Sede Priests: Trannies of the Trad World

 There was a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience last year; I thought, "aw, she's kind of cute." Then I realized she was a guy. (Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me!) 

Funny, though...a friend traveling through Connecticut was looking for a TLM, and found a traditional chapel but asked me and another guy via text if we had heard of it. Given that it wasn't listed in the diocesan directory, it was either a) SSPX; b) Old Catholic; or c) Sedevacantist. I wagered "C," and I won the round. 

One idiosyncratic giveaway was the website looked similar to a sede chapel in Jersey I drove by once, and looked up later. The priests there can trace their lineage all the way back to 1981!

1981 Ngo Dinh Thuc Consecrations Table (2018, Andrei Casey)

I was cleaning out some books yesterday and came across the Padre Pio pamphlet I picked up at a St. Pio shrine giftshop in Jersey years ago. It belongs in the trash, as it is a sede 'zine, compliments of none other than the infamous Br. Michael Dimond of Most Holy Family "Monastery" in New York. 

There is someone we know who used to go to our parish who hosts secret "underground" masses at an undisclosed address downstate, and even though it would be more convenient for us to attend something like this while down at the beach, I keep my distance because I suspect it's a sede priest. I'm not going to ask to see his consecration papers anymore than I would ask a transvestite to "show me the equipment" to prove whether they are male or female. You just hope your intuition is right that something is a little "off" and you decline the date. 

It's an affront, though. Imagine meeting an attractive person, striking up good conversation, and then realizing they are not a woman at all.  Sede priests pass themselves off as Catholic as downplay their blatant rupture with being under the authority of the Pope. Like Satan himself, who did not want to be under authority, they "go their own way" and act in defiance. To unsuspecting trad-sympathetic folks just looking for a reverent TLM, they play the part well. 

Pope Benedict XVI quoted St. Jerome in his 22 Feb 2006 General Audience to emphasize the "safe harbor" of the Seat of Peter: "I decided to consult the Chair of Peter, where that faith is found exalted by the lips of an Apostle; I now come to ask for nourishment for my soul there, where once I received the garment of Christ. I follow no leader save Christ, so I enter into communion with your beatitude, that is, with the Chair of Peter, for this I know is the rock upon which the Church is built" (cf. Le lettere I, 15, 1-2).

Just as you wouldn't date a tranny (because they are founding their existence on falsehood, but also for obvious reasons), don't fall prey to traditionalism at all costs...especially not at the cost of legitimate obedience and apostolic authority. Ask anyone in deliverance/exorcism ministry and you know "you do not step outside of your sphere of authority." I'd take a banal Novus Ordo over a sede Mass any day (and yes, I realize the Eucharist confected in Sede chapels is valid). For the Chair of Peter is the rock upon which the Church is built.

A Cradle Of Sophistry

Let me just say out of the gate that Matt even making the decision to host this debate on Pints With Aquinas was a bad idea at best and scandalous at worst.

I have written here about the time I came home with a pamphlet put out by Most Holy Family Monastery (MHFM) that I picked up at a Padre Pio shrine, felt something was off about it, and ended up throwing it in the trash so no one else would inadevertently find it and be led astray by its errors. What Matt is essentially doing with hosting and posting this debate is akin to fishing through the trash for it and making twenty thousand copies free of charge for sedes to distribute.

"Brother" Peter Dimond is not a canonical Benedictine monastic in any sense of the word, but the true definition of the detestable kinds of monks St. Benedict warns about in the first chapter of the Rule (emphasis mine):

"Third, there are the sarabaites, the most detestable kind of monks, who with no experience to guide them, no rule to try them as gold is tried in a furnace (Prov 27:21), have a character as soft as lead. Still loyal to the world by their actions, they clearly lie to God by their tonsure. Two or three together, or even alone, without a shepherd, they pen themselves up in their own sheepfolds, not the Lord’s. Their law is what they like to do, whatever strikes their fancy. Anything they believe in and choose, they call holy; anything they dislike, they consider forbidden."

First, why does this issue of a public debate even matter? Well, when I saw it come across my feed I instantly felt a kind of revulsion. MHFM operates by deception; you can read one father's account of how he lost (and eventually regained) his son to this cult here. And I thought to myself wearily, "how many well-intentioned but naive Catholics are going to click on this video and be swayed by the sedevacantist position away from the Truth?" 

As it turns out, my fears were not unfounded. I could only stomach about five minutes of the "debate" so I can't write the perspective of having viewed it in its entirety, but the comments section was revealing. First, it swelled more than with other PWA videos, and I presume because the sedes came out of the woodwork to rally in it. They are most at home and in their court in the online arena, and comment after comment was like this one that was posted:

"Incredible that someone could listen to this debate and walk away rejecting the sedevacant position. Literally Bro Peter proved that the sedevacatntist position ijs the only possible position a Catholic militant can hold and remain in the The Catholic Church. It's a matter of doctrine, and dogma, and after hearing the facts of the matter any other position held puts one outside of The One True Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. A Catholic militant simply cannot logically reject the Sedevacantist position, and or esteem these heretical reprobate antichrist antipopes as Pope, and remain in The Bosom of The Catholic Church."

The consensus among almost all, even non-sedes and "normie" Catholics, was that Dimond mopped the floor with Cassman. This is problematic for a number of reasons, not just because Cassman "lost," but because you dont give a platform to sedes in the first place because a platform is what they want most online. The fact that PWA is a more-or-less normie Catholic platform is a thick notch in the bedpost for sedes like Dimond who usually subsist in the digital underground. And the fact that he makes what appears to be the case for the validity of the sede vacante position to unsuspecting but disenfranchised Catholics, it comes across like an effective ISIS recruitment video, pouring gasonline of the fire of defection. Peppered throughout were comments like this one:

"I've been on the fence for awhile. I think I might actually become a sedevacantist because of this debate. Big fan of your show, btw"

Protestantism is an error, but at least they don't pass themselves off as Catholics, unlike the so-called "Old Catholics" and Sedevacantists. I fear Matt has done a lot of inadvertent damage with videos like this one, and if it was for the purpose of driving more traffic to the PWA Youtube channel by way of salaciously clickable content, even more so. As I've said before with regards to Professional Catholic (TM) programming as a way of paying the mortgage: you're better off if you don't quit your day job.

I recall in reading The Confessions of St. Augustine as a young man being in those same formidable years of looking for truth as Augustine was when he fell in with the Mannicheans. He was taken by their seemingly convincing cosmology and way of living, but in earnestly desiring to know the Truth eventually woke up to the defects of their arguments, and that the Truth was not in them. I think one needs to consider the untenability and logical dead end of the sede vacante position objectively (not in this kind of one-two punch debate format, either). But one should also look at the rotten fruit that sedevacantism produces. 

I had the chance to talk with a friend and reader last night who lived for eighteen years in a sedevacantist sect on the West Coast. She detailed the mind-control, the ritual abuse, the sowing seeds of distrust that occurred and broke apart families and led to suicides. She has since left and come back to the true faith, as did these nuns, which is a cause for rejoicing.

When I reflect on the scriptures in Galatians--that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Gal 5:22-23)--I do not see that evidenced in sedevacantism, regardless of how seemingly convincing their online screeds and diatribes are or how many debates they win with ill-prepared normie Catholics. Theirs is a hollow core, an empty gourd; and where the apples rot, the bees gather to sting.

Our current pontiff and the state of the Church do not make it easy to stay on the barque these days. Who wants to be part of a clown Church in its current state? If anything, it feeds this heterodoxy and fans the desire of those who are lured by the asceticism of Orthodoxy and the zealous crusading of Sedevacantism. PWA would have been wise to heed the words of St. Paul to Titus: "But avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law, because these are unprofitable and useless."

And yet, here I am. Still. I don't know why, and I can't attribute it to anything apart from 100% pure undiluted grace. It's not the pope. It's not the hierarchy. To keep our eyes fixed on Christ when the world draws our eyes away from Him is a matter not only of focus, but of steadfast survival. The words of Fr. Lazarus El-Anthony, a modern anchorite in Egypt, came to mind: "Out here, no one speaks my language. I have no countrymen...I have no one, no one to help me. If I take my eyes off Christ for one moment, I am completely lost." In our domesticity, we tend to lose sight or forget the intensive spiritual battle for our souls going behind the scenes. The lubricating oil of sophistry greases the skids on chute to Hell, and those who are taken by it do so because they take their eyes off of Christ, the Way, the Truth, the Life. He will restore all things in His time. Until then, we must pray for the grace of patience, perseverance, fortitude, and the wisdom to know what is right and true and what is a lie.

Two Fingers To Death: On Siberia, Sedes, and Schism

"I follow no leader but Christ and join in communion with none but your blessedness [Pope Damasus I], that is, with the chair of Peter. I know that this is the rock on which the Church has been built. Whoever eats the Lamb outside this house is profane. Anyone who is not in the ark of Noah will perish when the flood prevails" (St. Jerome, Letters 15:2 [A.D. 396])


One of the nice things about being on break and off from work for a week is having time to, well, waste. Exhibit #1: trading an hour of my time on the couch watching a young British man build a cabin in the woods out of shipping pallets with his dad...one nail and plank at a time. No words, just sawing and hammering. My son loved it. I couldn't believe I watched the whole thing from start to finish. (6.5 million views on YouTube, btw)

The rabbit hole that is Youtube then suggested to me a documentary about a woman who lived in the taiga of the Russian wilderness as a hermit for seventy years. Sounds about up my alley. A film crew spent two days traveling by river to document her life. One of four children, she had been living alone for the past twenty seven years after the last of her family died. Her mother starved to death in the sixties. The woman's name was Agafia.

She would not accept bags of flour that had a barcode, because barcodes were a sign of the Beast. "Worldly life is frightening," she says, "If Christians sing worldly songs, they're doomed to eternal suffering. Same for music. Everyone who enjoys dancing creates infamy."

Ok, this was kind of interesting. She seemed of sound mind, yet lived in some of the harshest conditions on earth, alone, as a sixty nine year old woman, with a large tumor on her breast, surviving on potatoes and turnips, fish from the stream, bread, and bark. Her hands were gnarly from chopping down trees and stripping branches for the goats, starting fires with flint and tinder, and carrying pales of water.

But I didn't understand her faith. She was obviously a Christian believer, and I just assumed she was Russian Orthodox.

"My father's ancestors were true Christian believers. Ever since Prince Vladimir brought Christianity to Russian lands, our faith has been passed from generation to generation."

That faith, I learned later as the film progressed, was the faith of the "Old Believers" or "Old Ritualists" which can only be understood in a historical context.

In the 17th century, the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Nikon, desired to unify the liturgical discrepancies between the Russian and Greek Orthodox churches and made heavy-handed (and, arguably, sloppy) ecclesiastical reforms. Old Believers, as they identified, rejected the reforms and clung tightly to what they saw as the original expression of the true Faith. Agafia describes this perspective in the film:

"Christ died on the cross for the whole world. He descended into Hell to free the righteous. But Patriarch Nikon went back to Hell to confer with Satan. So he introduced new laws. He was...the ultimate Satanist. He abolished the two-fingered sign of the cross handed down to us by Christ himself, changed books and church dogma, exterminated all our priests. They tortured Old Believers and imprisoned them."

With the State backing the reforms, they anathematized the old rites and books and those who still used them. Old Believers were arrested and executed, and those who fled went to Lithuania, Ukraine, and Romania. Others, like Agafia's family, stayed in Russia, and hid in the Siberian wilderness to escape persecution.

Agafia seemed to belong to the more extreme and ascetic Bezpopovtsy grouping of Old Believers, who were largely priestless (in contrast to the more moderate conservative Popovtsy faction) and believed the world had fallen into the hands of the AntiChrist. "Only those Christians who hold on to the true faith of Christ, commit good deeds, repent and pray to the Lord for forgiveness will receive God's mercy," Agafia tells the camera crew, filming her praying the Psalms in her dark and crowded cabin. This passing on of a faith in isolation, sans priests or ecclesiastical lineage, seems to be the Orthodox equivalent of the Kakure Kirishitan in Japan, who were also forced into isolation due to persecution in the 17th century and who emerged with a deformed faith barely recognizable to Catholicism:

"With their Scripture forgotten, no real creed, and no catalogue of doctrines, the practice of this religion has evolved into a narrow fidelity to ancestral rituals.

"This is the only thing they have the ceremony," Whelan said. "That becomes their dogma. You have to do it right, you have to say the prayers right, or it won't have power. In the absence of other things that most other traditions have, this becomes the thing you've got to be true to."

"I do think that they are religious men in their own way," she said, that their prayers are directed toward God.

A tiny Catholic Church on Narushima attracts a small congregation, but the Kakure Kirishitan priests are not interested in joining it. Although they probably understand intellectually the relationship between Kakure Kirishitan and the Catholic Church, Catholicism to them remains foreign and removed.

...In the last two priests the universal religious struggle between the conservative and the liberal. One priest, in being correct to the past, is blind to the realities around him. The other, attempting to make the ritual relevant to those who don't truly understand the tradition, makes compromises that dilute the best of what had been preserved."

In a largely Protestantized country like the United States, it may be hard to understand the interconnectedness of ritual and dogma that the Eastern church has always held, that church rituals had from the beginning represented and symbolized doctrinal truth. Old Believers felt that such seemingly innocuous changes as using three fingers instead of two to make the sign of the Cross, or translations that altered pronunciation, struck at the heart of their faith, and they would rather go to their death than deny Christ, who was Truth itself. The famous personification of this in the Surikov painting of the exiling of Boyaryna Morozova (considered a martyr-saint among Old Believers), being carried away by sled while holding up the iconic "two fingers" in defiance.

I found the history of the Orthodox Church in Russia interesting, as I wasn't super familiar with this period in history. We tend to get tunnel vision as Westerners and Americans and Catholics, so it's good I think to peak out from time to time to get some perspective. What I saw in this documentary, as peculiar and specifically geo-religious as it appeared to be, tended to reinforce the general anthropological struggles of religion and religious expression: conservative vs progressive, traditional vs reformed, true vs schismatic believers. It happens in all the world religions: Sunnis and Shias in Islam, Orthodox and Reformed Judaism. Buddhists of the Mahayana school use the pejorative term "Hinayana" ("Lesser Vehicle") to describe Theravada (Traditional) Buddhism, a term Theravada Buddhists would find offensive.

In our own Church, we have a Pope that some on the extreme end think of as an Anti Christ and not validly elected. The issues of today are different yet similar to the struggles of Agafia and her family: Sedevacantists who believe there has not been a validly elected pope since Pope Pius XII was elected in 1958 due to the embracing of the heresy of modernism.

We have heard of the "Spirit of Vatican II" Catholicism (the kind of mirror that reflects this heresy of modernism and botched, sloppy, jarring roll-out of universal liturgical reforms for the world to see) being in contrast to the actual documents of the Second Vatican Council. Catholics would call sedevacantists schismatic on the grounds that they do not accept the authority of the Pope (whether Pope Francis, Pope Benedict XVI, Pope John Paul II and I, Pope Paul VI, or Pope John XXIII). No authority=no Catholicism.

A sedevacantist may counter that the Church forfeited that authority in its embrace of heresy, and the seat of Peter being vacant is a sign of the times for true believers, or which they would count themselves. They did not leave the Church; the Church left them. They are willing to suffer and endure in defense of what they see as the Old Faith, the True Faith, before it was corrupted.

So, these things are nothing new. "Bad" popes are nothing new, and schism is nothing new. Desires for an authentic orthodox expression of faith and reforms of reforms as a way of getting to the "heart of things" apart from ritual and dogma (Protestantism) is nothing new. It can be viewed historically, yes. But for the believer (or, in some cases, for the new convert trying to navigate these choppy ecclesial waters), these are highly personal and important things. A believer like Boyaryna Morozova would rather be tortured and exiled to Siberia than use three fingers instead of two to make the sign of the cross, while another Christian believer might have no problem re-baptizing a new member of their congregation in accordance with their norms of belief.

I suspect Agafia's story is a mix of Russian fortitude, admirable stubbornness, dogmatic integrity, and religious fervor. For a foreigner watching from their computer screen thousands of miles away in the comfort of a heated and air conditioned dwelling, who may have skipped church to do some shopping or stay in their pjs, it may be an anthropological curiosity. But it also presents us with the questions: what is the true Faith? Are we willing to die, be exiled, live cut off from society, to preserve it? Does it really matter whether we use two fingers or three in rituals like the Sign of the Cross? Who has the authority to interpret scripture, proclaim dogma, and excommunicate? What makes one Catholic?

For me that last part is the one that isn't a real struggle: you cannot be Catholic without the pope. You may be more austere in your penance, more sincere in your convictions, more virtuous in your service, and more astute in your apologetics. But if you don't have the pope, you are on your own.

Pope Francis is not my kind of pope. I find his words and exhortations ambiguous and confusing. I've been critical of him in the past in my own little world of preference and influence. I don't even doubt what I'm reading in Malachi Martin's "Windswept House" about the smoke of Satan entering the Church, as Paul VI warned.  But who cares what I think or prefer? He is still my pope. I cannot separate my religious expression from subjection to his authority as universal head of the Church of Christ.

To apostatize is not only to deny Christ but to deny the Faith. They are not separate, just as being Catholic and recognizing the Pope as the head of the Church are not separable. I have no real knowledge and no real virtue, no real suffering to my name, no beautiful liturgy to extol, and no real merit to bring before Christ when I meet Him at the Last Judgment. And I have no other ark to cling to in this life but the Church. I am adrift without her. So I will cling to that. Pope and all.

"There is one God and one Christ, and one Church, and one chair founded on Peter by the word of the Lord. It is not possible to set up another altar or for there to be another priesthood besides that one altar and that one priesthood. Whoever has gathered elsewhere is scattering" (Cyprian of Carthage, Letters 43[40]:5 [A.D. 253]).