Thank you exilenomore for an excellent treating of the topic.

From phone

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.

Mr. Ruby has twisted my objections to his thesis into a caricature. The question does not at all revolve around the personal qualities of material bishops, but around the fact that they are not the hierarchs of the Catholic Church, let alone the only ones left.

What makes a formal bishop? A man who is validly ordained to the episcopate and who receives his teaching office from the Pope. He does not have the office of teaching the faithful who has not received it from the Pope directly, or indirectly through the ecclesiastical laws established by the same. And this is what makes the Church visible, instead of a conglomeration of self-established teachers who lay claim to an invisible mission (a pneumatic 'church'). The Church cannot exist without bishops who possess titles to episcopal sees, and neither can the particular Church of Rome be deprived of her clergy, because the Pope is the Bishop of Rome, and thus the Pope must be elected by the Roman clergy.

I have also not said that the universal Church has been reduced to one small place in the world. She is still spread across the nations. And I have not said that there are no faithful who know about them. But all the means of mass-communication are under the control of those who seek to keep people from finding the hierarchy at all costs. The hierarchs are obviously trying to reach people, but their means to do so are extremely limited. Everyone who knows how the world works nowadays can immediately understand that.

To know that there still is an actual Catholic hierarchy, which has received her mission in the way that it has always been transmitted, is not a 'platonic ideal', but the immutable thomistic reality; Catholic doctrine can never contradict reality, so when the Church teaches me that there is still a formal apostolic succession, a fully functional hierarchy, I believe that this is actually true today, and that this hierarchy exists in the visible world at this very moment.

Nevertheless, Mr. Ruby claims that "we all know in our hearts" that he is right. But he is not, and Catholic doctrine proves it.

They are willing to tolerate people fighting for the old Mass, against œcuмenism, liberalism, etc. as long as they do not seek the true ecclesiastical hierarchy (which is the cause of many other errors running rampant in the antimodernist resistance as well). That is why they do not shut down sites like these; if someone in contact with the exiled hierarchy would come on here and post information regarding what has happened and how to gain access to her, they would simply shut this site down and no one would know what had happened here, except the few who would have read it before it was taken down. Everything on the internet is being supervised, and when they think that something endangers their sway over the multitudes, they do what they can not to allow it to reach people's ears.

I disagree that there are exiled hierarchy - least ways not in the sense your post implies i.e. somewhere there is an alternate hierarchical structure in hiding.

The only thing within the entire Church which has not changed, which remains as it has always remained, albeit infiltrated with the enemy, is, in fact, it's hierarchical structure.

The only thing within the entire Church which has not changed, which remains as it has always remained, albeit infiltrated with the enemy, is, in fact, it's hierarchical structure.

Such assertions are the legacy of the SSPX. Richard Williamson has explicitly claimed that Catholics today must live outside of the hierarchical structures of the Church to be safe. Such a way of thinking is revolutionary and rebels against Catholic sense.

The Pope and the hierarchy in communion with him are the proximate rule of the faith, because the Church is the teacher of all nations; only in her can the true doctrine be found whole and intact.

The conciliar maffia does not have the four marks of the Church, and rather than the teacher, she is the seductress of the nations. So, the primary duty of those who wage war against this seductress, the primary duty of Catholics, is to seek the true hierarchy. Without the Pope, who is the visible rock of the Church, anything that will be built will be built on sand and will not withstand the storm.

Quote from: bowler

What's so excellent about it? It is very subjective, I don't have a clue where he stands, and what exactly he is talking about.

I am talking about the fact that there must be an actual Catholic hierarchy today, which is not conciliar, and which does not consist of a handful of irregularly consecrated bishops. The devil has been deceiving the world by making some subject to the conciliar leadership (nantism, the 'indult'), some by making them say that they can only save themselves outside of the Church (Richard Williamson, SSPX etc.), some by making them speak of a group of material bishops as if they are the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and others by making them say that there is no more legitimate hierarchy at all.

All of this is deception. The truth is that the Church has not undergone any intrinsic change. She is still, today, exactly the same as she was founded by Our Lord, with a hierarchy. This hierarchy is being prevented in some way from reaching the majority of the population of the West, and this is probably due to the masonic control over all aspects of society; sæcular government, media, military forces, and yes, the internet.

They are willing to tolerate people fighting for the old Mass, against œcuмenism, liberalism, etc. as long as they do not seek the true ecclesiastical hierarchy (which is the cause of many other errors running rampant in the antimodernist resistance as well). That is why they do not shut down sites like these; if someone in contact with the exiled hierarchy would come on here and post information regarding what has happened and how to gain access to her, they would simply shut this site down and no one would know what had happened here, except the few who would have read it before it was taken down. Everything on the internet is being supervised, and when they think that something endangers their sway over the multitudes, they do what they can not to allow it to reach people's ears.

OK, I see that I was right, you were hiding something. You still are. I conclude that your bottom line is that there is an exiled hierarchy, but that it would be snuffed if they revealed themselves. And if you reveal more, you will be snuffed too.

Sounds like you think "cracked the code", you are one of the enlightened. It really sounds to me that your problem is that you are scared of your own shadow.

Personally, I don't give a hoot if there is no visible hierarchy to lead me, if God so wills. I have 1900+ years of Catholic teaching to show me the truth. All I have to do is not sin, and not fool myself that I am not sinning when I am. If God decides to allow someone to come take my life, it is for a good reason. God's will be done.




 

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.

Name a trad bishop and then name his territory. The authority to teach and rule is attached to an office and none of these bishops claim any office.