A friend who is currently on assignment in the Bay Area sends me a picture of his Sunday Mass locale.
St. Thomas More Chapel (SSPX), San Jose, CA
I offer these glimpses into local trad communities in the hope that anyone who may be searching for a Latin Mass might take hope. Also, I love the portrait of Thomas More hanging in the sanctuary. The original by Hans Holbein the Younger hangs in the Frick Collection on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and is one of my favorite works of portraiture. If you ever have the chance to see it, please do (except they’ll probably make you quadruple vax and triple mask to get in these days).
Happy Sunday, friends! Like the Samaritan leper, do not forget to give thanks to Almighty God for your Catholic faith.
In all seriousness, add me to your prayers, friends. The last time I inhaled one of my beloved Marlboros was five days ago. I haven’t really experienced any cravings; just a whole lot of wondering what to do with myself. I am reminded of why I started smoking in the first place. I’m a bundle of energy and nerves in my natural state. The nicotine regulated that. Also, I’m still getting nicotine. I decided to become my father. I’ve switched to smoking a pipe. But even there, I only light up at night. I’m amazed I can get through a whole day without, well, see the headline. Its a mortification for me. I need that.
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.
Holy Ghost Catholic Church, Downtown Denver, CO
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.
In early February of this year, I was still on a pause as writer of this very blog. I hadn’t written anything in a few months. I was waiting – though I did not know it – for the right impetus to come along and spur me back into my daily writing, something I have loved doing for many years. That moment came in May when I read an article on Canon 212 about Fr. Gerald Murray scoffing at Frank Walker’s headlines and felt compelled to write a piece responding to Murray and defending Walker. And from there I continued to write every night. I think I’m back in the groove now.
St. Andrew Kim Catholic Church, Irving, TX. It shouldn’t be this hard to find Our Lord.
I mention February because it was during that month that I, after listening to a Barnhardt Podcast (if you haven’t ever listened to one, please do yourself the tremendous favor), decided to pen a letter to Miss B. To my great surprise, she published the letter in full on her page almost immediately.
The content of that letter was my supposition as to exactly how the anti-Church is going to attempt to suppress the sacrifice of the Mass. Many of us have already theorized that eventually the TLM crowd will be corralled into a tight space. We will find our way into the SSPX (who remain not in schism by the way). We will be declared to be in schism from the Church when it would be the other way around.
But what of the Novus Ordo? Some may disagree with me, I am sure. However, I still contend that the Novus Ordo in se offers a valid consecration. As I wrote a few months ago regarding a literal clown Mass, “Do I believe the sacrifice to have been validly offered? Yes. And that is why I think God is not too happy to have been called down on that altar.”
So below I am both linking to the letter as Ann published it and publishing it in full here. Do click on the link if you have time. Barnhardt has some interesting in-text commentary. And disregard the “T.” at the bottom of the letter. We all know my initials are “HM”. Wouldn’t it be interesting if I drove some traffic to her page? One could only hope.
Dear Ann, Have I got a doozy of a theory for you (following on your most recent podcast). Like you, I have been hearing rumors that Bergoglio will not only herd all former Ecclesia Dei communities into the SSPX to then “excommunicate” us but that he will also change the form of the canon. You made some good suggestions. “This is our Body”, “This represents My Body”… My nephew, a young man with a wife and son who works night shifts as a cop in a large northeastern city so that he can still attend the TLM without difficulty, proposed this to me so I’m giving him credit here. “This is the Body of Christ.” That’s it. If the words of consecration are changed to these six simple words, it is not only glaringly obvious to what depths of heresy we will have sunk but also profoundly subtle. It takes away the complete sacrificial nature of the priest – a man configured to Jesus Christ the High Priest – speaking in the first person the literal same words of the Divine Master. AND, it does this in a way that all previous translations of the canon did not. In the 70’s we had the awful “… for you and for all” but that didn’t change the essential words of institution. Here we would have a priest simply proclaiming what is supposedly in front of him on the paten (though he would have consecrated nothing). Remember how demeaning the sacrificial nature of the Roman mass has been the goal all along. That’s why they gutted the offertory, diced up the collects, and generally dumbed down the entirety of the mass with their pedestrian and, frankly, low-IQ language. The reason this is subtle is that the average Novus Ordo mass-goer would simply say, “But that’s what it IS. See, the priest tells me that every time he puts the host in my hand. He says ‘the Body of Christ’ so what’s the big deal?” They (the fag-hag modernist hacks) will also claim that this is nothing more than a “restoration” of what the Apostles did – arguing from the standpoint of archeologism in the same way they love to toss around the phrase “the reformed liturgy” in reference to the Bugnini rite. There is no reforming what Christ Himself gave to us and the Church nurtured for 1900 years. I’ve been hearing talk that one of the forthcoming documents from Rome will be a revision to Liturgiam Authenticam. That 2001 document states at no. 20: “The original text, insofar as possible, must be translated integrally and in the most exact manner, without omissions or additions in terms of their content, and without paraphrases or glosses. Any adaptation to the characteristics or the nature of the various vernacular languages is to be sober and discreet.” A change to that principle would effectively allow a worldwide paraphrase of the canon a la what Bergoglio has already done to the Pater Noster in Italian. Anyway, Ann, these are just my thoughts on the matter. This might not come to pass and might not even be coherent. We continue to pray and watch. Meanwhile, I’m locking down my connections so that when we do go underground I’ve got a priest in the foxhole with me who will offer the actual mass. As always in Christ, HM
I have a knack for collecting my out-of-town guests from the airport holding up a sign in the manner of a livery driver. Unlike a livery driver, however, I somehow wind up with a bizarre sign in my hands or even wearing “strange” clothing. For instance, there was that one time when my older brother landed and I greeted him at security holding a sign that said: “Welcome to your first pride!” He approached me, studiously placed his reading glasses on his face, leaned in, read the sign, grabbed the sign out of my hand and laughed in the way only a brother can laugh at a gag like that.
Then there was the time when I picked up my adult nephew in true redneck fashion. I cut the sleeves off of my shirt, grabbed a lasso made from clothesline, and dressed up my kids like a horse and cowboy while holding a sign that said: “Welcome home from rehab!” Oh boy, where was I going with this… Oh yes!
Newly cardinaled Arthur Roache, the creepy old Brit is demonstrating once again why he earned himself the moniker “Uncle Arthur”. At first I thought it was because of his wacky antics, kind of like Jesse on Full House. However, now I’m starting to suspect it’s because of his resemblance to Uncle Fester. Also, he’s out his damn mind, as is sometimes said in Texas. He also strikes me as the type who would flip sides in a heartbeat if the circumstances were different.
“That reform is taking place, but it’s a slow process because there are those who are dragging their feet with regard to this and not only dragging their feet but stubbornly opposing what the Church has actually decreed.
That’s a very serious matter. In the end, people have to ask themselves: am I really a Catholic, or am I more of a Protestant?”
The “reform” to which he refers is the destruction of the ancient (read: Catholic) Mass. Imagine the gall of a man, a prince of the Church no less, suggesting that a Catholic is actually a Protestant because he clings to the Catholic Mass. I’ve written about this very issue before. There are those in the Vatican and elsewhere who have as their goal the eradication of the Mass. As that does not seem to have materialized, they will attack the Mass-goers as non-Catholic when they themselves are really the non-Catholics.
Last Supper, stained glass, St. Michael’s Catholic Church, Newark, NJ
Don’t fall for it. Also, don’t assume that they won’t still try to eradicate the Mass from the face of the earth. It’s not like they didn’t give us a preview two years ago. It’s not like it hasn’t been prophesied in Daniel. It’s not like they haven’t been wetting themselves over this prospect for decades. Tomorrow I will publish a letter I wrote about six months ago to another blogger who, at the time, graciously published it. That blogger’s link was shared on Canon 212. It was not known to have been written by me at the time. You will see what I mean when I run it. In the meantime…
Don’t let the ramblings of a madman hireling get under your skin. Love the Latin Mass. And that man had better not ever call me a Protestant again, psycho-freak – sorry, Uncle Cardinal Arthur. Also, he seems really pissed that we’re “dragging our feet” about all this, so I say gum up the works my friends. They’ve stated their goal of eventually “bringing us all back into the sole expression Novus Ordo weirdness”. They’ve got dates already marked on calendars in certain dioceses indicating when the TLM comes to an end. Do what it takes to slow things down.
Folks, I got off all that social media nonsense a while ago. Sorry but I'm not on Twitbook, Facepalm, YouHu, WingWang or any of the others. Maybe an event will happen to make me change my mind like Peter and Paul coming down with flaming swords and commanding it be so. Until then, read the blog and if you feel a comment is in order or you feel like sharing a tip or suggestion for a topic, email me at harvey@harveymillican.com.