Here is Griff's response to the objection raised above:
> Irregularly consecrated bishops do not make up the visible Catholic hierarchy. Period. It would mean the very destruction of ecclesial visibility, not it's salvation.
Immaterial! My piece just proved that our traditional clergy are as fully regular and authorized and capable of comprising the visible Catholic hierarchy as any bishop personally chosen and consecrated by the most sainted holy Pope. Opposing the authority of our traditional clergy is what means the very destruction of ecclesial visibility.
> The hierarchy has survived, and still does, in the ordinary transmission of jurisdiction, which comes from Peter alone. What this means is that there is, today, an episcopate which has formally received its jurisdiction from the Pope, and which, in case the Pope has died, has the power to legitimately elect another one. And this hierarchy cannot be the conciliar leadership, which offers heterodox worship to the Eternal.
And that hierarchy is the bishops and priests I have identified; as that and that alone does it survive. Their jurisdiction is formally received from the Pope and they are not the conciliar leadership. Why or how anyone with even the faintest claim to Catholic sentiment would fail to see the truth of this totally escapes me.
> The primary duty of Christians in the present circuмstances is to seek the legitimate Roman Catholic hierarchy, because ubi Petrus ibi Ecclesia. The more people there are who accept that she still exists, the easier it will be to increase the ways for us to gain access to her. The most dangerous lie that the devil has been spreading in these times is the lie that the Church has been fundamentally changed by the criminals that have usurped her buildings, and among the anti-modernist resistance as well, this lie is being swallowed by gallons. And he spreads this lie to keep people attached to his conciliar servants, and to prevent them from seeking their authorized pastors.
We are always obliged to seek the Church and join it. It is not enough to be simply baptized and “doing our best” on our own, unless stranded on a desert island or the like. We have an obligation, of which our Sunday and Holyday Mass obligation is but a part. They who shun the visible traditional Catholic ministers God has placed before them, flawed as so many of them admittedly are, reduce the existence of the Church to some Platonic ideal of perfect Pope and perfect bishops, and hierarchy who never sin, never get anything wrong, never misjudge anyone, and always know the serenely awesome answer to every question we could have. But that is not reality, and it never was. The Apostle John once asked, “How can you claim to love the God you have not seen when you don’t love the neighbor you have seen?” But by the same token, how can you claim to obey some pope you cannot find or even be sure exists at a given time when you don’t obey his only possible living representatives in the earth today? We don’t align with our traditional clergy because of their great sainthood (though some truly are quite saintly), but because they are Catholics, something to which no other clergy, Novus Ordo or otherwise, can lay any real claim.
> We must seek the Pope, or the hierarchy which can elect him. And as long as we have not found him, we must at least be united to him in desire and in a spirit of filial submission, as we pray that the Ring of the Fisherman may be freed from its bitter exile, forced upon it by the sects of darkness which have covered the face of the earth with their threatening wings.
One rightly seeks him only among the Catholics, not somewhere else. Are there any real Catholics but traditionalists? By definition we know there cannot be. But also, as our Lord said, “Seek and ye shall find.” All of us seek, do we not? What do we find? We find the Mass Centers and Chapels of our traditional clergy. That’s what we find, and deep down we all know there really is nothing else out there to find.
Does any of us ever find any secretive “papal succession”? Does any of us ever find any “bishop in the woods”? Or let’s look at this a different way. Does any of us actually scour the earth in search of these secretive “real hierarchical” members? Of course not. In Arthurian legend, the Knights of the Round Table scoured the earth in search of the Holy Grail. It took years, but as the legend has it, the Grail is found. But no one goes to anywhere near such lengths to seek any such secretive Church hierarchy, though so very much more would be riding on that, if it were the truth. Why? Because we know it doesn’t exist. Deep down in our hearts, we all know it.
How do we know this? Because if the hierarchy could really be so confined to some (obviously very) small and limited region that can be so perfectly contained concealed from entirely all living Catholics around the whole rest of the world, then that would mean that the Church is not really Catholic at all, for part of what it means to be “Catholic” is to be accessible from every part of the world, maybe some more than others, but everyone with the power to move about freely has the power to at least make that pilgrimage once in a lifetime, and most of us much more than that. We know this because if some real but hidden papal succession or bishop in the woods did exist, how can this exist, even in a small place, without making believers? How can there be new priests and bishops to continue this hidden Church unless some community of Catholic Laity exist to bear them as children and raise them in families? How can such a community be so willing and content to abandon the Divine Commission to preach the Gospel to all Creation and baptize them into the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost? How is it that not a one of them has spoken up, saying “Here we are! Look what we have here! Would that all of you were as blessed as we!” When a bishop in the Philippines returned to Tradition, we all learned of it at once. When another in Thailand simply so much as cooperated with some real traditional Catholic priests, we all learned of it at once. A person can indeed remain hidden, but the Church cannot.
Only when we abandon our fantasy of a Platonically ideal “Church hierarchy” and instead accept the sometimes imperfect men but truly Catholic clergy that God instead sends to us do we find peace, and the Church. Only then do we find the pieces of the great eternal and historic Cross that God asks us to pick up and carry forward. Only then do we find what God has placed us all here to do.