Matthew, if you think it wise to move this to the Crisis folder, please do so.  I am not here positing anything to do with sedevacantism, but I am dealing with a matter that pertains to the sad state of things at present.

Once, long ago, I was flipping through the channels on TV and came across the nuttiest kind of monster movie or something.

There was this nice lady who was searching for her sister, who had vanished after having stole a large sum of money. She traced her to this old broken down motel with a spooky Victorian house on the hill behind it. Someone had told her that the mother of the young man who ran the motel had information about the missing sister. So the lady broke into the Victorian house and started searching for the mother.

Finally she saw her in the root cellar. Sitting in a rocking chair with her back to her. She walked up to her and touched her shoulder. The whole chair pivoted around. It was a skeleton with a wig! Boy, did that lady shriek. She also threw up her arm. It hit a dangling light bulb and made it sway back and forth. The reflection in the eyes of the skull was rather artistic in a ghoulish sort of way.

But then something happened. The lady was interrupted in mid-shriek by someone who had just entered the room howling madly. It was a tall woman brandishing a knife! The lady just stood there. Not terrified, not flailing her arm around, just staring in disbelief. Then her sister's boyfriend ran in and started wrestling the knife away from the tall woman. Whose wig fell off revealing that he was no woman at all but the son who ran the motel! (He had some SERIOUS issues.)

This really stuck with me over the years for some reason. Now I think I know the reason. I was working out an analogy. The skeleton lady was dead. She wasn't going to harm the searching sister. So all that shrieking and flailing was kind of cathartic for her. But the tall "woman" with the knife... "SHE" was going to slice the sister into ribbons. And all the sister could do is stand there and wait and just be shocked beyond all words or feelings.

I think that by now Traditional Catholics are pretty used to the idea that Rome Lost the Faith (more or less) in the early 1960s and in the late 1960s introduced a Bad Mass. "Antichrist!" "Servant of the nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr!" "Modernist!"

That's the shrieking and the flailing. It almost becomes sport sometimes in a grim way. We all have our funny nicknames for this cardinal or that Novus Ordo vagary.

I think that criticizing pre-Vatican II popes to the extent that Mrs. Martinez does is what you turn around and see when you think you've seen it all. You realize that you hadn't seen anything yet, and that this is the thing that could really kill you.

Gladius, Randy Engel has a very well docutmented chapter of the book, "The Rite of Sodomy", that discusses this very topic in detail.

Thank you for the information.

It's one thing for priests and bishops and even popes to theologize and plot unfortunately as they skulk around the Vatican and the back rooms of seminaries notorious (but only for a handful of people on the planet) for their Liberal tendencies.

It's quite another for the same people to declare a New Pentecost in the name of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul and to cram condemned errors into the nooks and crannies of every soul on the face of the earth with the real power they have from Jesus Christ Almighty.

It's Godless absurdism to compare the Mystical Body encyclical of Pope Pius XII to the docuмents and the overall phenomenon of the "Second Vatican Council."

Mrs. Martinez does not even bother to point out a single objectionable passage in the encyclical itself. She just cites the favorable reaction of various Modernists to it and finds in them sufficient grounds for damning Pope Pius and his teaching of his infallible doctrine.

Note that I don't say that Mrs. Martinez damns the doctrine itself. Had she thought longer and harder on why she did not and could not do so, she might have spared His Holiness and turned her guns on the Modernists, where they belonged, and been content to leave them there. There is no great difficulty in allowing that she might justly make bold to speak with some extremely cautious diffidence about certain liberalizing tendencies of "Pacelli" which may have found their way into his exercise of his papal office.

Maybe some people here have read a three volume book on Fatima written by a French brother attached to the Abbe de Nantes and his "Counter Revolution." I think that he shows how it should be done if it's to be done at all. That is, criticizing pre-Vatican II popes as fallible clerics with questionable associations and tendencies while treating of them as Supreme Pastors with a true Catholic Sense.

Mrs. Martinez objects to any introduction of a "body" concept into the Church's self-description.

She objects to the use of the adjective "mystical" only in passing. That's not at all her main gripe.

The Mystical Body of Christ. She admits that "the phrase itself can be traced back to St Paul." This proves that she has no particular objection to the word mystical itself, although, shooting from the hip in all directions, she has conditioned herself to fault Pope Pius for using it. Otherwise she would have said, "This phrase of Pope Pius XII is a novel take-off on St Paul's perfectly innocent phrase 'body of Christ', which, of course, lacks the nefarious adjective mystical."

What she objects to is the use of the term "body of Christ" in a context that, unlike that of St Paul, is not "pastoral and non-juridical."

I think that her run-down on the imagined evils of Pope Pius XII's encyclical "Mystici Corporis" is wildly off-base, to put it kindly and with appropriate layman's down-to-earthiness.

As though a Pope dare not take a page out of the Blessed Apostle Paul's inspired book and take a more pastoral and non-juridical approach to describing what the Church is. As though the non-Scriptural term "perfect society" does not have problems of its own because of what transgressors on the Old Guard RIGHT side might try to make of it.

As though Mrs. Martinez is not now due to take on St Paul as one of those intellectual troublemakers.

Anyone who could compare the attachment of the word "mystical" to the Scriptural term "the Body of Christ" to Vatican II's insolently crude rejection of previously taught doctrine has a serious problem with his sense of proportion.

Mrs. Martinez admits that St Paul used the dreaded term "body of Christ" and then as much as ACCUSES Pope Pius XII of giving it "quasi-canonical status." This shows that theology and logic are not Mrs. Martinez' strong suit. The use of the term by the Blessed Apostle Paul in his Inspired epistle makes the term pretty canonical already. No quasi about it for Paul or for Pius.

Mrs. Martinez' main point is that Vatican II shouldn't have come as such a shock. That Pius XII and previous popes had long been taking the Perfect Society in that direction. (Some perfect society!) I think that this is outrageous.

I think that we've been down the Via Spellman before. (Name of an actual street in Rome between the Colosseum and San Stefano Rotundo.) My understanding is that the author who wrote the book in which accusations of unnatural vice were lodged against Cardinal Spellman was basing his entire case on witnesses who were unwilling to go on record. We may have our reasons to have "gut feelings", but Justice demands that we at least present these accusations as resting on flimsy evidence.

There is probably some sort of problem with ALL the popes down to and including Saint Peter. We really have to be specific than that if we're going to suggest that they weren't popes at all.

Mrs. Martinez seems to have a soft spot for Pope Pius XI. She suggests that "Pacelli" was behind attempts to stultify Pius XI's timely warnings about trusting reports that the Communists were becoming nicer Communists. She calls him the most learned of all modern popes. (I don't know about that. Probably the one who read the most books, given his stint as an ecclesiastical librarian.)

Pope Benedict XV she dismisses as "Della Chiesa", a protege of.... of... CARDINAL RAMPOLLA, THE MASONIC ORGIAST! :shocked: :scratchchin: