Harvey Millican's Blog: Musings of a Trad Dad

My daughter asked me tonight if I’d ever heard of a song called Midnight Train to Georgia. Why do I suspect I’m going to wind up as a Pip for Halloween?…

My sister relayed to me a conversation she and her husband had with friends over dinner recently. My sister, you see, is of the mind (as am I) that Jorge Bergoglio is not the Vicar of Christ, is not the Roman Pontiff, not the pope. I think it is as plain as the nose on my face that Pope Benedict XVI did not validly resign the papacy. I believe that he (Benedict) attempted to partially resign and that in this he failed at resigning the whole thing. Others have written and spoken at length and I invite you to look into it. I understand that many people hold that my position is somehow wrong. That’s OK in the sense that we can discuss these things. I did not always hold this view myself so I allow others time to reason to the same position. What I can say is that there are many people who DO hold this position. If you could see my inbox, you would know that this is something that is almost a given in parts of the Trad community.

But to the conversation in question between my sister and her friends… The reactions and responses my sister got ranged from the incredulous to the angry to the downright illogical. Her one dinner guest informed her that “such and such organization looked into this a year ago and determined it wasn’t true.” That’s seriously like running the question through Snopes. My sister was told that she was committing the sin of pride, for how could she possibly know better than the “whole of the Church” on this matter? This to me seems like the cop-out bastard child of the “universal peaceful acceptance” argument which also holds no water especially since there is a significant portion of faithful Catholics who question the whole affair. Remember, Arianism was universally and peacefully accepted too.

All of this got me to wondering what exactly is holding back the minds of otherwise rational and faithful Catholics. Peter Kwasniewski, a man I and many others admire for his brilliance in liturgical matters, is emblematic of just one group of the “deniers”. Clearly, I mean here those who deny what I believe is patently obvious. Dr. K. for his part has spent pages of ink telling the world that the problem isn’t whether the pope is an antipope but rather the fact that Catholics have been treating their pope with too much deference. In other words, we shouldn’t have made the pope a “rock star” and if we just back off of every little thing he says, we can forget all the heresy and outright hatred for the Catholic faith. In fact, my sister’s friends even told her that, “Look, Francis is a heretic for sure, but he’s still the pope.” Hear that, you stupid people? He’s a heretic for sure but still the pope. Clearly someone either never heard or is willfully disregarding that piece of the puzzle that heretics cannot be popes.

Mark Docherty had a brilliant post earlier about the crowd who, like our friends above, think they can gloss over Bergoglio’s heresy lest they have to do the hard work of examining the evidence and concluding that he is not the pope. In short, if you believe the man to be pope, you can not ignore his Magisterium without yourself falling into heresy. Logically speaking, then, should we not question the Bergoglian docket of horse crap that’s come down the pike lo these past ten years? Because if he’s pope, then we’re cool with adulterers and Holy Communion; we’re cool with James Martin SJ and his faggotry, we cool with the death jabs, etc. We would have to be. Yes, we love the pope, the true Vicar of Christ, because he is the Vicar of Jesus Christ on earth.

To me, the simple and most logical argument is this. Pope Benedict XVI Ratzinger for whatever reason (and we can look through volumes of his writings over decades in the public eye) believed he could split the papacy and expand it into a collegial, synodal office. This fact, substantially erroneous, invalidates his putative resignation. Therefore, whether he thinks so or not and whether he likes it or not, he still holds the fullness of the office. And as if God was some kind of all-loving Father, He’s given us to see with our own eyes that Bergoglio and his minions are clearly trying to destroy the Catholic Church so it ought to be easier to reason one’s way back to Ratzinger.

This is where the headline comes in. Most people simply cannot imagine… Decent people have a hard time imagining any evil in the world. We hear of murders and rapes and riots and the like. We read about torture in books and on the news. But to many folks, the idea that other human beings could actually do these things somehow doesn’t actually exist in the mind. We assume that because we would never rape or murder or torture, that no one would ever do these things even though the evidence to the contrary is plain. And likewise, as Ann Barnhardt points out, many figures in the current “hierarchy” of the Catholic Church “don’t actually believe any of that Catholic bullshit anyway.” Think I’m joking? Listen to their sermons. Listen carefully. Better yet, engage them in the confessional if you dare. Ever been told through the screen that your mortal sins are not only not mortal but not even sins? That’s right. They’ll hint at it in the pulpit that no one really commits mortal sin. Then they’ll tell you outright that your contraception or adultery or masturbation or sodomy (notice always the sex stuff with this crowd) is actually normal and healthy and should be continued. Observe how they live their public lives in the parishes that you and I have paid to maintain over the years. Do they live like they handle the Sacred Body of the Lord daily and have a solemn charge to win souls for heaven? Go ask, I’ll wait… And in this too, the mass-going Catholics (which at this point is all the Trads and a handful of the Novies) still cannot fathom that our so-called leaders aren’t even Catholic.

This brings us to where this band of filth intend to lead us. You see it already in the words of Uncle Arthur Roache as he tells us we are Protestant for not gleefully embracing the wonders of V2. Ask yourself this simple question. If what I believe was right and correct and CATHOLIC in 1959 but now makes me Protestant because the Catholics of today now embrace Protestant liturgy and theology, then who exactly is the Protestant? They are admitting, albeit in a shoddily veiled way, that they have concocted a new religion. At the end of the day, what was Catholic before MUST still be Catholic by definition.

I mentioned Gladys Knight earlier. I think I’d like to round out this heavier post with reference to another bit of music. Let us head to South America, land of Jorge Bergoglio and the singer known as Shakira. 20 years ago, one of my nieces was enamored with Shakira. Her first hit, Whenever Wherever, was blazing up the charts. My niece was particularly impressed that Shakira had translated the song into English all by herself! I listened carefully to the words. In the second verse it becomes obvious that English was not her first language, just as years later it would be obvious that Bergoglio is an antipope. The line is: “Lucky that my lips not only mumble/They spill kisses like a fountain. Lucky that my breasts are small and humble/So you don’t confuse them with mountains.” Sidenote: I was in a small Cessna once in bad weather. The pilot, who was not exactly instrument rated, started to panic when he heard the terrain indicator bellowing: “Pull up! Pull up!” “Captain,” I said from the jumpseat, worried I might spill my gin, “What is it? I thought we crossed the Blue Ridge an hour ago!” Just then the fog cleared. Turns out it was just Shakira’s boobs.

Good night, folks.

St. Raymond Nonnatus, pray for us!