such monsters of uncharity, masquerading as Catholic clergy, creep over the fetid wastelands of Tradistan.
If you consider yourself a Catholic, you have an affirmative duty to get out of any of the traddie cults now.
