A REALLY EXCELLENT NEW YEAR'S SUGGESTION

Each venture/ Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate. Eliot

We're afraid we have a little bit of disappointing news.

St. Nick wouldn't let ol' Krampus load up the sled with the pack of Tradistani clergy he'd corralled.   They were so bloated with gourmet food and weighed down with the laity's hard-earned money that the groaning sleigh couldn't take off.

To make it worse, the stench of their greed was so overwhelming that Rudolph's nose went dark temporarily. With all the bad weather in the forecast, the nasal blackout scared all of the other reindeer something awful: The team made a frightful mess on the cult center's sagging, leaky rooftop. Luckily all that steaming muck masked the foul odor of clerical rapaciousness.

But we weren't too disappointed. Santa left us a wonderful present --  a brand, spankin' new domain name -- so we can fulfill our promise to restore to the web all the info about the 2009 SGG School Scandal that ended the cultists' Reign of Error.

As soon as our webmistress comes back from her Christmas-break secret mission to Mexico, she'll create the templates and upload all those files you've been clamoring for! We hope to make the new site available sometime after New Year's as a handsel to our enthusiastic supporters and out-of-joint adversaries.

Meanwhile, we encourage all the captives of Tradistan to make a firm New Year's resolution to leave the cult in 2015. There are plenty of alternative Latin-Mass chapels with decent, well-adjusted priests unaffiliated with the vile, money-obsessed cult masters. All you have to do is open your eyes to rescue yourself, your family, and your savings.

Isn't it time to stop wasting your treasure on prodigal, globe-trotting clergy and their wild-and-crazy spending plans? That money should be devoted to your family or to your retirement fund, not to the clergy's. Krampus gleefully told us how many tearful kids in Traddieland woke up with their usual aching hunger pangs to find nothing under the scraggly tree or on the breakfast table because Ma and Pa had squandered the Christmas Club money and the grocery budget on the cult masters' latest appeal for more cash. (The ever-thoughtful Krampus did leave bundles of stinging switches, which depraved cultist parents can donate to the school in case the rug-rats get too resentful about meager meals and no presents.) 

If you leave the cult early in 2015, think how warm you'll feel next Christmas Day when those smiling, well-fed little angels give you a big hug after they unwrap all those nice presents you were finally able to afford.

Once the shadows of the cult have been altered by your exit, Tiny Tim himself couldn't be happier than your little ones as they shout with the  joy of the ransomed, "God bless us, every one."

YULETIDE MUSINGS

You better watch out! Popular Holiday Song (Gillespie and Coots)

Jolly old St. Nick needs to know who's been naughty so his trusty sidekick Krampus can prepare a fitting comeuppance when they arrive together in bleak Tradistan.  This year, we think the enormous untruth at the heart of the sede cults -- their claim to represent the unchanging Roman Catholic Church -- is worthy of the grisly creature's grim attention.

We're not talking here about malformed clergy gone rogue, the suppressed moral imagination of the lay folk who tolerate and support bad behavior, the self-regarding clericalism run amok, the absence of oversight and accountability, or the leadership's petty rivalries and dirty tricks.  What we have uppermost in our mind is Sedelandia's visible disunity of practice.

Tradistan is nothing but a tangle of isolated cult centers, with only a superficial resemblance to the true Catholic Church. Each little enclave is an entity to itself, with its own peculiar, if not deviant, notions about the liturgy and Catholic life. Before the reforms of Vatican II, Catholics could expect no surprises when they visited another church. Now, however, when we assist at a chapel other than our own, we immediately notice how strangely different it is. The impression is that of an artisinal commodity -- an object that thrives locally but cannot survive in the general community.

In one chapel, for instance, a morose priest -- a notoriously malformed, hectoring moralist -- languishes unzipped from reality. He cleaves to the rubrics of Pius XII, yet on Palm Sunday at his second Mass, he reads all the wrong Gospels. Obsessed with women's clothing, he concocts bizarre rules for ladies' summer footwear and threatens not to perform a baptism unless a young, female bystander, whom he deems improperly dressed, leaves. He denies communion to the faithful when he can't remember whether they went to him personally for confession. In the confessional, he has the wicked habit of postponing absolution so he "can think about it."

In other chapels under a different cult master, the Leonine prayers have been banned. In their place, we often hear weird, jury-rigged centonizations. (However, sometimes young clergy have been known to recite defiantly the prayers when at a mission, so even there we find no consistency.) Still in other chapels, we learn that the wandering bishop who controls them has been declared a "missionary" bishop with jurisdiction throughout the world! In another, the goofy priest attempts to coerce the male laity into making their confession to him face-to-face, not in the confessional. The one thing common to all these splinter groups is how differently the clergy say Low Mass. The casual observer notices wild incongruities in the time each priest takes, while the trained eye spies glaring inconsistencies of gesture and screaming defects.

The one thing that seems to unite all these warring practitioners is their fixation on money. They trot out more fund-raising efforts than a PBS station. Yet even the non-stop cash solicitation varies in intensity and purpose. Some of the clergy are content to go off their rocker only if they don't get their pay immediately before Mass. Others have greater ambitions for lavish building ventures, luxurious foreign travel, and fine dining. In these latter chapels, everything is monetized. The appeal for more money drowns out every other message, and no fund-raising opportunity goes untried. Each visit to these lucre-loving chapels greets Catholics were ever new projects worthy of their financial sacrifice, from apartments for foreign priests living abroad to garish holiday decorations.

This Christmas, the same disparity of practice will be on parade again for the disedification of the faithful. One chapel will go all out on a hugely expensive, grotesquely over-the-top Midnight-Mass extravaganza never seen in the good old days, while another will have to wait until Christmas Day to suit the shoddily vested, minimally formed priest's whims. Cultlings may tell themselves that this wild variation is Catholic and normal, but wiser heads know better. All this idiosyncrasy is repugnant to the true Catholic spirit and does not differ in kind from what we see in the Novus Ordo, the Protestant denominations, and the evangelical sects.

This year, put an end to the sede circus. Smash the fun-house mirror of Tradistan by refusing to give any more money until the hard-hearted clergy clean up their act. When they pass the hat, just drop in a lump of coal -- and then let Krampus do his job.

A HOLIDAY GIFT

Here comes Santa Claus,/Right down Santa Claus Lane. Popular Holiday Song

And just in time for the holiday season also comes Pistrina's summary of its 2013 series of posts rebutting/refuting the Blunderer's defense of the validity of one-handed priestly orders.

Our THE DUBIETY OF ORDINATION CONFERRED WITH ONE HAND will also be found on a separate resource page together with the September 1990 letter from the nine priests and "One Hand's" reply to one of the signers.

Now instead of clicking through our many posts, inquiring minds can turn to one document for all the answers they need. As we've said before -- ♫ many times, many ways ♫ -- we don't know whether priestly orders conferred with one hand are invalid. That decision awaits a restored Church. What we do know is that such a conferral is defective -- and that Tony Baloney's now discredited monograph can no longer be used to make a case for validity.

So, when in doubt, opt for pars tutor, just as the Catholic Church used to do. 

BTW, one of our colleagues is busy working on the Spanish version, which will be available to the Spanish-speaking world in 2015. We do hope we have it in time for Dannie's expected junket to Mexicali, Mexico.

A GRAND MEMORY FOR FORGETTING

Like a flower as the dawn is breaking/The memory is fading. From Grizabella's song in "Cats," the musical

Editor's Note: This is the second of our two-part series aimed at discrediting the statement of a European priest, who swore "before God" -- and some 35 years after the fact! -- that the notorious June 29, 1976, priestly ordination took place at Écône without defect. Last week we demonstrated how common sense assures us his testimony is highly suspect. This week we'll summarize the scientific findings and forensic insights that argue compellingly why traditional Catholics of good conscience should ignore this priest's statement. N.B. At the end of today's post, we have a special announcement, both in English and in Spanish.

Defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges all are aware of the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. In fact, the forgetting curve begins to drop off swiftly after 20 minutes. Thereafter, it continues to decline exponentially until the second day, where it levels off at a considerably reduced accuracy. Moreover, the inevitable decay of memory is irreversible: the more that time goes by, the greater the likelihood of faulty remembrance. This means that earlier testimony is, on the whole, more accurate than later testimony. Consequently, the longer the interval, the greater the probability that post-event information will become confused with the target memory. Indeed, with the passage of time, memory is increasingly susceptible to contamination.

Human memory, as Bartlett showed in 1932, is reconstructive. A witness uses several sources to reconstruct a memory, only one of which is the actual memory itself. Our memories have gaps. To fill in the gaps, we recruit prior knowledge, expectations, biases, attitudes, prejudices, and information fed to us by others. Once our recollection has been contaminated, it's impossible to recover the original memory intact.

As well-founded research teaches, we don't record and recall memories as we would store and play back sounds and images on a recording device. We store the gist of any memory in a way that makes sense to us. Our mind organizes --  makes sense of -- the information by forming our memories into schemata or units of knowledge corresponding to stereotypes of people, places, things, and circumstances. We then use these schemata to predict outcomes of near-term events as well as to plot the courses of action we should undertake.

To the extent that the schemata can be influenced by our values, unconsciously unacceptable information can be distorted so as to accommodate the schemata we have created. Our mind makes an effort to reduce dissonance by adjusting our memories to our knowledge and understanding of the world. All this is to say that we often alter our memories to make them more meaningful to us, to shape them in accordance with our firmly fixed beliefs.

Inasmuch as human memory is so malleable, it's fair to say that no one can put any stock in the European priest's jurat regarding the 1976 ordination, even if he did sign it solemnly "before God." Quite frankly, thirty-five years is too long an interval to wait, so it's easy to see the schemata at work in this case: Holding the archbishop in such high esteem, this hero-worshiping priest could not fit the well-reported fact of the one-handed ordination into his stubborn belief in the venerable prelate's unerring competence. 

For this man, the archbishop still towers over the traditional Catholic world from his lofty pedestal. To admit that this heroic figure -- perhaps even a saint -- had made a serious mistake was simply too unthinkable. Our witness's human memory, compromised by the suggestions of partisans and possibly aided by unconscious transference (confusing one event for another), reconstructed the priestly ordination rite of June 29, 1976, so that it would make sense to him, the great archbishop's starstruck acolyte. Since he could not comprehend his hero's making so grave an error, his reconstructed "memory" came to rescue his challenged understanding. The desperate and unscrupulous defenders of one-handed orders simply took advantage of his psychological dependence and the unreliability of human memory to support their now utterly defeated position.

THE BOTTOM LINE: We cannot take, without a grain of salt, the European priest's sworn statement. There are too many threats to its reliability.  Both common sense and awareness of the inherent weakness of tardy eyewitness testimony lead the prudent man and woman to reject it out of hand. Anyone who appeals to this priest's statement stands impeached before Catholics of good will and sound intellect.

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

Next week, Pistrina will publish its much-anticipated English version of its rebuttal/refutation of blundering Cheeseball Checkie's failed monograph defending ordination with one hand. We've repackaged our series of 2013 posts in an easy-to-use, downloadable question-and-answer format. A colleague is currently working on a Spanish translation, which we hope to make available here and in Spanish-speaking countries sometime in the spring of 2015. We're also considering a French version, but the urgency is less pressing since most of the French will now have nothing to do with "One Hand." At this time, Mexico and South America have the greater need to know the truth because Dannie considers any country south of the border as his private territory. Although we'll be sending out the English version to everyone we know in the countries where "One Hand" likes to pretend he's the "metropolitan of Tradistan," a Spanish translation will convince these good Catholics to use their own undoubtedly valid bishops, not doubtful, gringo interlopers who like to stir up as much trouble in other countries as they do here in the U.S.

AVISO ESPECIAL

La semana entrante, Pistrina publicará la versión en inglés de la refutación muy anticipada de la obra fracasada del "Tonto Toño el Chapucero" (Anthony Cekada),  donde él defiende la validez de ordenes conferidas con una sola mano. Hemos redactado nuestra larga serie de posts publicados en 2013 a un formato de preguntas y respuestas.  Ahora mismo, un collega está traduciéndola para los hispano-hablantes de Sur América y México. Esperamos que esté lista en la primavera del 2015 (en el hemisferio norte).  Es importante que los Latinos sepan tan pronto como posible la verdad, por que "El Manco Danielito" ('One-Hand" Dannie Dolan) considera países de América Latina como su proprio territorio. La buena gente católica del mundo latino tiene que saber que este dudoso arma líos dondequiera que él viaja. Es mejor  -- y más seguro -- utilizar obispos ciertamente válidos de países de habla española. Mientras tanto, la versión en inglés será disponible a todos.