Those who say there has been no Mass since 1969, and I do know a number of such persons, also assert that the Sacraments of Confession, Holy Orders, Confirmation, Communion, and Extreme Unction have also disappeared, leaving only Baptism and Marriage. They have no priests, only “presbyters, deacons, and informally, deaconesses, usually the wives of the presbytery and deacons.” Well established married men, not under age forty, with command of their families and households are eligible to be presbyters and deacons. It holds by bond of a stable marriage that the woman serves as deaconess with regard to the logistics of female baptism and certain acts of charity suitable to females, not males. They meet in homes, or other private buildings, usually on a rotating basis so that no one family is overburdened. I know of two such groups, one in Canada, one in the southern USA, the US group being the larger and original group. Over the decades, the US group has gone largely off-grid, their work, agricultural and related, are no longer dependent upon outside converts to perpetuate themselves. They’ve become insular, adopting a common mode of dress. Should a “convert” arrive, that person must be conditionally baptized regardless of his original baptism. The same holds for marriage, done in a private ceremony with the presbyter and his wife as witnesses. The marriage is then announced to the “church” during the next service.
They have no “official” name and are members of nothing so far as the civil authorities. They refer to themselves as Believers of Christ and hold that they are the only persons to be “saved” since 1969 at the General Judgment. They run their own schools with a few families choosing to homeschool.
They have three schools in the US, but the Canadian branch all homeschool due to the impossibility of Canadian law. In the US, they manage to slip in under a loophole gained by the Amish in 1972. Girls attend school from ages six through 11, grades 1-5. Boys from age 7-14, grades 1-8. School is taught single sex by older adults, often a widower or widow, someone who no longer has charge of minor children. Marriage age for males is age 16, girls is 12, but that is very rare. To avoid legal problems, they stick to 16 for females with parental permission and 21 for males by their own rules.
These Believers were originally from Catholics who rejected Vatican II, a small group of Old Order Amish who broke off the “Weaverites,” followers of a bishop, Andy Weaver, over a dispute over infant baptism. A number of the Catholics were from what was then French Guyana, now, Belize. Their primary language is English, but some speak Spanish at home. A small number of older people speak French, but it’s dying out. They follow a liturgical calendar not unlike Catholic, and have retained practices of fasting and abstinence during Lent, Advent, but no Mass as they believe the only true Sacrifice is in Heaven.
If you think they sound like a combination of Russian Old Believers and Old Order Amish, you’d be right. Throughout the 1990’s many of them gave up motor vehicles for horse and mules. As of the early 2000’s, they communally owned a number of vans and pickup trucks. About a third used horse/mule power for farming, the others retained older model tractors, plows, combines. In 2002, the last time I had any contact with them, they were becoming increasingly Amish in their use of technology, meaning, disconnecting themselves from “the grid.” 9-11 played a large role in pushing them more “conservative.” I don’t know much about the Canadian group or if the two are still connected.
I see them as an interesting subject of study of religious group dynamics, and also a cautionary tale for those wishing to go off into the wilderness and establish a traditional Catholic utopia. It can easily get off-track and end up first, in schism and then heresy. The initial founders’ intent in the 1970’s was not to establish a sect, to retain their Catholic roots, to live in community and find a few priests to come in and say Mass for them. That didn’t happen. The involvement with the Weaverites morphed into a gradual separation from Catholicism through the 1980’s and by the 1990’s, the idea that 1969 was the cut-off for the Mass on earth had taken hold. By the mid-1990’s, the community leaders were of the belief that Christ’s return was imminent, before 2000, at which time the Mass and priesthood would be restored on earth by Christ Himself from Rome. When that didn’t happen, they had either to admit nobody was going to Heaven, like, they missed it, or what they thought Scripture and various Catholic prophecies predicted was wrong. So they set up a structure that enabled them to wait.
My primary contacts in this group were among the Weaverite Amish who no longer considered themselves “Anabaptists” like the Amish and Mennonites since they believed in infant baptism. Both couples passed away from 1999-2002, so I pretty much lost touch.
Perhaps this post also fits in the thread on Bp. Roy’s Imperfect Counsel. I’ve seen what can happen when people, well-meaning, take upon themselves authority that is not theirs to take.
Topic: The Ceasing of the Holy Sacrifice during Antichrist's reign (Read 2590 times)