Ladislaus in your younger years you just made sense, a lot of your earlier work completely dismantles this new position you have created in your mind.
You are like a Sean, Salza or Fellay and even Williamson to some degree, your older positions completely contradict and nuke your current position.
My question is, when did you abandon Lefebvre was it early 2000’s or so.
Utter nonsense. You act as if +Lefebfvre himself held a consistent, single, monolithic position his entire career, when the exact opposite is true. Now, while some might call him a flip-flopper, I actually give him credit for this, since changing one's position or mind can be a sign of intelletual honesty and a sincere search for truth. Those who get locked into a position for 40 years rarely have such integrity.
What are you rambling about regarding my "younger years" and "earlier work"? That article in The Angelus about "Difficulties with Sedevacantism"? You must be, since I really had no other "work" that would suite you. Now, after I became a sedevacantist, I did write some articles (a couple in Latin), mostly under a pseudonym, for then-Father Sanborn's publication. Father Sanborn asked me to use a pseudonym, BTW, for logistical reasons, not to hide my identiy, but I won't say any more. I also wrote some articles under my own name. That's the only other "work" I've ever produced. Since about 2010, where I've been posting here, I've maintained a fairly consistent position.
So the "Difficulties with Sedevacantism" was NEVER intended to be an endorsement of R&R, even though SSPX and now you TAKE it that way, due to your confirmation bias. I was actually in an unresolved middle territory. Just because that particular essay focused on the SV side, it did not mean that there were no "Difficulties with R&R". At the time I wrote that, I was in a "Limbo" in terms of my approach to the crisis. That "article" was never meant to be an article, never intended for publication. I've told that story before, but I guess I have to do it again, but I'll also add some prior timeline.
1987 (or so), I became generally a Traditional Catholic, without much knowledge of Catholic theology, just due to a draw from the Traditional Mass, realizing the heresy rampant in my Jesuit High School and University, etc.
1989 - 1991 SSPX seminary. There I started to learn, uhm, Catholic ecclesiology. So, there was a problem there, as I started to realize that the SSPX R&R position clashes with Traditional ecclesiology. I had many long discussions (often on walks) with Bishop Williamson. I cited the principles, and really what he came up with was that these theologian did not anticpate this Crisis, to which I responded with a rhetorical question (that His Excellency did not answer), "But don't the principles themselves remain valid even if their application these days is difficult?"
1991 - I left SSPX, spent a few months helping out Father Jenkins and working with now-Bishop Joseph Santay in Cleveland, but then went to MHT seminary and spent the better part of the year with then-Father Sanborn (in Warren). So, it was toward the tail end of this time that I began to have issues with the straight (and dogmatic) SVism of Father Sanborn. In particular, the misgivings I had were touched off by a guy there who had decided that Pius IX was not a legitimate Pope, but an Anti-Pope. I sought answers for what would prevent a straight SV from just deciding that any given pope was a non-Pope, looking for some principled "backstop" that would prevent Father Cekada's famous "Aunt Helen" from waking up one morning and just rejecting a pope if she discovered some "heresy" in his teaching ... and I simply couldn't find any. Also, then-Father Sanborn's aggressive "communion" (heresy transmitted like cooties), since Bishop Sanborn himself maintained communion with individuals who maintained communion with individuals in communion with the Conciliar Church ... and since I was in communion with Father Sanborn, there were effectively no Catholics left in the world. So I had to back off the "cooties" heresy transmission nonsense, due to this
reductio ad absurdum.
1992 - 1993 back to SSPX. I had NOT reverted to R&R, but considered the matter unresolved, remaining in some in-between Limbo state. Yet, again I left, since I continued to be regularly reminded of their ecclesiological errors to the point that I found their positions unacceptable even for someone who now had a more open mind on the matter.
1993 - 1996 ... I went to grad school at The Catholic University of America (completed the Ph.D. coursework but never took exams or did the thesis). At the time, I was helping out Father Ringrose, and attending his chapel, at one point staying with Father at the rectory.
It was during that period, in 1995, that a member of Father's chapel (and also a member of the small Gregorian schola I started up there) came up to me and told me that he had received a copy of a pamphlet Father Cekada put out and had found it very persuasive, and, knowing that I had been a dogmatic SV type, asked me to explain to him why I backed away from that. So that's when I spent about 2-3 hours on a Sunday afternoon spewing out, literally just as fast as I could type, not unlike how I might spew out a post here on CI ... what ended up being the "article" in The Angelus. It was just meant for him, and as far as articles go, would not have been more than a first rough draft. I left Latin quotes untranslated (since I didn't really have the time to translate), didn't really check the grammar, spelling ... and didn't even put my name on it, since the man I sent it to knew where it had come from. Then one Sunday afternoon another guy at Father's chapel came up to me and said, "Congratulations on the article." I was puzzled and confused. "What article?" He responded, "In The Angelus". myself: "What?" he: "in the current issue, for October 1995". So I look it up and found to my surprise the thing I had sent to my friend.
I was not particularly happy about it. SSPX KNEW that I was staying with Fr. Ringrose and easily could have contacted me, but they never did and published that thing, as-is, with some edits (unapproved). Laughably, since, as you recall, I didn't put my name on it ... they spelled my name wrong beneath the title of the aritcle. Some of the Latin translations they did had inaccuracies ... that Father Cekada later excoriated me for, even though they were not my work. Some of the other Latin was untranslated, for which Father Cekada attacked me for being pretentious and pompous. Right ... pompous for someone who never wrote this for publication and just left the Latin untranslated due to lack of time. He also felt he needed to respond because I had mentioned in it that it was a response to Father Cekada's pamphlet. So, uhm ... I never even read his pamphlet. It was a response to the pamphlet only loosely, in the sense that the friend who asked me to write this up said he had read the pamphlet. So it was a response to his having read the pamphlet, but at no point was the substance of the pamphlet addressed. Of course, Father was able to create enough distraction to discredit me, even though he was unable to actually refute the core of the argument. In fact, in his only attempt (one sentence in the many paragraphs of personal attacks) involved a laughable mistake. In the definition of "dogmatic fact", it's said that dogmatic facts are "historical" in nature, so Father used that to determine that we cannot question the legitimacy of PAST popes unless there had been someone alive at the time who questioned it. That's an absurd blunder. So, the term "historical" refers to the nature of a dogmatic fact, and has nothing to do with past, present, or future. It's to distinguish dogmas per se, which are propositions, from things that are fact, or historical events (e.g. that St. Peter had been in Rome), etc. So the one line in which he attempted a refutation involved a ridiculous and embarrassing blunder.
In any case, since I had never wished to enter the public arena, I never issued any kind of public rebuttal ... and just accepted the embarrassment that came from Father Cekada spending several pages trying to make me look like a pompous ignoramus.
As an aside, this is yet another example of how one can jump falsely to uncharitable conclusions when one does not have the facts, i.e. claiming that I was being pompous or arrogant in "peppering" the "article" with Latin quotes, and then discrediting me by pointing out the bad translations (made by The Angelus), etc.
But, despite the fact that I found these difficulties with SVism, expressing to my friends the reasons I had backed away from a dogmatic adherence thereto, I was NOT endorsing R&R or the SSPX position, despite the fact that in their confirmation bias they took it that way.
So, I remained in a state of unresovled doubt for some years ... until I started to look into sedeprivationism, and that position resolved very nicely the serious problems on BOTH sides, R&R and with straight SV, and I've been a non-dogmatic, nuanced, and sede-doubtist / sedeprivationist (and Siri Theorist) pretty much ever since, so for the last 25 years or so.
So, my adherence to Archbishop Lefebvre's position lasted all of about a year and a half after entering seminary. I actually wrote him a note shortly after leaving, in Latin, to which the Archbishop responded in French, in his own hand, but the answer was very unconvincing ... something about mysteries and all that.
Your assertion that I had somehow been staunchly R&R through the 1990s would appear to be based on falsely concluding that the 1995 Angelus article was meant to promote the R&R position.
Ironically, Bishop Sanborn ended up ALSO moving toward sedeprivationism, right along the same timeline ... and yet by extremely different paths.
Topic: Validity of +Thuc-Line Bishops -- a 30-Second Debunk of the Kelly-ite Position (Read 312473 times)