So, I was traveling this weekend and stopped in to Mass at a larger SSPX chapel, and I was very edified to see 75-100 people there for a 7:30 AM Mass on a Saturday (that wasn't even a First Saturday).  I thought that, well, despite their flaws, the SSPX have some good fruits ... and that is true.  They had what appeared to be a very large building project underway for a boys' school, and the church itself was quite magnificent for a newer building (better than some of the other SSPX efforts, if you overlook the stained glass crucifixion over the altar that had a Wojtylesque "bent cross" aspect to it, although most likely due to practical considerations ... that I personally would have tried harder to overcome).  Nevertheless, I briefly thought that perhaps I had been a bit too hard on SSPX ... but then I reflected on it just a bit more and snapped out of it, realizing I had succuмbed to emotion.

Here's the thing, and people have asked the question also.  Before Vatican II, the Church APPEARED to be in an incredible and amazing position, where most predictions had the US becoming a majority Catholic country by the year 2000, due to the conversion rates and respective birth rates.  Seminaries were full, to the point that the US, which had long been considered mission territory almost didn't know what to do with all the priests, and so many of them went out on missions.  Monasteries, convents, and other religious houses were filled to capacity.  New churches and schools were constantly under construction.  Bishop Sheen had among the highest ratings on Prime Time TV, when you only had two or three major networks nationwide, rather than 1,000 cable channels.

But then ... sudden and catastrophic collapse at Vatican II.  Like a beautiful building with amazing aesthetics that, nevertheless was thoroughly termite-infested and rotten under the surface, it just collapsed, almost as quickly as the Twin Towers on 9/11, at freefall speed.  We saw mass apostasy.

That there was a clear sign that things had NOT been as they had appeared.  Lots of constructions projects, building, organizations, this group and that group at each church, etc. ... was just shallow and superficial, since the FAITH had been rotting away underneath.  If we look back on the episode with Father Feeney ... and I do NOT want to digress onto the BoD question here ... but if you look at what Father Feeney had been up against, the statements made by people like Cushing, Father Feeney's Jesuit superiors, other Jesuits, other "theologians" ... their statements were openly heretical, verbatim contradicting defined dogmas.  "No salvation outside the Church?  Nonsense."  Father Cekada's book "Work of Human Hands" actually does a tremendous job detailing how the "Liturgical Revolution" had been underway for decades.  Bishop Williamson famously traced the philosophical and then theological rot all the way back to the Renaissance, and also likewise used to condemn what he called "50s-ism", where everything was great in the 1950s due to the numbers, logistics, construction projects, etc.  He would talk about how all the bishops were chosen because they were good politicians, diplomats, fundraisers, PR people, and organizers of construction projects ... and the very few of them knew a lick about theology, which is why most of them had to take these periti with them to Vatican II, and let them attend the sessions in their stead while they hanged out at the "Bar Jonah" ... and not a few undoubtedly sought out other, more nefarious "entertainments".  Of course, they were so ignorant that they had no idea whether their own "periti" were orthodox Catholics or flaming Modernists, thinking that if they got their advanced degrees from Rome, and were smooth talkers ... that was good enough for them.

So, now, back to reality regarding my perception of the SSPX chapels.  We've long discussed here how the SSPX are on slow-motion repeat of the pre-Vatican II train wreck, where they appeared to have rewound the film to the 1950s, but then set it back in motion ... retracing the same inevitable collapse.

SSPX historically pointed out the "false obedience" that induced the majority to accept error, and the fact that "it's the faith, stupid", not the smells and bells.  Today's SSPX deride the Resistance priests, SVs, and many others by gaslighting them as "disobedient".  So, for them, their faith is not greater than their obedience, and they're these eeevil and wicked men who committed sins of disobedience toward ... those "superiors" who have no canonical right to exact any such obedience, while of course blithely disregarding the commands of the man they insist MUST be considered the Vicar of Christ.

With turning back the clock to the 1950s (and the SVs are even more at fault for this than even SSPX), they're just doomed to repeat the same trajectory.  If you drop an object off a tall building, and if somehow you had the ability to turn the clock back to prevent it from crashing into the ground, you don't wind it back only for two or three stories of the fall, since once you set it back in motion, the force of gravity and its trajectory will inevitably drag it down the same path once again, and you're just buying yourself some more time.

I'll pass over the well docuмented change in the SSPX, where open Modernist heresy, such as that of Father Paul Robinson, are being promoted as Traditional Catholicism, and religious indifferentism runs rampant, and where +Fellay effectively has taken his position on the stage alongside Wojtyla at Assisi ... and those false religions, due to a kind of theological transitivity, where the SSPX are happy to have their "niche" within the Conciliar pantheon, bragging about having been invited officially to the Jubilee ... only to be followed 10 days later by the LGBTQ+123.  Is that something to be proud of?  Or should a Catholic be ashamed?  Were you witnessing to the faith ... or denying it?  What does Christ have to do with Belial?  See, the Romans did not directly outlaw Christianity per se, but would have tolerated it, so long as the Christians would tolerated the pagans, and tossed in their grain of incense.

So, while I am edified by the numbers of people who do appear to exhibit genuine piety and reverence, I have always tended to remain aloof from the goings on at most chapels.  That's just my nature, where I prefer to pray in the chapel than to socialize at the donut table, etc.  I have one or two friends with whom I enjoy discussing the faith, but, on the rare occasion that I made contact with these others, I am invariably left rather disedified, with one or another individual spewing grave error, with rather egregious violations of modesty, both in dress and behavior, etc. ... and the very few I've spoken to for any length of time about theological matters, wow are they a hot mess where it comes to the faith and to theology.  While the younger priests do tend to be very kind and compassionate, something often lacking among the more orthodox, and I'm edified by their concern for souls ... at the same time I listened to a Mass at Christmas time where I heard no fewer than double-digit Christological heresies uttered before I stopped counting.  Undoubtedly the priest meant well and was not pertinacious by any means, but that's a recipe for disaster.

Of the "old school" priests who are still around, many of the brightest (who should be teaching as seminary and in fact used to) ... they're either second- or third- fiddle to some young priests two decades younger or else they're superior of a chapel in Zimbabwe or Nigeria that's practically a straw hut on dirt floor, not that there's anything wrong with that, and those souls are as precious as any others, and God has blessed them by sending them these priests with the solid faith and not the neo-SSPX pablum.  That's of those who remained and didn't leave for the Resistance or SV or some other group after the SSPX began to compromise.

Sadly, in between are a bunch of them, including old school ... who just laid low, shut up, and kept quiet.  Why?  Many are simply afraid and lack the courage to do what's right at the risk of being expelled, since ... they wouldn't know what to do or where to go, since they depend on SSPX for their livelihood, their medical care, and ... everything.  So they keep quite.

Finally, a very small few have been put in charge of priories because they've bought into the agenda and have become enthusiastic bobble-head yes-men to +Fellay or whatever the regime says this week, even if it's the opposite of what they said last week.  Father Cekada amusingly described the breakdown of seminarians at Econe as 1) hard-liners, 2) soft-liners, 3) +Lefebvre-liners ... the last being those who just kissed up and accepted what they were told, and it's those last that inevitably get promoted in SSPX.  So, one of these "old school" priests who is an exception and is a prior somewhere (as he should be due to his age), came to the SSPX chapel near me and couldn't help but take a jab at the Resistance because they're against "just talking to the Vatican", offering that assessment with a scowl on his face and a tone of voice indicating derision and almost mockery, a total strawman gaslighting job if there ever was one.  Yeah, sure, Father, it's just because the SSPX are "talking to the Vatican" that priests had to leave SSPX to follow their consciences.  That level of dishonesty speaks to his having compromised in order to get ahead and attempting to quiet his own conscience, which I'm sure reproves him on a regular basis for being a traitor.  Sure, I get disagreeing with the Resistance, and I do myself, being more sedeprivationist myself ... but when you gaslight with such crap that it's merely for "talking to the Vatican", yeah, you're basically lying and committing slander.

So, as we see the SSPX re-playing the pre-Conciliar train-wreck in slow motion, thinking they see a light at the end of the tunnel, whereas we know it's actually the light of an oncoming train, just as the enemies of the Church spent centuries and decades infiltrating the Church at large, having perfected their techniques, they could have infiltrated and undoubtedly did infiltrate the SSPX in 2-3 years.  In the early days, if you were smart, spoke a couple of languages, you were practically guaranteed a meteoric high rise in SSPX, so you just plant a few of those in their seminaries, and then compromised a few more by various Epstein-like honey traps ... and the SSPX were thoroughly infiltrated.  Evidence of this infiltration is very obvious, but I'll pass over it here.  Bela Dodd famously said she had planted over 1,000 young men in seminaries all by herself, and we know that she was not the only one even in the US undertaking this mission.  There are multiple indicators also regarding the extraordinarily imprudent SSPX building projects along these lines that I can spend more time on later as well.

Now, while the Church appeared to be flourishing outwardly leading up to Vatican II, we know in retrospect that under the surface lurked much rottenness.  Father Feeney said in the 1950s that he just sensed that, despite appearances, there was something very wrong, and he later came to the conclusions that EENS was central to it (and the resulting religious indifferentism), so this collapse didn't come of of nowhere, where a Church whose members all had deep faith suddenly went into mass apostasy all on one weekday afternoon.

Why did God allow this Crisis? ... many have asked.

I believe that it's in order to sift the faithful from the unfaithful, and to strengthen the faith among the remnant.  See, before Vatican II, you just had to look up at a building and see where the sign said "Catholic", and walk inside, and voila! ... you were Catholic.  You showed up on Sundays, did your thing ... and you were Catholic.  There was no exercise of faith required, but mere literacy, where you could read the word "Catholic" on the sign.  So the faith went into a kind of atrophy due to lack of use and lack of exercise, just as muscles will atrophy if someone become bedridden for a long time and does not exercise them.

So God put the Church into an "eclipse" state so that those who kept the faith and had a strong enough faith, they would have to EXERCISE and EXERT that faith in order to FIND the Church, whether in a hotel room, or barn, or somewhere else, and DESPITE the fact that the mainstream NO "hierarchs" kept issuing declarations that these were in schism and NOT Catholic.  Those who continued to be lazy and just kept entering the building that had the word "Catholic" on the sign, those were sifted out.  I had an argument on X with this supremely arrogant CMRI priest who derided those who used the term eclipse regarding the current crisis, since that would be to assert that the Church had lost her visibility, but I pointed out that in the actual physical eclipse of the metaphor ... Does the sun lose its INHERENT or INTRINSIC "visibility", or is it just that it's out of your line of sight?  If you got in your car and drove a hundred miles, you would see it.  Or, as with the phenomenon of toddlers' view of "object permanence" where they perceive that if they can't see something, it cease to exist, if you move something around a corner, or behind a tree ... you have to actively go looking for it, and move, and exert yourself to FIND it, and that's precisely what's going on here.  Our Lord "moved" the Church, and tucked it away, hid it just a bit, without thereby rendering it invisible, since, indeed, many Traditional Catholics have in fact found it.  Book of Revelations opens by referring to the woman (clearly the Church) fleeing out into the desert and being nourished there for a time.

This first generation of Trads had to fight for the faith, and their faith became stronger as a result.

But now that we have that first generation of priests dying off or becoming older (Father Leo Carley being one of the last in the US who had been ordained prior to Vatican II, still active at 91) ... we find a new generation of so-called "Cradle Trads", who were simply raised that way and did not have to fight for the faith.  Many want to "get along" with the people in the world and don't want to seem "strange", so they're all about being considered "normal" and not "weird".  We have new generations of priests who were often themselves Cradle Trads also, and, strangely, I and many others have noticed that the new priests are very very similar in personality, almost as they had emerged from a clone factory, trained not only to carry the party line, but to not think for themselves, not be allowed to have independent thought, whether about theology, or about other matters either, to the point that they almost look alike, have the same haircuts, wear the same shoes.  Back in the 1970s and 1980s and even into the 1990s, you had one character after another, sometimes a bit strange, but certainly unique ... coming out of the seminaries.

So, just as God had to SIFT the faith and cause it to be strengthened by forcing those who still had even a bit of it left to exercise it, I believe that we are now in what I have now called "THE SECOND SIFTING".  Just as SSPX are re-playing the same collapse into Modernism that happened in the 1950s, and God allowed the crisis to sift the faithful out from among the unfaithful (who inhabited the same buildings and the same pews), God has begun a second sifting process, separating the cradle trads with weak faith from those who have stronger faith.  That is what we're seeing with the SSPX, lots of buildings going up, much money, one little group after another at each chapel, great attendance, much money in collection baskets ... just like the 1950s, but, alas, just like in the 1950s, I believe that SO MUCH of that is now just as shallow as before, and possibly even worse.  These SIFTINGS can be likened to when someone might be panning for gold, where you use one pan with a slightly bigger openings in it, and then you take everything that fell through the first pan and pass it through a second pan ... and you might do that multiple times.

I believe this SECOND SIFTING will be the last one prior to the Triumph of the Church through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and that the THIRD SIFTING will be that final one at time of AntiChrist, after that period of peace (as stated both in the Book of Revelation and by Our Lady of LaSalette).  Revelation and Our Lady at LaSalette refer to a generation passing after the Triumph and before AntiChrist.  I've often wondered about how ONE GENERATION can go from Triumph to total collapse, but we're seeing that here in the first couple of Siftings, where one generation after the original Trad Remnant was sifted out by God, the next generation is already going down the same path, and, as the old saying goes, Corruptio Optimi Pessima ("the corruption of the best is the worse"), or the spiritual "the bigger they are the harder they fall" maxim.  So, just as those who fail the test of the SECOND SIFTING will fall harder, since they / we should have learned the lesson already from what happened leading up to Vatican II, so too those who fall after the next generation goes down will fall even harder, having had even less of an excuse after the Triumph of the Church.

I believe, then, that were are nearing the end of this SECOND SIFTING, and that the chastisement follows soon.