O'Connell sees fit to spice up his screed with a reference to the Padre Pio's ethnographic background.

Why do mainline Traditionalists always do such things in their apologetics? Why does Josef Ratzinger, for example, always become the Catholic-in-his-bones son of Catholic Bavaria? I reckon that for some odd reason recognizing heretics as popes leads to being a cornball.

A SOUTHERN Italian temperament does not lend itself to theological acuмen and pastoral prudence. Why should we care what some stubborn old stigmatist Guido hot-head says? A NORTHERN Italian mystic might have spoken about Beastly matters with a cooler head and sounder judgment.

We need no pope to declare that Traditionalist mainstreamers lie when they say that sedevacantists hold that true popes are incapable of sin.

We need no pope to declare that it is unjust tweaking of the facts for propaganda purposes to claim that Pope John XXII taught heresy and yet was never unpoped, so to speak, by the Church.

We need no pope to declare that it is dishonest or stupid to compare Caiphas to the pope in the context of the sedevacantist debate.

And so on and so on.

We need popes to decide cases when kooky Jesuits who are rightly appalled by Liberal nullifications of the Nulla Salus dogma go off on theological misadventures of their own.

Mr O'Connell would do well to learn the truth of that last and to keep his foolish opinions on the rest to himself.

[/quote]Part of the reason why we have "a crisis to this degree" is that too many Catholics are behaving like frightened mice instead of rational men faced with the end of the Church of Rome as the Church of Christ, and underrating the value of individual reason and private judgment in the scheme of religious things.

I would like to ask a question b/c as a convert I may not be understanding what you are saying, when you say, "the end of the Church of Rome as the Church of Christ," isn't the Church of Christ currently supposed to be the Church of Rome as Our Lord gave Peter authority and Peter was bishop of Rome - or does this have something to do with other accepted sects in Catholicism?

And the other question I had was, isn't it a little understandable that considering how detrimental to the Church Luther was in his use of individual reason and private judgement that the faithful would be leary of coming to theological conclusions on their own?  The average lay person isn't necessarily learned enough to do that (not that they shouldn't be trying to advance themselves in the faith and knowing more about it).  The traditionalists all agree that Vatican II is bad and the hierarchy, but the effects of that conclusion are disputed.  I think that the crisis in the church was enabled b/c Catholics were too complacent to even realize what was going on, and it has continued b/c the overrating of individual reason and private judgement resulted in the Reformation, and they don't want that to happen again, hence "let's not completely break away from the papacy, but resist."  

I understand what you are saying Cletus--I just think your choice of words is mistaken.

You and Trent were using the conceptions of inividual reason and judgement in two different senses is what I tried to point out. One hopes of course that individual common sense is sufficient to recognise the v2 church as Babylon, but if that is not enough, we have the Infallible Constitution of the Church as well.  

What do you mean by saying that 'ALL Catholics, besotted of their various false theologys........?

Can you point out a false theology that I have adhered to as I consider myself-- and assumably you do as well--part of the 'ALL' you mention above????

You and Trent were using the conceptions of inividual reason and judgement in two different senses is what I tried to point out. One hopes of course that individual common sense is sufficient to recognise the v2 church as Babylon, but if that is not enough, we have the Infallible Constitution of the Church as well.  

What do you mean by saying that 'ALL Catholics, besotted of their various false theologys........?

Can you point out a false theology that I have adhered to as I consider myself-- and assumably you do as well--part of the 'ALL' you mention above????

I should have written "virtually ALL Catholics" or something like that.

I should have made an exception for savvy Catholic individualists operating on private judgment.

I should have written "ALL groups of Catholics who take any sort of priestcrafty party line."

An example of false theology in the sedevacantist camp is that whereby it becomes a sin of despair and proximate to heresy to doubt that there will ever be another pope and a Roman restoration.

"God would not permit the current crisis to go on for more than seventy years."

That's the kind of nonsense I term false theology. What happens is that Catholic individuals do become "besotted" with various insane pipe dreams of heavenly rescue from the distress that the Vatican II Springtime causes them. Communicating these pipe dreams to other strung-out Catholics with pipe dreams of their own they edit out the nuttier and more idiosyncratic aspects of their pipe dream and a somewhat less ridiculous CORPORATE delusion of ReRedemption is created. For example, the dogma that God MUST end the "current crisis" by the year AD 2030 or thereabouts, otherwise He is in violation of the sacred canons of the 1870 Vatican Council.

There is reason. There is reason aided by Faith. Reason alone grasps nothing of Babylon or the Vatican Council. But it DOES grasp the horrible viciousness of displaying obscene images of anyone, especially those who are renowned for promoting virtue and adoration of the Prime Mover. The Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth is of all Holy Men the greatest. Everyone knows that. That is, everyone except people of modern "faith" who could quote the canons of the 1870 Vatican Council and St Stanislaus Kostka's canonization decree to justify their affront to that good Rabbi.

In the 1960s and 1970s it was common for Good Catholic Soldiers, dismayed by the Satanistic debauching of their children by the Princes of the Holy and Indefectible Visible Church, to say things like, "We may as well send them to public school, so at least we don't have to PAY to have their faith and morals destroyed!"

This is Catholic "faith" and "piety" and "lay docility" taken to its inevitable post-Trent end. Reason Alone, unaided by "faith", uncontaminated by parochial considerations of who's a top banana canonically speaking and who's a low banana, would have calmly demonstrated that no one has the duty or the right to effect his child's spiritual corruption.

The parochial, loyal, docile Trent-style Catholic kept allowing the wicked priests of a false religion to sacrifice his offspring unto Moloch.

The Traditionalist attempted to creep out of the nightmare through the little side door of the Latin Mass. He has ended up right back in the thick of the iniquity, exposing the souls of his children to extreme spiritual danger. How so? Those wicked priests of Moloch shrewdly figured out that loving the Old Mass has become like preferring chocolate to vanilla. "You may have your precious Latin Mass. But now, we are sure, you want to show proper docility towards your Lawful Local Ordinaries and the Sex Ed courses that he deems in line with Current Understandings of Magisterial teaching..."

It doesn't matter that we have yet to see Traditionalists flocking into the totality of the Vatican II church system. It is bad enough already that they have flocked into parts of it (Indult Masses, Extraordinary Form Masses) and have laid the theological and apologetical groundwork for further flocking. "Well, after all, His Grace always said that Rome is our Mother, and it is better to be attached to her than unattached... I say, all blessing and honor to Rifan and the Transalpine Redemptorists..."

The proper exercise of individual reason and private judgment in men of good will would have prevented all this phony baloney Good Catholicky tomfoolery and abominableness.

I coined the term ReRedemption to poke fun at what I see as a serious problem among those who are trying to remain faithful Catholics: the tendency to expect or demand of God extraordinary or miraculous interventions into what appears to be the hopeless breakdown of the original Redemptive System.

Christ established the papacy in the Kingdom of Light He won for us as our Redeemer. If that idea apparently backfires (so sto speak) and a Kingdom of Darkness results, it is to posit a RERedemption to speculate, say, that God will raise Pope Pius X from the dead in AD 2029 and have a band of angels specially designated as cardinals for the occasion declare him the Pope of Popes who will make Vatican II be as though it never had been.

One is positing a ReRedemption when one recognizes the breakdown of the Ordinary System of Redemption but will not pay any mind to the final ordinary fact of that Ordinary System that fulfills all justice and sets all things right: the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Or, the return of the Master to his disorderly House.

It's just human nature to play theological Walter Mitty and dream up an entirely extraordinary system of restoration. A ReRedemption. A pope chosen personally by St Michael is one of your more fanciful ReRedemptive fantasies. But a more plausible and theologically high-falutin' version of that same fancy is an Antichristian, Godless, heretical, idolatrous non-pope who suddenly or slowly popes himself by suddenly or slowly becoming as orthodox as Pius X at his best or maybe as unorthodox as Pope Honorius at his worst.

Christ posited sordid Apocalypse ("if that steward should start getting drunk...") as the end of His glorious Redemptive work in this world. I suppose that we have the right to hope and pray that in the present situation we can be like the pagan lady and the Blessed Lady of the gospels and get Him to buck the ordinary system and work a miracle according to our tastes. But the Evangelists would not tell us how many times that avenue of approach became a dead end.