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I don't want to be an 'I-told-you-so', but here we are again.  Another Recusant, and it just keeps moving along, into the future, just as time does.  

Anyone in the XSPX who's oblivious to the Resistance' Existence by picking up TheRecusant Issue #21 and flipping pages would find himself thinking it must be a hoax.

As it was from the start, TheRecusant continues to be cutting edge.  Many uninitiated readers might not be able to grasp Issue #21 until a year from now.  Therefore, anyone who has no idea what's really going on (very likely the case if they just go to Mass at an SSPX chapel every Sunday and hear the sermon and talk to a few parishioners and watch TV news and read the paper and listen to the radio), would much better serve their own needs to "get up to speed" by looking first at an older issue, say, TheRecusant Issue #8, for example.  Or Issue #16 from May of 2014, with the fine articles "Keep it Simple!" by the great Fr. Girouard (who ought to be consecrated bishop), or "Bishop Fellay - No Change!"  "Ten Errors of Vatican II" [compiled from writings and speeches of] Fr. Gregory Hesse [R.I.P.], is a fine and edifying look at some of the glaring heresies that emerge from Pollyanna acceptance of the corrupted and corrupting docuмents of Vat.II.

You ought to be collecting all 21 issues because the day will come when you're going to be glad that you have them.  I told you so.

When I picked up my first issue of TheRecusant 2 years ago this month, I knew in about two minutes that this was a keeper.  I wrote here on CI that all of us should subscribe to receive copy every month (or however often they would come out) and archive them, because these are going to be invaluable docuмents in the future.  I can't help but say that time has proven the veracity of that prediction, for we are now living through days when in order to understand what the current issue is all about you just about have to do some research.  "How could we have arrived at this point?" you might ask.  Well, if you had been reading these issues for the past two years you wouldn't be asking that question.  

The parade of The Recusant through the past 24 months is a Rosetta Stone of the progress of the Society of St. Pius X.  You just about won't be able to comprehend the fact of what is now going on unless you dare to take a hard look at what HAS been going on.  And you will find it ALL (even if abbreviated) in past issues of The Recusant, "An unofficial SSPX newsletter, fighting a guerrilla war for the soul of Tradition," as it says on the front cover of each issue.  

If the Editor were not such a humble and soft-spoken man, he could justly have been writing, "An ongoing chronology of the accelerating and pernicious corruption of the erstwhile venerable Society of St. Pius X under the nefariously deceptive Bishop Bernard Fellay."  It's a good thing that he's the editor and I'm not!

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Looks like Mass is scheduled in Ontario (St. Catharines) and Syracuse on Sunday.  No location noted yet.  I will make every effort to attend.

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Excellent commentary N.O.   I intend to backtrack and read all issues.

Thank you. It seems to me that one could compile all the "From the Desk of the Editor" lead articles into one volume of running commentary that pretty much maps out the progress of current events since the beginning of the XSPX crisis.  Essentially, all the other articles would become quasi-footnotes to substantiate the FDEs.  

Such an exercise is valuable for any student of the crisis inasmuch as it would facilitate an ability to answer accusations from uninformed Fellayites who chant the mantra "It sounds like you're just anti-Fellay."  There are a number of pithy replies to such inane quips, like, "I'm not nearly as anti-Fellay as the facts of history are," or, "Any decent tyrant demands uninformed followers and this is no exception," or, "Keeping one's head stuck in the sand doesn't improve the reality that continues to progress all around you:  ask any ostrich."

The bottom line is, the day will soon come when the loyal defenders of the XSPX will awake to find they don't have a Society of St. Pius X anymore, and they won't be able to answer their children's questions such as, "How could this have happened?"  

The simple answer to that question is, "Too many pew-sitters have not been reading The Recusant."

The Recusant reprints on every front cover the portraits of its two patron saints, St. Thomas More and St. John Fisher.  In the spirit of their "Resistance" to the putsch toward protestantism in the 16th century, Ed. et. al. have consistently and most capably laid down a trail tantamount to a day book of objective observation of "what is going on around here."  It amounts to a bullet-proof edifice of an open-and-shut case against the false claims of the Menzingen-denizens.  It's right there for all to see, but as with so many other things these days, some people just don't want to see.  But you don't have to be like them!  Read back issues!

In reading back issues, it seems to me the most obvious method would be to just start with Issue #1 and proceed through each one.  But that might turn into a heavy burden for some readers.  It's now approaching 800 pages of material.  And some of it is very intensely detailed.  

I would recommend for example looking for all the articles regarding the AFD of 2012 ("April Fifteenth Declaration"), but you'll need to keep an eye peeled for the alternative titles:  "Doctrinal Declaration," "Doctrinal Protocol," "The Doctrinal Preabmble," etc.  The multiplicity of titles for it is in itself evidence of the ongoing obfuscation and objective subterfuge foisted upon the faithful from the Society leadership in most of the offices of the many District Superiors worldwide.  I recall seeing on Issue #8 "Is the Doctrinal Declaration Still Relevant?"  That would be as good a place to start as any, I suppose.  Also, any of the several articles by the great Fr. Girouard has the power to make complicated tangles of intrigue understandable from the start.  That is a big help in all this.

Perhaps someone could come up with a hit list of suggested reading to most quickly familiarize a newcomer to this whole charade, by directing them to particular issues and page numbers, with even cross-references to other issues and page numbers by topic.  

The front cover of each issue has a brief summary of the articles contained therein, but there are no page numbers attached.  That was perhaps due to changes in editorial formatting that would have introduced another set of facts to check before putting an issue to bed.  Ed. has said several times, "We have never claimed to be professional publishers -- far from it!"  I'm sure he is fully capable of cranking out proof-read and error-free copy, but there is simply too much material to cover and too little time for him to cover it all.  


After all that, don't forget to send in some small donation for all the benefit you've received, for The Recusant is entirely run on volunteer contributors, and does not demand any "subscription price" for its issues.  In common Catholic courtesy, all they ask is that you send what you can afford and what you think it's worth.  Eventually, the value of these copies will become evident, but for now, it's all on a good will basis.  You can get a handle on what things are worth just by running off a few Xeroxes yourself.  I have gone to a local printer, where making duplicates costs 90 cents per issue and that's just for the physical copy.  What is the content worth?

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