In about 1990 or so, I left SSPX seminary due to my convictions regarding SVism. I had come to the conclusion that R&R was irreconcilable with Catholic doctrine regarding the indefectibility of the Church. That's a typical progression. I became a Traditional Catholic simply due to my general sensus Catholicus that the Conciliar Church is not the Catholic Church. When I was in college, I read a book written by St. Alphonsus and it became evident to me that the faith expressed in his book was not the same as that held by the Conciliar Church.
But once I got to seminary and began my study of Catholic doctrine, the Catholic ecclesiology to which I became exposed revealed to me the incompatibility between R&R and Traditional theology. So I moved toward SVism and went to then-Father Sanborn's seminary (well, he started a seminary for me and one other guy).
At one point, however, I ran into an SV chap who told me that he had decided that Pius IX had been a non-pope due to some "heresy" he had discovered in his teaching. So this led to a bit of intellectual soul-searching. I knew this was untenable but couldn't articulate why, based on the principles of straight SVism.
I ended up leaving Father Sanborn, but then vacillated between SSPX and SVism for a number of years ... as neither approach seemed to be satisfactory. After I had left SVism and moved back toward the SSPX, I ended up at The Catholic University of America and stayed for a couple years with Father Ringrose. While I was there, someone at his chapel came up to me and mentioned how he had read a pamphlet by Father Cekada that he found persuasive, and was asking me to explain why I had backed away from SVism. I told him that I'd write something up for him to explain my thoughts.
So I wrote up this explanation and sent it to him. This "docuмent" was eventually published by The Angelus in 1995. I had never intended it for publication. It was just a rough draft, something I cranked out in part of an afternoon. Not only did The Angelus not bother to even ask me for my permission to publish it, but they engaged in some editing of the docuмent (without my approval) ... and even spelled my name wrong on the "article" ... as I didn't even put my name on it, since I just sent it to the man who had asked me for my thoughts and didn't feel that I had to put my name on it. At one point, another young man at the chapel came up to me and said, "Congratulations." I was confused and asked, "For what?" "For your article in The Angelus." I said, "What?" I wasn't very happy with them. SSPX knew I was staying with Father Ringrose and could have simply reached out to me about it.
As a result, unfortunately, what was published was by no means a finished product. Father Cekada issued a public refutation of the paper / letter, since I had mentioned in it that I was responding to his pamphlet. In point of fact, I was only responding indirectly to the pamphlet, because the man who initially asked me simply mentioned that he had read it. I myself had not even read the pamphlet and was not addressing anything concretely within it. Father lambasted me for being pretentious for using lots of untranslated Latin, for showing off ... except, again, there was no such intention. I just whipped this thing out in an afternoon and hadn't taken the time to translate the Latin. There were a few times that The Angelus translated some Latin, and in a couple places the translation was not correct, and Father Cekada attacked me for that, even though I had not been the translator.
In any case, I read his refutation and it was extremely weak and unconvincing, his major point being a serious blunder, where he confused the notion of dogmatic facts being "historical" to come to the conclusion that we cannot question the legitimacy of PAST popes unless there was someone who had been alive at the time who questioned them. No, the term historical means simply that it's a point of history, an event, rather than a doctrinal proposition.
I never really bothered to issue my own rebuttal to his refutation, since I had never intended to enter the public arena in the first place.
I had as the subject, "Pope-Sifting: Difficulties with Sedevacantism". Father Sanborn had popularized the term "sifting the Magisterium" to describe the R&R notion that individuals could filter and sift the Magisterium based on their own judgment. So, my issue stemmed from the problem with SVism where Catholics could, based on their own judgment, sift popes ... just as the one man sifted out Pius IX. I had known of others who decided that St. Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII were also non-popes.
Now, this paper was NOT intended as an endorsement of R&R, with which I still had serious issues, probably more issues than I had with straight SVism ... but of course The Angelus used it that way.
After vacillating for many years due to the issues both with R&R and with SVism, I became acquainted with Sedeprivationism, and it was only there that I found the perfect balance between the problems with R&R and with straight SVism.
Ironically, Father (and later Bishop) Sanborn himself ultimately also ended up (on a different path) at Sedeprivationism, and Father Ringrose has recently become a Sedevacantist (or some kind).
Topic: What does sedeprivationism actually solve (Read 9981 times)