PLUNGING THE STRUGGLING SHEEP

One sickly sheep infects the flock,/And poisons all the rest. Watson


The vile cult masters have reached a new milestone in their boundary-crossing race to the bottom.  A little birdie has informed us how they've resumed with a vengeance their nasty efforts to alienate traditional Catholic faithful from chapels unaffiliated with Tradistan. Right now, these creeps are spreading the big lie that bishops who don't have the required training cannot ordain validly, hence the priests of other chapels are not valid. As a "service," they're offering to take over these chapels (and their weekly collections, no doubt).

Let's get one thing settled once and for all:

NO sede bishop possesses the academic qualifications for the episcopacy, which would have proved his fitness in a manner determined by the Holy See of yesteryear. (We know of only one, an advanced octogenarian, who might possibly have come tolerably close, provided an amused Holy See of the past had the whimsy to assign a vicar apostolic to, say, Al Capp's Lower Slobbovia.) 

In most cases, the current universal impediment to "canonical fitness" results from the overall intellectual mediocrity of the sede episcopate. However, the practical reason is that these wandering bishops have no means open to them (a) to acquire the solid learning in moral theology and canon law required and (b) to earn the necessary credentials from the right schools. Today, unless they lied on their application form, they couldn't secure a licentiate even if they had been blessed with brains, knowledge, and a basic formation.  Moreover, why would any traditional Catholic cleric want to attend the "approved" institutions to earn a credential, where most of the professoriate and the curriculum are Modernist?  

Along with all this nonsense about invalidity comes yet more foolishness about canon law's forbidding bishops outside the cult to exercise their orders.  Putting aside the important question of whether canon law is in effect during the vacancy, we point out that, as a matter of fact, ALL sede bishops technically have been consecrated unlawfully and, therefore, by positive law must not exercise their orders. No papal mandate has ever been granted for the consecration any sede prelate.

In strictly juridical terms, that means none of the undoubtedly valid sede bishops ought to exercise their orders, including the cult masters. (However, in the case of "One Hand," he should not exercise any orders except the diaconate, until he gets fixed.) The bottom line is that anyone who receives the power of the episcopacy never loses it. That means the validly consecrated bishops who operate outside the SW-Ohio/Brooksville cult are just like other trad prelates: they ordain validly, though not lawfully.

It's the usual double standard at work. Ask yourself two questions: 

Why is it that only those whom the cult masters regard as "competitors" must be held to the unattainable standards of canon law (which cannot be enforced anyway)? Why is everyone else, except the cult masters, under pain of nullity?

Dannie tells a French lay group to reject a young priest because he hadn't completed seminary training, yet ol' Deacon Dan "ordained" a man who merely "studied" independently (and later separated from the first priest who supposedly guided his "studies"). The cult masters recruit simple-minded lay people from other chapels by telling them that other bishops have irregularities, yet they refuse to re-ordain and re-consecrate "Dubious Dan." The Trio claims that rival bishops don't live up to the academic standards of the past, yet their own published works are filled with howling errors (especially in Latin), and some of their priests have committed catastrophic blunders at Mass or in the administration of other rites. (Think of the "Skipper" who forgot the consecration and the Frenchman who couldn't bless holy water without a spiritual crisis. Both were pesthouse completers.)

"Sheep stealing" has always been a melancholy fact of the degraded landscape of traditional Catholicism. What makes this recent outbreak so loathsome is the misinformation they're spreading. In the past, Trad clergy of all sorts raided neighboring flocks by marketing their chapel's friendliness, its flexibility or rigidity in moral matters, or its focus on the liturgy etc. Often there was more than a grain of truth in these aggressive campaigns. 

We Readers certainly can see how Catholics might want to leave the chapel of an asocial, screwball priest who's incapable of offering High Mass, saying the simplified Pius XII Mass of Palm Sunday correctly, or performing a wedding ceremony so that they might attend a chapel offering sound liturgical praxis and more stable clergy. We can even understand how the strategic use of innuendo could be used to persuade the faithful to go elsewhere. After all, where there's smoke, there's often fire, as everybody in Trad World has learned from painful experience.

However, the whipsaw hypocrisy of these latest transgressions against truth and decency takes the cake. These renegade "clergy" surely know they could be tarred with the same brush with which they blacken the names of hardworking priests and bishops outside their sphere of influence. Why, then, do they act as they do? Because their contempt for the laity over whose blank, crossed eyes they pull so much wool empowers them to disregard any threat of diminished probity within the cult.

The cynical cult kingpins are aware that intelligent, well-informed Catholics of conscience despise them. Therefore, they only press into service small-souled, shrill morons in hopes that those addled creatures will siphon off one or two other fellow-defectives. The cult masters long ago accepted that they'd never permanently capture clear-thinking, worldly-wise, independent-minded lay men and women who can spot a con-job from a mile away. (They don't want those people anyway; they're satisfied if they can attract them for the short term -- long enough to squeeze some money out of them before the poor dupes recover from their temporary madness and leave the cult in a rage.)

That's why the clerical sheep rustlers have to go a-raiding: they need the influx of new fly-stricken, daggy daft-lambs  to replace the strays who have finally gotten a whiff of the wolf slavering behind the masquerade. These victims learned the hard way that the beast isn't looking for souls to save -- it's looking for donors to shake down. When awakened laity no longer submit to fleecing, the cult masters need replacements to pay for the luxuries they consider their birthright. (It's a characteristic of grasping guttersnipes to consider other people's money their money.)

So be on guard against any sicko, shrieking former chapel members who come slinking around with a cock-and-bull story about invalidity and canonical unfitness. You don't need to be defensive.  Turn the tables on the lowlife trash: Ask why they're carrying water for malformed, lupine bishops and asinine clergy who themselves are canonically unfit or worse. Let them know that the cult clergy are living in glass houses, so nobody has any business throwing stones.

Then tell 'em to crawl back to their filthy lair so the beast can feed upon them.

BUT AT LEAST A GOOD CIGAR IS A SMOKE

Emergency Warning for your Wallet -- from the Editors: It's an arctic Lent in frost-strangled SW Ohio, and the cold-hearted cult masters are ravenously hungry for your money. Their latest scheme to separate you from your hard-earned cash is to sell you a crucifix along with St. Alphonsus Liguori's Way of the Cross for $20.00 (!!) so you can do the stations at home. Don't be a sucker. Just use a wooden crucifix you already have and print out St. Alphonsus's text from this site (click here); ask an undoubtedly valid priest to perform the blessing if you also wish to gain the indulgences. BTW, if you use the site we give, you can be sure of getting St. Alphonsus's prayers. The booklet shown on the SGG cult site is for the method of St. Francis of Assisi. (Maybe the cult kingpins will change the image as soon as they read this, so check it out asap here, right side, middle image. In any case, Pistrina's got a screen shot.)

Now for today's exciting post.....

Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes... 1st Baron Beveridge

We never tire of exposing how alienated from the authentic world of scholarship and the Latin language the malformed cult masters are. Together with dubiety of one-handed conferral of priestly orders, it's our favorite meme. Consequently, it's always a pleasure when others highlight the gruesome twosome's moronic errors.

To date, we've received five e-mails gleefully pointing out a Latin-spelling goof in the short letter "One-Hand Dan" addressed to seven of the priests who signed the September 1990 ad cautelam missive warning him of the fearful doubt stalking his priestly orders. Click here and go to page 5 of 5.  There you'll see the Latin term-of-art status questionis (sic!), lit. "state of the question or investigation," meaning the chief learned opinions concerning an area of inquiry. As our correspondents observed, the correct spelling -- the spelling of trained and true Catholic priests in the modern era (and of secular scholars from many different disciplines) -- is quaestionis, with ae (or the ligature æ), never e (as found in some medieval texts).

We can't imagine a first-year student's making such a blunder, let alone someone who intimates to Traddielandia that he was "canonically fit" for holy orders. It's rank amateurism at its worst: trying to impress with a Latin tag and then misspelling it! LOL

To complement the wry, critical comments we received about Dannie's orthographic boo-boo, we thought we'd share with everybody a much more serious lapse of academic good sense in the same set of documents. In his reply to the superior of the SSPV (page 1 of 5, 2nd paragraph, in the above link), Deacon Dan ruefully taunted, "...you and your clergy now trump up charges that I am doubtfully ordained and may not really be a priest. Suave conatum, sed havanum non datum. Nice try, but no cigar."

Despite a pronounced reek of what the French call latin de cuisine, we're not going to comment on the Latinity of the slavishly literal translation of Dannie's variation on the popular American expression "close, but no cigar" -- or is that Tony Baloney's smarmy voice we hear there? As a specimen of callow, adolescent snark, it's O.K., we suppose, especially with the jingling homoeoteleuton. (We must, however, vigorously protest suave.*) Nonetheless -- and this is crucial -- the effort does not rise to the level of mature academic wit, nor does it embody scholarly best practice.

A well-schooled, real scholar with a university-educated taste refined at an accredited graduate school would have first chosen a genuine and idiomatic Latin phrase -- preferably a notable one  -- that captured the sense of "nice try -- or 'close' --, but no cigar." He then could have offered the vivid, U.S.-pop-culture saying as the rendering for the Latin original. As a result, Wee Dan's rebuke would have sparkled with class, perhaps (dare we say?) even with professional élan.

As it stands, the riposte is merely crass and gauche, for literally translating 20th-century American, colloquial English into Latin results in a jarring anachronism, to say the least. There's no cross-cultural interplay and hence no wit. What we have before our offended eyes is a Midwestern-American vulgarian swaddled in a ragged beach towel, who insists that we believe he's wearing a toga. Not even close!

Let's show you what we mean.  First, for our many readers from abroad, "nice try (or 'close'), but no cigar" is a colorful way of saying almost, but not quite. It characterizes an attempt that comes near to succeeding but fails to attain the sought-after object. Right off the bat, without even recalling the texts of classical authors, we thought of the familiar Latin phrase proxime accessit, "he came very near [to winning the prize]."

The expression is found all over the Web and in popular reference books like Stone's Latin for the Illiterati , Ehrlich's The Harper Dictionary of Foreign Terms, and the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. In modern English, proxime accessit is a noun-phrase from the 19th century meaning a runner-up, i.e., someone who comes in second place for an award, a prize, or a scholarship, etc. It's perfectly classical Latin, for  the idiom proxime accedere is found in ancient authors.

If Dubious Dan (and his blundering wing-man) had been formally educated under credentialed professors, the Dirtbag could simply have changed the grammatical person of the verb to the second person singular (he was addressing his career-long nemesis, the louche and disapproving superior of the SSPV): "Proxime accessisti -- Nice try, but no cigar," with the American expression amplifying the Latin to drive home the truth that a failure remains a failure. A deliciously snide opportunity to tweak an intimidating adversary lost to an untutored nitwit!

Now, already from the deepest, dirtiest corners of Trad cyberspace we can hear snarling, bark-like, spittle-laced protests that Pistrina's sinfully beating up on the deliriously mediocre Ren and Stimpy of Tradistan, who can never recover from their severely deficient formation.

Cross our hearts! That's not what this is about.

We've already exposed the manifold and irremediable educational and cultural failings of Dannie and Checkie as well as those of that gas-bag Big Don. The issue is settled forever; even the cultlings (grudgingly) admit it. No, this is about something else. This isn't a futile exercise in dead-horse whipping:

It's a reminder to the innocent, traditional Catholic laity who aren't enslaved by the SW-Ohio and Swampland cult-cabal.

You see, the cash-starved cult kings have resumed trying to lure the faithful away from competing traditional chapels under the pretext that the priests and bishops of those chapels haven't the requisite training. That's why it's important for future innocent victims of their guile to know that Dannie, Tony Baloney, and Big Don don't possess the requisite knowledge and preparation either. 

So, then ... when the twisted, mammonite clergy dupe the next simple-minded, barely literate, low-life-trash-pot lay stooge into undermining a rival chapel by spreading the blundering "seminary professor's" misinformation about "invalidity" and "unfitness," the faithful can take it all addito salis grano ("with a pinch of salt"). 

More on the new, raging outbreak of "sheep stealing" next week.

* The word nice in the idiom nice try means "very good, well-executed, well-conducted, outstanding" (Webster's 3rd International unabridged) or "done with precision and skill, deft" (American Heritage Dictionary), as in "a nice bit of craftsmanship," "nice shot," "nice job," and, adverbially, "nicely done!" The sense of the word nice in those informal phrases is different from its sense in such utterances as "nice color," "nice perfume," "nice wine," "nice song," and "nice feeling" etc. because it's a different lexeme.

The underlying cognitive meaning of suavis, suave is agreeable or pleasant to the senses or to the mind and emotions. Suavis  is chiefly said of sensations -- touch, taste, sound, sight, smell and, by extension, the character of persons. An able writer educated at a real university knows you can't just look up the word nice in an English-Latin dictionary and pick the first gloss you see (or recognize):  you first have to know the sense in your own language before choosing the right Latin word to represent in translation the English meaning (assuming, that is, you also know what the Latin options denote).

That's all too much for the educationally challenged cult masters, who apparently have no notion of polysemy. No one should pay attention to what these ill-trained buffoons say about anything. They fell flat on their smirking faces 25 years ago, and they keep on stumbling over their ignorance today. The only difference is they've moved from blundering in Latin to bungling theology.

BOUNDIN' BEGGARS

Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark,/The beggars are coming to town;/Some in rags, some in tags, /And some in velvet gowns. Nursery Rhyme

The begging, cajoling, wheedling, soliciting, cadging, and hustling at St. Gertrude the Great Cult  just won't stop.

This week we learned that on top of all the recent fund-raising appeals, the cult masters are now demanding an additional $5,000 - $6,000 to buy a replacement electronic organ "not only to maintain and expand our current musical program, but also for the sake of our upcoming generation of young organists, now 12 and 15."

Dannie and Tony Baloney are always playing the "kiddie card" when they need money for special pet projects. (Remember Dannie's video appeal for SGG School --  "It's for the children"?  And then in 2009 he defended the principal after the teachers exposed ill treatment of the little ones.) Why do the faithful have to underwrite the musical instruction of others' children? There must be many other local practice venues with state-of-the-art instruments for talented young keyboard musicians. And what ever happened to the former St. Clare chapel's organ, which the cult masters had in storage? 

Why can't that instrument be used to replace their "current 30-year-old electronic organ"? If it was sold off after St. Clare's was forced to close because all the decent folk had left, why can't the proceeds from the sale or auction be applied toward the purchase of the replacement instrument? (Or has that money already been wasted on dumb projects or travel abroad?) Furthermore, is the current organ really "slowly dying" or does the Checkmeister simply want a fancier toy?

If the cult really does need a another organ, how, then, could "One-Hand Dan" have in good conscience traveled to Tijuana and Mexicali, Mexico, last week (as he announced in his "Bishop's (?) Corner" on February 8)? If he paid for travel expenses, wouldn't it have been more appropriate to put that money toward the purchase of the replacement  organ? As of February 11, $2,375 had already been collected or pledged, and Dannie's trip will no doubt total at least $2K or more. For Pete's sake! That makes almost the whole amount they're asking for! 

For their own peace of mind and financial survival, Gerties must stop the cult masters' forever collection campaign. Dirtbag Dan himself may have shown the way: In the same "Corner" where he announced his trip to Mexicali, he wrote the following:

Do you have any questions you would like answered in a sermon sometime? Let me know. I’ll try to organize a Q and A Box for the vestibule, and maybe some Sunday Q and A sessions in Helfta Hall.

 If His Fecklessness ever does get around to "organizing" a suggestion box, we've got a perfect set of questions for a sermon answer, or better still, for a question-and-answer session in public:

Who paid for the 2015 pre-Lenten winter vacation to Mexico -- Dubious Dan or the Mexican faithful? If the Mexican faithful, can "One Hand" produce documentary proof? If Li'l Dan "shared" the costs, how much did he pay and how much of that was the chapel's money? Finally, if it was the chapel's money, why wasn't it used toward the purchase the replacement organ?

END THE MANIC AND ABUSIVE PANHANDLING. TELL 'EM YOU REFUSE TO BE AN "ORGAN DONOR."

HINT DROPPING

I'm tired,/Tired of playing the game!/Ain't it a crying shame?/I'm so tired! Lili Von Shtupp in "Blazing Saddles"

You've heard of "Fat-Shaming" haven't you?

You know...the use of public, social pressure as a catalyst to persuade the obese to lose weight.

Well, it looks as though Dannie's invented a new form of stigmatization -- Grub-Shaming -- to pressure the reluctant cultling-zombies to cook for and feed him. In last week's "Bishop's (?) Corner," His Dubiety really tried to lay a guilt trip on the cult's bleary-eyed womenfolk when he wrote about his week of relaxing in the Florida sun at Big Don's downmarket "seminary":

The retreat went well, in addition to the weather. It’s a nice treat, one for which I try to be suitably grateful, to sit down to a delicious home cooked meal, not just once, but—of the luxury of it!—three times a day, like in the old days. God bless Dorothy who does the cooking.

Oh, the humanity!

Distressed Li'l Dan has to go all the way to sun-drenched Florida in the middle of winter to get his three squares! The poor, wretched widdle ting is so deprived that daily homemade breakfast, lunch, and dinner seem an almost unimaginable luxury from an all-but-forgotten past. Why, the misery of the 2011 Horn-of-Africa famine pales in comparison to the Dirtbag's suffering, doesn't it?

Aren't you ashamed, you selfish Gertie gals?

Why can't you wait hand and foot on Wee Dan, too? Don't you want a blessing? Or are you too busy managing your own household? Shame on you for your heartless self-absorption! You know, it's not enough that your family has to support the cult masters' excesses*: You have to be their servants, too.  And you should be remorseful if you hesitate.

You've been set an example by the tireless and assuredly overworked Dorothy. Don't you know that you, too, have a high and mighty "bishop" (LOL) to pamper? (But wait! On second thought... maybe Dorothy gets paid for her troubles...)

While Dannie cannot fathom the cultlings' reticence to sacrifice even more than they do, we think we know the answer. Several weeks ago, we received a comment and a separate but almost identical email defending Dannie. The comment, a quotation from a blog,  read:

Bishop Dolan recently told me in an interview: 'If this were ordinary times, I wouldn’t be a bishop. I have no illusions about that.' He has grasped that because we are in extraordinary times, he doesn’t get to do what he would have wanted to do, which is be a simple parish priest – or even earlier – a simple Cistercian monk.  http://truerestoration.blogspot.fr/2009/04/restoration-i-dating.html

In our replies, we dismissed the self-effacement as bogus, since Dannie's outward behavior speaks otherwise. If he truly recognized his unworthiness for the episcopacy, he would never put on airs as a Catholic bishop, to wit, elaborate pontifical ceremonies and vestments, the expectation of  deferential treatment, self-referential remarks aimed at exciting reverence for his (doubtful) status etc. He would have comported himself in all ways -- including habiliment -- as a simple parish priest in order to signal both his yearning for simplicity and his awareness of his painfully obvious deficiencies.

 A fortiori, if Dubious Dan genuinely recognized his inadequacies, he would never have actively sought the miter. He would've refused it had it been offered (which, of course, it wasn't: it was coveted, to say the least.). There were many other men of his generation who were much more able, and he should have used whatever influence he possessed to make certain that a better educated, better formed priest be consecrated in his stead.

In our opinion, his heavy-handed hint about home-cooked meals is yet another proof that he expects to be considered a grand prelate deserving treatment reserved for the "Quality," as the English say. A humble man with adult organizational skills would be able to prepare his own meals at home. Millions of his betters do so every day. The Web is chock full of great-tasting, easy-to-prepare recipes. Since he doesn't live alone but has several doubtfully ordained "priests" as gofers, he could design a monthly schedule with a list of cooking/preparation/clean-up duties for each of the "lower clergy." (Better yet, he could ask one of the Gerties to do this for him in the event that the task prove too challenging for his limited resources.)

Naturally, if he and his associate, the Blunderer, hadn't been so set on defending the indefensible SGG principal and firing the truth-tellers in 2009, there may have been enough money in the budget to hire a full-time cook. Perhaps he had to defend the principal or risk certain catastrophe, whereas he gambled he could weather the firings. In the latter case, if he'd cut back on unnecessary and expensive foreign and domestic travel when half the cult left, there would probably be money to hire someone on at least a part-time basis. But since he's responsible for bringing the "old days" to an end, and since he won't give up traveling, he'll have to be content with grub-shaming the cult-crazed riffraff into cooking for him.

But it won't work. From what we hear, they're tired of all the begging and cajoling.

That means, as Lili so eloquently shouted, Dannie's "finished. Fertig! Verfallen! Verlumpt! Verblunget! Verkackt!"

* This might be the appropriate time to demand that "One Hand" reveal who paid the travel expenses to the retreat at the fetid Brooksville pesthouse. Dannie, you'll recall, gave the retreat for both the "seminarians" and the cult's "young fathers." Since the Blunderer was "the parish priest last week," it appears as though "Uneven-Steven" McFaker, Lurch, and the Forlorn Finn accompanied His Errancy. That makes four travelers. Did they fly? Did the "young fathers" pay their own way or was the excursion considered corporate inservice training and hence an SGG expense? Did the rector pay for His Verbosity to fly or be driven down as retreat master, or did Dannie cover the expenses himself in return for "a delicious home cooked meal...three times a day"?  If he paid, did he use his Christmas money and salary or did it come from SGG?