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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.
