DISORDERED ORDO IX

We should, indeed, honor St. Joseph, since the Son of God Himself was graciously pleased to honor him by calling him father. St. Alphonsus Maria de' Liguori

Editor's Note: Today's DISORDERED ORDO, a somewhat lengthy and complicated post, is entirely devoted to a liturgical error. So enormous is the blunder that this month PL has foregone pointing out mistakes in Latin and editorial consistency in order to spotlight how jaw-dropingly transgressive Dannie's goof is.  By the time you finish reading about $GG impiety, even Gerties will tell Wee Dan and Silly Sal to stop hawking ordines. 

If the Readers were asked to give just one, solitary example why no priest (and no “priest”) should ever use $GG's ordo, we'd have to offer Dannie’s following instruction from Saturday, March 19, 2016 (p. 30), the Feast of St. Joseph, Spouse of the BVM:

Ad Vesp: seq. Dom. Palmarum, Color violaceus, Antt. et Pss. de Sabb, Ant. ad Magnif: Pater juste, com. præc. (“At Vespers: of the following Palm Sunday [N.B. = First Vespers!!], Color violet, Antiphons and Psalms of Saturday, Antiphon on the Magnificat: Pater juste [“O righteous Father”], commemoration of the preceding.”)

Right off the bat, we’ll stipulate this date in 2016 was a real toughie for rank amateurs to figure out its Vespers, what with St. Joseph, a Double of the First Class falling on Saturday, and the liturgically untouchable Palm Sunday following. Whew! Complicating the matter is this statistic from M. J. Montes:  a calendar with a March-27-Easter (upon which the date of Palm Sunday obviously depends) occurs only 5 times over the period a.d. 1875-2124, inclusive— at the bottom fifth of the frequency table. 

Furthermore, during that 250-year interval, the only years in which a March-27-Easter occurs are 1910, 1921, 1932, 2005, and 2016. Consequently, if you're producing an ordo based on “Pius-X-rubrics” and want to see what pre-Vatican-II compilers did, you've got two choices — '21 and '32. Admittedly, it might be hard for most folks to lay their hands on an ordo from so far back. Moreover, if you're Dannie or Silly Sal, you might be too bone-idle to look or too confident in your disturbingly inadequate knowledge of the liturgy to bother to check. 

This year's Vespers decision, then, was clearly a matter for pros, not malformed, Latin-less dilettantes.

Real liturgical experts with whom we conferred told us that Dannie's entry is virtually all wrong, largely because he seemingly doesn't know the elementary difference between concurrence (= the "conflict of two Offices, one of which follows the other on two consecutive days...[and] can take place only in the Vespers") and occurrence (= the "conflict of two or more offices falling on the same day"*).

March 19, the date of St. Joseph's feast, fell this year on Saturday, not on Palm Sunday. It was, therefore, to be celebrated normally, and not transferred. Hence, Saturday, 3/19/16, is a case of concurrence, not occurrence. As one of our expert advisors skillfully explained,

[Vespers] on Saturday, March 19, 2016, would be as follows: Second Vespers of St. Joseph, commemoration of Palm Sunday, color white.  The Antiphons and Psalms would NOT be of the Saturday, but would be those proper to the feast of St. Joseph, as, of course, would the Antiphon on the Magnificat. The Antiphon that Dannie lists, Pater juste, is that of the commemoration of Palm Sunday.

Insofar as competently compiled ordines are written in succinct, formulaic language, all that was really needed for the Latin instruction were the following six “words,” not Dannie’s 18:

V fest, com Dom, color albus (“Vespers of the feast, commemoration of Sunday, color white”) 

Why so short when compared to the English of our experts? First, in an ordo, it’s unnecessary to add Palm Sunday, for even an idiot cult “priest” can see that when he looks at the ensuing March 20 entry. Second, in the formula we just used, there’s no need for a  “2” before the “V” because V[esperae] fest[i] in liturgical parlance means “Second Vespers,” i.e., of the feast being celebrated, viz. St. Joseph, Spouse of the BVM. Third, it’s unnecessary in an ordo to repeat St. Joseph 's name since it's in the title of the entry.  (First Vespers, BTW, is of the feast to be celebrated and is sometimes styled V[esperae] seq[uentis], to which Deficient Dan’s ad Vesp: seq… is equivalent. )

At this point, some foaming-at-the-mouth culties out in cyberspace are moistly roaring back at their spittle-sprayed screens in a barely intelligible, hill-jack drawl:

“How dew yew'ns know, Puh-EE AY-yul? Yer ’non'mous “ache-spurts” maat be raw-ung! It’s jes’ thay-er opinion, ya know. Them dudes DEE-uhd-n’t make no pre -V2 oar-DOUGHS. Thayerfer, da BEE-uh--ship WEE-ins, 'n' yew'ns loust!”

Well, the Readers thought the mad-dog “fans-o’-Dan” might bark something along those rustic lines.

That’s why PL looked for a pre-Vatican II ordo with a March-27-Easter before sitting down to post. Fortunately for PL, which does have the energy to do the research, our Readers acquired a copy of a 1932 ordo from Verona, Italy. (How’s that for authoritative?)

At March 19, the feast’s caption reads:

Alb. Sabb. S. JOSEPH SPONSI B. M. V. Conf. dupl. 1 class. Off. festiv. pr. ut in Brev. (“White Saturday [feast] of St. Joseph Spouse of the BVM Confessor double of the 1^st class proper festive Office as in the Breviary”),

and here’s what it gives for Vespers:

In 2 Vesp. (ut in Brev.), com. Dom... ** (“In Second Vespers (as in the Breviary), commemoration of Sunday...”)

For those of you who aren’t familiar with “ordo speak,” permit us to gloss:

On Saturday, March 19, 1932, the crisply designed Italian ordo informed the trained clergy of Verona that:  

(1) The feast being celebrated that day in white vestments was that of St. Joseph, Spouse of the BVM, and it had a proper festive Office, “which,” as Matters Liturgical says, does “not take any of [its] constituent parts ... from the occurring Ferial Day….” Accordingly, there’s nothing to be taken from the ferial Office of Saturday in Passion Week. (Besides, if the ferial Office were to be said, the entry caption would have read something like 19 Viol. Sabb. De eo etc.); and 

(2) The proper festive office is “as in the Beviary,” here meaning it’s found in the “Proper of Saints” section of the Roman Breviary under March 19. 

As a result, when the well-formed Veronese clergy reached their Vespers instructions, they at once knew they had to say Second Vespers from the sanctoral Office of March 19 (viz., St. Joseph, Spouse of the BVM, the feast being celebrated, not to be celebrated) and then make a commemoration of the next day, Sunday.

Hunnh? Pardon us. What’s that you’re growling? Go, ahead ... repeat it, Gerties. We’ll listen. We promise. Just wipe your twisted mouths first:

“That thar EYE-tal-yun oar-DOUGH don’t make us'ns no never mind. EE-ut coo-ud be raw-ung. Anyhows, that’s onlyest one yaar. Yew'ns ain’t proved jack squat!”

Spewed out like a loyal cult zombie, that's for sure!

PL anticipated Gertie genetic throw-backs would find cover in ridge-runner skepticism, so the Readers were ready. It so happens PL also got hold of a 1921 ordo from Carcassonne, France, where we found for March 19 the following:

Alb. Sabb. — S. JOSEPH, SPONSI etc….— Off. ut in breviar....Vesp. de festo, com. seq. Dom. ("White, Saturday, [feast] of St. Joseph, Spouse etc....Office as in the Breviary...Vespers of the feast, commemoration of the Sunday following").

So, there, you saucer-eyed cultie cretins! Our modern-day experts do have corroboration from the good ol’ days: they’re right, and your "BEE-uh-ship" Dumbo Dan is oh-so-wrong. Just as our learned consultants said: “Second Vespers of St. Joseph with commemoration of Sunday, color white” and not  “First Vespers of Palm Sunday, color violet, etc.,” as “One-Hand Dan” egregiously misled his dubious “clergy” (and most likely Big Don’s zeroes, too).

Let's now move on from the mentally incapacitated Gerties, O.K.?

A rational objection to our critique — one, say, from an overly fair-minded, educated traditional Catholic (therefore, not a cultie) — might claim that Li’l Daniel blundered in good faith. Not having an old ordo at hand,  they could argue, “Dannie's only mistake, albeit a big one, was to give precedence to the Sunday Vespers over the Double of the First Class.  As it was a Sunday of the First Class, there is some room for excusing his error.”

Fair enough (as Cheesy might retort with a smirk). Maybe early 20^th century ordines are hard to find if you’re a slouch. However, there are plenty of 2005 Saint Lawrence Press (SLP) editions available. $GG was known to buy multiple copies, and so did the pesthouse. In fact, Tradzilla used to save them and probably still does. Why didn’t Dannie consult it for a another opinion? After all, $GG’s ORDO 2016 plundered SLP’s scheme for noting the Psalms (click here), and as we’ve seen, the cult isn’t above plagiary (click here).

One glance at p. 27 of the 2005 SLP edition should have cleared up any doubts or at least given rise to some second thoughts:

V fest, com seq (“Vespers of the feast, commemoration of the following [day, viz. Palm Sunday].”) 

And big as life in the right-hand column is the capital letter “A” signifying White vestments. But His Self-Importancy and dribbling Silly Sal chose not to seek guidance from an intellectual and social superior.

Finally, it remains to address Dannie’s instruction Ant. ad Magnif: Pater juste ("Antiphon on the Magnficat: O righteous Father”), the only element that comes close to being right. Although mention of that Antiphon on the Magnificat from the Saturday Office in Passion Week is totally unnecessary for a properly trained, skilled user of the Breviary (seeing that the economical V fest, com Dom, color albus would've been sufficient). To be sure, that Antiphon was to be recited BUT …. as the commemoration of the SUNDAY!***

In spite of Dannie’s maladroit positioning of the instruction, some Bambi-inspired souls might defend his inclusion of Ant. ad Magnif etc. as a good-hearted attempt to help his liturgically challenged “clergy” figure out which Antiphon to say. Sometimes, you know, the old ordines were so expressively parsimonious, they became almost cryptic to the neophyte. And for that reason, even though Dirtbag Dan pretty much botched the whole thing, his attempt at greater specificity should be imitated in today’s ordines.

And you know what? PL would have to agree.

Priestly formation in the infamous sede “seminaries” is so bad that their completers need every bit of assistance from today’s ordo compilers. But let’s make sure the assistance doesn’t add to a grotesquely malformed user’s already overwhelming difficulties. And let’s make sure it’s in the right place, shall we? Hence, this is what we’d suggest by way of a contribution (although it’ll never be needed in our, our children's, or our grandchildren's lifetimes, seeing that the Astronomical Society of South Australia's tables show the next occurrence will fall in 2157!):

V fest, com Dom (ant ad Magn: Pater juste e Sab infra Hebd Pass) (“Second Vespers of the Feast, commemoration of Sunday [Antiphon on the Magnificat: Pater juste from Saturday of Passion Week]”)

THE BOTTOM LINE

There’s no mistaking it: Wee Dan and his addled sidekick messed up royally. Wrong Vespers. Wrong Office. Wrong color. Wrong Psalms. Wrong Commemoration assignment.

Utterly incompetent!

But it’s actually worse. On Saturday, March 19, 2016, any cult “priest” who recited what we'll call The Silly-Sal Vespers, a massacre of the Roman liturgy, necessarily failed to observe the liturgical rights of St. Joseph’s Office.

As a matter of fact, if "clergy" used $GG ‘s ORDO, then, at Vespers, they reduced the Patron of the Catholic Church to a mere commemoration on his feast day! (We hope the Mexican clergy associated with $GG had enough sense to ignore Dimwit Dan and thereby please God by praying the rightful Vespers of our Lady’s holy Spouse.)

IOHO, any “priest” who used Dannie’s ORDO and thereby omitted the Vespers of St. Joseph is culpable because everybody knows the $GG crowd is way out of its depth. Cult “priests” should have bought the SLP edition, not Dannie’s impious mess. If these clerical wannabes still possess the slightest sense of the Catholic religion, they should firmly resolve to ignore Dannie and Silly Sal’s sales pitch this December when the $GG ORDO 2017 goes on the market. "Clergy" can get the real thing from England (click here).

Reparation, "reverend" gentlemen, is in order. And you know it!

STARVE THE BEAST!

*Definitions from Wuest’s Matters Liturgical, where the all the rules for the “Concurrence of Feasts — Arrangement of the Vespers” may be found. (Emphases ours.) Although there’s a Latin edition, this book is available in English, so it should have been accessible to Dannie and Silly Sal. Fewer wasteful trips to Mexico would have left more money to buy indispensable reference books.

** We omitted the local commemoration since it does not apply to a universal ordo, a standard "Do-What-You-Want" Dan and Silly Sal can’t seem to observe (see, e.g., DISORDERED ORDO 2/21/16)

*** The Jesuit Bernard Hausmann makes clear all the rules in his indispensable Learning the Breviary. We recommend his work to every lover of the traditional liturgy (available here), but we must raise one caution: the handbook assumes you’re using an expertly edited ordo, not Dannie's disaster.

"O MY PROPHETIC SOUL"

Plenty of winds gotten in the bowels, holes, and corners of the earth, bursting out of the earth, and the earth closing again, causeth the shaking or earthquake, and is a token of ensuing war. Tully's Almanack

EXHIBIT: Page 3, Column 1, MHT "Seminary" (LOL) Newsletter, August 2016:

Father Hecquard showed me a property which his brother acquired which could serve well for our priests who wish to establish an apostolate in France.... It would be an ideal place for a small seminary. It would be wonderful to one day establish a seminary in France where young men could be trained as they ought... (Emphasis ours.)

Call us imaginative.

Call us conspiratorial.

Call us off our rockers.

But very soon you may be calling the Readers CLAIRVOYANT. 

Why? Because we see in Big Don's apparently off-the-cuff travelogue remark another sign of the impending consecration of the Swampland Boy-Bishop-Elect (with at least one co-consecrator, mind you, and maybe one more, if he grovels) — an event, you'll recall, that we predicted earlier.

By way of a reminder, the first sign was the Donster's promise in his May 2016 newsletter to morph into Tradzilla by founding a new organization of sede "priests" (see our post of June 12 here). For his replacement, the Swampland's Big 3 families have one of their own, not an outsider Flushing Rat. By all accounts, the Kid's more than ready for his long-overdue miter.

Adding to the impatience must be a burning itch to rush the rector out the door, along with all his cumbersome baggage. (The biggest pieces of which, BTW, are "One-Hand Dan" and Tony Baloney.) The time has at last come for the Mad Mullah of Tradistan to fold his tent and not-so-silently steal away: the Big 3 want their social media accounts open again so an admiring world can follow them as they live to the max the good life, unfettered by the petty traddie rules that bind the unconnected and moneyless.

With the August pesthouse newsletter firmly in hand, we surely have a second sign — active scouting for "seminary" property in France. O.K., yeah, sure, it's couched in conditionals and sounds like wishful thinking. But keep this in mind: published statements from Tradistani kingpins, which look to you and us like wishful thinking, are actually concrete schemes in disguise. In this case, it's donor bait intended to reel in small fry to fund the Donster's new adventure cum escape plan.

The revelation that True Restoration's terminally naïve junior-varsity cheerleader "was with [Tradzilla] for the entire ten-day trip [July 2016 Europe + England] ... [which] would have been impossible to do...without him" sounds as though the Donster's already lined up at least the initial bankrolling he needs to make the break from paludal Florida (see p. 1, column 2 of the newsletter here).

That makes total sense.

Swamp Boy will take over the entire B'ville cult compound, "covent" and "seminary" included. There'll be neither need nor desire for two "bishops" on the Big 3 family homestead. "Swampy" is already working full-time at the pesthouse and will soon journey to Australia in Big Don's place — on-the-job prep for his new rôle as the Mini Pooh-bah of the family-cult enterprise.

Tradzilla will save face by slinking off to jump-start his already stalled new organization and then get even with the Big 3 by setting up a rival "seminary" in France. The Big 3 won't care, however, because they can spawn all the "priests" they'll need for generations to come. All they have to do is be careful that not all the boy-crazy female progeny are captured for a life in the golden cage of the "convent."

Be on the lookout, then.  Watch for the next emerging signs of the coming consecration. When it finally takes place amid the costly pomp and ceremony befitting a cult princeling, Tradistan U.S.A. will shake mightily. To close the fissure opened by Big Don's removal, "bishops" of all stripes will surface to fight among themselves for dominance and donations. "One-Hand Dan" won't be among them, nor will the Long-Island Jellyfish: they're both in bondage to the fleeing Tradzilla.

As protection from the aftershocks, the Swampland cult will close up in perfect isolation, forcing all members unrelated to the Big 3 to high-tail it out of the fetid bog.  Meanwhile in France, the disruptive Tradzilla will find himself the target of better-funded, intellectually sharper European trad leaders deeply resentful of his trespass.

Oh, yes, indeed, when the newest wandering bishop takes to his faldstool, there'll be a massive tectonic shift in Sedelandia, which will usher in

TRADMAGEDDON. 

Ruat caelum!
 

EPILOGUE

It'll be a grand day for genteel American traditional Catholics when Big Don a.k.a. Tradzilla packs up to recruit for his new but already moribund organization. Then it will be the French who'll have to suffer this uncouth philistine's spectacular deprivation of higher culture, of which the August newsletter provides a sterling example.

On page 4, the boor "bishop" tarred Wagnerian opera as he pandered to his low-brow American cult followers. In the primitive brain of this cultural Neanderthal, who apparently hasn't the attention span of a swatted fly, these masterpieces of Western music are "interminable," "endless affairs." To his churlish ears, consummate works of genius are no more than "women screaming for about four hours."

Worse, he can't even get the name of the "principal screamer" right. In Wagner's Ring cycle (which according to the moronically reductionist rector is about a "stupid gold ring"), Wotan's daughter is not "Brunhilda," as he mistakenly writes, but rather "Brünnhilde." And if he replies he used a commonly found English form of the name, then why did he write Walhalla instead of the more usual English form Valhalla?* (BTW, if our memory serves, the German form Wagner used throughout was Walhall.)

(Pssst! Somebody, please, get this New York yahoo a libretto! Obvously he's never seen one.)

But Don's gaucherie doesn't end there. To characterize as an "aria" what urbane opera lovers admire as the "Immolation Scene" (Götterdämmerung, Act 3) is a staggering blunder, for it betrays an astonishing absence of musical sophistication.** Among cosmopolites, it's common knowledge that in Wagner's mature works, the "formal divisions" of the traditional aria "had been totally dissolved" (Oxford Concise Dict. of Opera), and "the distinction between aria and recitative is largely replaced by a more continuous style throughout" (Havard Concise Dict. of Music). 

Let's face it: This gawking barbarian doesn't belong at the head of any "seminary," even a pseudo-Catholic cheap imitation like the pesthouse, and certainly not in charge of an organization of Catholic "priests." Young men and traditional "clergy" need a civilized leader, as in the past.  So, as Americans, let's be grateful the ill-bred Donster may well be on his way out of these United States. Soon enough the debonair French will put him in his place, and, à coup sûr, they won't stomach all those obsessive, rigorist prohibitions and screaming sermons (nor the screaming Scut the Prefect). The French prefer their traditional Catholicism to be like their cheeses: unadulterated by artificial American ingredients.

* Here's an interesting aside for logophiles, therefore off limits to Donnie and Dannie: the form Valhalla (less frequently Walhalla) comes from the modern Latin adaptation of the Old Norse Valhǫll = "hall of the slain" (see, for instance, Bartholini's 1689 Antiquitatum Danicarum or Magnússon's 1828 Priscae veterum borealium mythologiae lexicon or the 1818 Latin Translation of the Edda, if you don't believe us).

** Big Don's prose style is equally unschooled: he refers tautologically to the Valkyrie's immolation as her "incineration in the flames." It seems Big Don doesn't know the definition of "incinerate" or the Latin behind it, otherwise he'd've deleted "in the flames." It's hard to believe he attended Catholic schools, isn't it?

MIDDLE-CRASS VALUES

Where it is the duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat. Morley

PL's recent posts about $GG "clergy's" linguistic shortcomings set off a landslide of emails. One correspondent perplexedly asked why these poorly educated "clerical" vipers celebrate the Latin liturgy at all, when they obviously don't know the language in which it's written. Wouldn't every day be a bitter reminder of personal inadequacy, she asked? Wouldn't they live in dread of the kind of exposure they're getting from Pistrina. Wouldn't it be psychologically less stressful not to have to fake it all the time? Wouldn't they be afraid if people started to scrutinize them more closely? And finally, why didn't Dannie and Checkie get into another line of business years ago?

Good, solid questions all.

But the simple answer to each one is: not if there's money to be made, and an easy life to be enjoyed.

Dollars for luxury travel and upscale restaurants go a long way toward pumping up deflated self-esteem. A steady income guaranteed by oafish cultlings shields these unlettered men of the cloth from the effects of outsiders' criticism. A grifter's shallow personality makes winging it exciting, especially when not much effort is needed to dupe the rubes who foot the bill for all the bling. An unchecked effrontery to invent willy-nilly new mortal sins will criminalize any sincere attempt to probe too deeply, so victims will generally keep their trembling lips closed.

Their secret has been to pick the right kind of suckers and then give 'em what their shallow hearts want. Do that, and you really don't need more than a few Latin tags to keep the marks bamboozled.  Recruiting the suckers is the easy part. First, just find the dumbest, least educated, amoral chumps out there. Next growl that only you can save their souls, provided they're prepared to pay and pay and pay, while simultaneously refusing to believe any hard evidence of your unfitness.

But giving the saps what they want takes a more psychological insight than finding them. Notwithstanding the difficulty, the clerical creeps are up to the challenge. It's true they may be lacking the lit(t)erae humaniores, but prudentia carnis they possess in overabundance. Their Latin knowledge is less than a moron's, but they're geniuses at divining on which side of the bread the butter is spread.

Here's their million-dollar intuition: The lay fortune's fools, who've been on the losing end of life from conception, secretly yearn to be mediocre. Therefore, what they ardently desire is not authentic, spiritually uplifting Catholicism under the benign guidance of well-trained, professional clergy, but in its place they want "bourgeois pseudo-Catholicism."

In that sham religion, the emphasis is on materialism (expensive vestments, new organs, deluxe living quarters, luxury spa vacations in the chic desert Southwest). Everything is obsessively commercialized ($GGResources, the big $30-K plan), and no opportunity is lost to monetize the sacred ($GG's Purgatorian $ociety, $t. Christopher for Your Car, All $ouls' Day envelopes). However, "bourgeois pseudo-Catholicism" can't stop at the grubby fascination with amassing goodies and pocketing big bucks. If it did, even the lowlife losers would eventually recognize the snakes they'd let into their lives.

So to keep the suckers in their place, the slithery, vulgarian "clergy" model aspirational bourgeois norms of behavior. Frustrated social climbers without breeding stuck forever at the soiled bottom of society's Everest, the "clergy" awkwardly affect superficial speech patterns and faux-upperclass attitudes learned from the boob tube (Dannie's high-mannerist language, Checkie's pitiable attempts to appear refined, fancy French restaurants for a meat-'n'-tater-lovin' Big Don).

Since they lack real culture (bad Latin, gross errors of fact, mispronunciations like Uneven-Steven's  "impass-say" for impasse, a morbid predilection for fast food), these "clergy" must compensate, or risk an angry pelting from the peanut gallery they call "the faithful." Hence, they're relentless self-promoters who pass off their enormous failures as world-class achievements (Tony Baloney's adolescent, error-pocked WHH as "magnum opus"). It's the only way to maintain the dominance necessary to exact the reflexive, mindless conformity that compels laymen to impoverish their wretched families in order to bestow on these social outcasts the lavish life their hardscrabble backgrounds would have denied them.

To suppress questions before they surface, they coat everything with a saccharine veneer of the kind of low sentimentality that's repugnant to the Catholic culture of the past. Baby Bunnies, pretty pansies, contented kitties, and mistry-eyed meteorological musings form the major topics of Dannie's weekly messages. Far more philistine (and borderline irreverent) is the mawkish characterization of the Mother of God: it sounds as though the cult masters learned their Mariology from a backward maiden-aunt who never reached the fourth grade. Nonetheless, while their cloyingly emotional approach obscures the central rôle of Mary in dogmatic ecclesiology, it's a useful means of stifling nagging doubts about the "clergy's" self-serving motives: Suckers will always succumb to the siren song of bourgeois schmaltz.

So, there in a nutshell is the answer to our correspondent's question about why the Latin-challenged $GG "clerical" louts bother with Latin at all. A teeny, weeny bit will get them into the fly-blown gardens of the witless, who are easy pickings for uneducated but cunning ecclesiastical entrepreneurs with nothing to offer in the way of true religion. But what these serpents do have to hiss about is more than enough to persuade an upwardly mobile, incurious lumpen proletariat to part with its cash and set its soul at risk.

"PLAY UP! PLAY UP! AND PLAY THE GAME!"

Those games in which the gain serves as a recompense for the...industry...of the mind...are recreations in themselves good and lawful. St. Francis de Sales.

It's the long, leisurely 2016 Labor Day weekend.

Whaddya say about playing a fast, spine-tingling parlor game before we all fire-up the grill?

First, carefully read the following statements:

Soon he was commanding the faithful not to wear jeans, or watch television, or read newspapers, or have any relationship with former members. To break the rules was to invite excommunications from this one true (albeit rather small) Catholic Church. 

Several former members of the sect claim that they have been separated from their families, who are supposedly forbidden to speak or have thrown them out of their homes. All report that the most painful aspect of church discipline is the way children are brought up, allegedly forbidden even to speak with other children at school who do not belong to the sect.    

Thus far [the sect] has failed to shoot down scandals... But, in fact, some people still keep the faith... and fork over the money. 

Then came the million-dollar donations, the followers around the world, the monks and nuns of his order, the construction of the imposing basilica...

He would be borne aloft on the shoulders of the faithful...amid clouds of incense and the music of organs through the halls... even as he demanded of his followers “humility.”   

Young people, when they get out, are completely disoriented, with brutal problems of identity, emotional abuse... 

If this were a parody, and fiction, it could be a great comedy, but...

All righty, then. Ready to play? Great! Here we go...

PL: (quizzically) Where, do you think, did these little gems come from?

YOU: (hesitantly) Could it be "CathInfo"?

PL: (nonchalantly) Unh-uh.

YOU: (searchingly) Or, maybe, Pistrina's archives?

PL: (matter-of-factly) The Readers don't think so.

YOU: (hopefully) How about, say, "The Lay Pulpit"?

PL: (helpfully) Haven't seen 'em there.

YOU: (pensively) Hmmmmm! Could it be e-mails from disgruntled Gerties, fed-up Swamplanders, or CMRI-survivors?

PL: (teasingly) Nooo-ope.

YOU: (anxiously) Then, what about sundry blog comments?

PL: (tauntingly) Not even lukewarm, pal.

YOU: (resolvedly) Darn! O.K.... so how about, ummmmm ...

(then triumphantly)  BY GOSH, I'VE GOT IT! They're from newspaper clippings out of Brooksville, West Chester, Highland, Spokane or any of the other unlucky communities where sede "bishop"-led enterprises have set up lucrative franchises! All of 'em have a very familiar ring, don't they? Why, with some imagination, you could I.D. a specific sede nest. After all, the first one sure sounds an awful lot like the Swampland, right?

PL: (impatiently) Enough already!!! You'll never guess in a million years.

Believe it or not, these quotes are not about the American sede gang at all. No, sirree, Bob! You see, we've taken them from a "Daily Beast" article about the Palmarian Church in Spain, one of the wildest and craziest religious scams in the whole of TradWorld. You can read the full article about this sect's shady "popes" here, so there's no need for us to rehearse its abuses today.

Besides, our brief (and our beef) is with Tradistan, U.S.A. — "One-Hand Dan," Tradzilla, Tony Baloney, the Long-Island Jellyfish, the Boy-Bishop-Elect, and to a lesser extent the Pivmeister (lesser only because we've not had much direct contact).

The simple point we want to make is this: the bowel-twisting possibility that these quotations could describe our Tradistani ecclesiastical buccaneers ought to bring traditional Catholics to their senses. Even a morally impaired Gertie knows (way down deep, that is) these excerpts do not characterize anything remotely Catholic.

 They document the sick behavior of a virulent cult.

A number of you who visit this blog are not opposed to the cult masters. Some of you, to be truthful, are their enablers, either by way of occasional donations/encouragement or by active collusion in a degenerate cult center. But if, while reading the above selections, one or more of the American sede kingpins came to mind, then your awareness has condemned Tradistan's warped leadership far more harshly than PL ever has.

Congratulations. You've won the game!

Winners may collect their cash prizes as soon as they begin to

STARVE THE BEAST!