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Author Topic: someone please explain difference between sedavacantist and traditionalist (for  (Read 2043 times)

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Offline Jovita

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Traditionalist is a spectrum.  It is not a description of any one particular group.  

Traditionalist Catholicism is on the Right side of the Catholic world.  

Moving from the left-wing to right-wing of the spectrum, you have the following brands (that I'm most familiar with) in the Traditionalist world:

1. Novus Ordo Catholics who are jaded about the current modernist conditions of the Catholic Church, and half-heartedly pine for "the good old days."
2. Catholics who attend diocesan Tridentine Latin Mass.
3. Catholics who attend the Rome-approved FSSP (Fraternal Society of Saint Peter), where they hear Latin Mass, but are in danger of receiving little bits of poisonous modernist teaching.
4. Catholics who attend the non-Rome approved SSPX (Society of Saint Pius X), which exists thanks to a loophole, though is constantly blackballed by Rome.  The SSPX has "kept the pilot light on" when it comes to Catholic Tradition, and it is solely thanks to their efforts that the Latin Mass has survived to this day.  They are ridiculed and derided by most Catholics who do not understand Traditionalism or the problems with Vatican II.  
5. Sedevacantists.  Residing on the far right of the spectrum, sedes believe that all of the popes since Vatican II were false.  

Again, this is the spectrum of Traditionalist Catholics going from Left to Right.  

I'm sure there's more I've left out.  But I don't have much time to type this reply.
There is a point missing from this spectrum. I am a little point. A Catholic who gave up on the NO post V2 and transferred to an Eastern Catholic church (who is headed by it's own Patriarch). So I look at Pope Francis like a King from a rival Kingdom who usurped the throne, intent on subjucating it's subjects until they are annihilated.


Offline ubipetrus

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Transferring to an Eastern (or other Alternate) Rite was once a viable way to escape the disaster, but starting about in the 1990's or so, they too have had their gravely questionable "changes" of every sort, evident compromises (especially with schismatic East Orthodox, all at the direction of the Vatican leadership), and so forth.  As there are about a dozen Alternate Rites (I say "Alternate" because while most of them are "Eastern" there are some couple or few which are "Western" without being the Western Latin Rite), all taken together, and it is reasonable to suppose that the damage to some may be greater or lesser than the damage to others, or further along in being corrupted, or proceeding at a slower or faster pace, I cannot say for certain that all have passed beyond the pale, though by this time (20 years after the corruption of the Alternate Rites was begun in earnest), the chances of there being more than one or two which might still as of yet remain within the pale, however just barely, are practically nil.
There are a couple things to consider here, one being that all the Patriarchs and Major Archbishops of these Rites as were installed prior to Vatican II and (at least possibly) accepted or vetted by a real Catholic Pope are now all dead, the last few of that category having passed away in the mid-1990's.  I notice that it is the same general time frame in which they have begun to be most conspicuously compromised, for example with the Balamand agreement or suchlike.  And all such Patriarchs and Major Archbishops have been under the pressure of Vatican II to be influenced by its non-Catholic doctrines ever since the Council itself, and who is to say who among them might have yielded even while others may not have?
Which leads to the other consideration, namely that we Western Latin Rite Catholics (by birth or initial conversion) are hardly in a position to evaluate whether a particular Alternate Rite yet remains Catholic in content, belief, and profession (including liturgy).  We come there, after all, quite prepared to expect that many things will be quite different:  An Altar may be free standing so the celebrant can literally go all around it, or else it may be concealed by an iconostasis, or there might not be seats except a few for the infirm and nursing mothers, and that many of the prayers will be different, and who knows what all else might be different.  Would we Latins really be in a position to ascertain whether a particular Alternate Rite parish has been Novus Ordo-ized?  They might (for example) leave "for you and for many" intact (putting our "for you and for all" concerns to rest), all the while mutilating "the mystery of Faith," or the epiclesis, or something else, in some serious way that only those native and expert in such Rites (or at least the particular Rite in question) might even notice or realize the seriousness of.
"O Jerusalem!  How often would I have gathered together your children, as the hen gathers her chickens under her wings, and you would not?" - Matthew 23:37


Offline Jovita

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I agree with you, however, I came to Catholic Orthodoxy through Eastern Orthodoxy and by the grace of God found an Orthodox Catholic priest. They are, as you might say, rare.