What happened to Hobbledehoy? [
please correct misspelled thread title! :soapbox: ]
This reply was nice to see today:
Here is the quote: "Please ignore all that I have written regarding sedevacantism. Thanks to the grace of Almighty God and the intercession of His Blessed Mother, I no longer adhere to any of the sedevacantist cults or any other break-away community. I am now reconciled to Holy Mother Church. I am sorry for leading so many souls astray, for the which thing I resolve to do penance and make reparation until my dying breath. Thank you so much and God bless!"
He is a bit vague, but I can't disagree with TKGS's interpretation. He certainly suggests that he's sworn off Traditional Catholicism.
Again, the Sedes are going to love me for saying this, but I have to say it anyway:
I can understand repenting of one's past Sedevacantism, because definitively saying the Pope isn't the Pope and outright rejecting his authority IS A DEFINITIVE STEP (let's agree on that much) But Traditional Catholicism in general, Recognize and Resist for example, is the least that a good Catholic can do -- it's basically "staying the same" and holding to what we know. It doesn't involve a POSITIVE step, but rather the lack of any drastic action. There's no "big step" involved there.
So I have a harder time understanding why someone would get all penitent about their Traditional Catholic days.
Poor Hobbledehoy. He was such a good member. He left here because of various personal problems he was having IRL, including scruples. He was a very melancholic, scrupulous, but also pious individual. And a good man.
It's sad to see what the world, and the crisis, can do to some people.
He's certainly always welcome back here.
Hobbles left a truckload of scans, many from his rare books collection, here on CathInfo, but going back to look at certain ones leaves me a bit sad that what's remaining are broken links or no-longer-accessible offsite files (such as a closed account at PhotoBucket).
IMHO it would have been better for us if he had uploaded files from his computer instead so that the images would be archived on CI. Maybe that would have taken too much time or something.
As for the "resist" theme, I take a lot of consolation in thinking about the foreign missionaries in the great age of faith, like St. Francis Xavier S.J., who spent the rest of his life evangelizing in the far East, while converting and baptizing estimated hundreds of thousands of souls. While he was doing that great work, there was virtually no way for him to keep up to date on news from Rome, since there was no reliable means of communication. (That's right: there was no Internet or e-mail in those days.) It's hard for us to imagine what that would be like, but think about it --- he knew the Faith of our fathers (he WAS one of our fathers!!), and that's what he taught. HE DIDN'T EVEN KNOW WHO THE POPE WAS. Popes could come and go and it made no difference to these courageous warriors; they continued in their quest to spread the Faith throughout the world, and to die with their boots on in the process.
It was in this spirit of faithfulness that ABL did what he did and said the things he said, much of it now "a hard saying" even for his surviving contemporaries (
a-hEm!).
CONSEQUENTLY, the Faith they taught was the same they had received --- they handed down that which they had been given (see the inscription on the tomb of ABL). They worked with full confidence that when their students would go away and encounter other Catholics in the world, their faith would be the same faith they found everywhere, since the Church is
universal.
But today, for someone who had learned the Faith before Vat.II, if they had been "away" and now returned to encounter other Catholics, what would they find?
Would Saint Francis Xavier recognize the Catholicism of Pope Francis? (Note: those who had presumed that he chose "Franiscus" after St. Francis of Assisi were puzzled by his own answer: No, he had chosen it after the famous Jesuit missionary!)
What would be his recommendation for us today? If reason has any meaning, he would advise us to do nothing other than what he did during his lifetime, which is to hold on fast to the traditions we have received, whether by word or by letter. In other words, he would say we should resist the Vat.II changes.
Archbishop Lefebvre himself called what he was doing "the Resistance," so this word should not be one that raises for us any scruples today. We should not fall to
this sneaky temptation of the DEVIL..