A couple of things:
First, yes, as someone said here, and this would apply to all priests: It's important to look at the dates of some sermons. Trad priests sometimes become more decidedly firm with regard to the conciliar church versus Tradition, and a sermon a priest gave 10 years ago will reflect a very different perspective from a more recent distaste for compromise he has reached after a time period.
Second, Fr. R has been with the OLOS apostolate for some time now. He's no longer with the FSSP.
Third, no single priest -- even when he belongs to a particular trad apostolate -- can be assumed to embody the majority of viewpoints in that group, let alone the entirety of viewpoints. I have been listening for many weeks now to a priest who is still with the FSSP. He is markedly different from Fr. R, although I have a lot of respect for Fr. R. This other priest concentrates more, much more, on trad spirituality, even though he has given many talks on doctrine as well. By contrast, Fr. R is much more head-trippy (and I don't mean about exorcism -- there he is quite concrete and not intellectual). But overall, Fr R concentrates on theology and modern society. This other priest emphasizes traditional spirituality but is very much on fire with his conviction that God will purge the Church spiritually and that among her current leaders number a whole huge bunch of "heretics, apostates, and sodomites."
He also has a different viewpoint on The Final (General) Judgment than Fr. R. has. Fr. R insists that all of our sins will be exposed to the entire globe, and that "we will have to answer for every infraction" to every person and to the entire Heavenly Court (including for previously disclosed, forgiven sins). The other priest says that, among the Elect who remain at the Judgment, their sins will not be disclosed but will be sheltered from the knowledge of others, whereas the sins of the damned will be made public. In light of my own traditional education, the second priest's statement conforms more to Catholic dogma and spirituality.
With regard to Fr. R's viewpoint on "all trads," "most trads," "trads as a group," etc., he is hands-down wrong. It's the one area in which I disagree with him the most. I've heard this same claim from some lay people as well: "You know, I've been around." Well, sir or ma'am, if you haven't become deeply acquainted with every trad parish and every trad apostolate in --let's just say the United States, then you are in no position to make such statements as "trads have a real problem with anger. " SOME, even many, trads have a real problem with anger, but particularly if they make no attempt to convert their anger to individual spiritual zeal for their own conversion. I could go on, but I think you can get the picture with just this one snippet. He generalizes a whole bunch about the spiritual state of the trad soul, shall we say, but he rarely even comes to my State and I'm almost positive he has never visited our parish. We are very much NOT a bunch of angry people.
Fr. R sees extremes, and from those extremes generalizes unjustly and inaccurately. It is also the nature of his ministry that he literally pops in and out of locations. He does not have a parish that I'm aware of, but I'm open to correction from anyone here. He does MISSIONS. That means, pop in and pop out. He has a schedule, which is viewable on that OLOS website. My own trad priest is quite familiar with Fr. R's sermons, I think, because I've discussed them in spiritual direction with my priest. But my own priest is much, much more focused on spirituality than Fr. R is, who --again-- has three foci: exorcism (first), doctrine, and the state of modern society. He does speak about spirituality but not to the degree that some trad priests do (who also have sermons online), and definitely not in the style of other priests.
Topic: Fr. Ripperger: Defender of tradition or company man? (Read 8291 times)