A RUDE AWAKENING

Life is perhaps most wisely regarded as a bad dream between two awakenings. O'Neill

There's one good thing about the Terrible Trio: their behavior always proves their adversaries' point.

Last week, "One-Hand Dan" impressed his cult with a brief account of his ordaining to the priesthood a man who belongs to a group of latter-day "Dominicans" in Boston. Then he casually boasted that the newly minted levite would be spending a few months in West Chester to finish his priestly studies "under Fr. Cekada's tutelage."

Nothing, we think, is more emblematic of the intellectual morass of the traditional movement than this ugly, little story. As you can see, things have come to such a pass that "One-Hand" doesn't even bother with requiring a semblance of sacerdotal formation before he makes a priest forever. All that's required is a few months of post-factum indentured servitude in a highly dubious independent study program. (We won't even comment about the "tutor's" qualifications.)

What we have here is the blunt admission that becoming a priest is mentally less rigorous than getting a GED. Gone is all pretense that a Roman Catholic priest is carefully selected, well formed, and thoroughly vetted.

Perhaps that's a good thing. It better suits the crisis than the absurd charade that MHT completers have any connection whatsoever to the priestly training of the past. Perhaps such ordinations will, in the end, make traditional Catholics wake up a realize just how bad it's all become.

It all goes to prove the Readers' point that the Restoration will have to come from the conservative Novus Ordites, because Traddieland has surrendered.

STAY HOME ALONE -- YOU'LL BE IN BETTER COMPANY.

FLOOD OF REMEMBRANCE

Lest we forget -- lest we forget. Kipling

Pistrina's series on the Terrible Trio's zero-legacy leads the Reader to put the essential question: What is to be done to wrest traditional Catholicism from these small-bore minds with 16"/50 caliber Mark 7 ambitions?

They hold tight-fisted control of the non-profit corporations underwritten by the hard work and sacrifices of the faithful. They have made dead sure that the people who support them have no voice in any matter. They behave and spend as they please. They are confident they can weather the frequent storms of opposition that arise because they can rely on an unthinking base of cult followers to keep them in the clover.

No doubt, the fierce reaction to the Blunderer's grisly opinion on the Schiavo case or to the SGG School scandal has cost the Triad gravely. Indeed, they will never recover. Their stature in the traditional world is forever diminished.

However, just because they have been exposed and have lost their influence outside the small cultlets they have bewitched doesn't mean they are without financial resources to keep themselves going for a little while longer. By this time, it's not unreasonable to suppose that their tiny band of supporters is so brainwashed that they will keep giving until they have no more. Perhaps, there are a few decent souls left who harbor doubts, but the number of the principled few must be so small that their leaving will have little impact on the Trio's basic comforts. They know that the remnant they have is immune to reason and to an appeal to common sense and Catholic principles. Their lock on this morally lost, frightened cadre of fanatics is as firm as their heightened sense of self-preservation.

In a word, nothing short of actuarial tables, the economy, and their own aging can stop them from doing just about whatever they will. Sure, their luxuries have been drastically cut back by the severely reduced income stream, but the scope of their control of properties and organizations remains intact. No one's going to change that, even if they must one day become greeters in some big-box discount store to eke out a living.

Just the same, there's a reason enough to continue the vocal opposition. The Japanese have a saying that goes something like this: "After 75 days, all men forget." Without a swelling torrentof reminders, it's all too easy to forget what troubles the Trio has visited upon traditional Catholics. They may be unschooled, but their savvy self-interest has taught them the basics of marketing: They simply have to put on a good face and make nice, and then the money will come trickling back. In fact, their business model requires that the faithful just fuggedaboutit. Their cagey experience with the average Traddie has confirmed that weak-willed people hope time will heal all wounds.

Without opposition, time is on their side. That's why it's important to make everybody outside their cult remember just who these swashbucklers are. There is no anodyne for the suppurating wounds they have viciously inflicted on the traditional Church. While we cannot prevent them from preying upon their own passive cultists, we can contain their contagion by countering their PR initiatives with the truth.

Keep the Beast weak. Don't believe it. Refuse its avaricious demands for your money. Tell the world why!

THE NOONDAY DEVIL

...daemonium meridianum, the most stubborn spirit to govern and guide that any man can meet, and the most perilous withal. Hawker

From the Desert Fathers to St. Thomas Aquinas, we stand cautioned against acedia, indifference in spiritual matters, "soulful don't-care-ishness." Yet in the Sede Vacante, we laymen remain uncaring of the dire effects of intellectual acedia, negligence in scrutinizing the scholarship and credentials of those clergy who lay claim to being our spiritual guides. How else can we account for our listless failure to reject out of hand Work of Human Hands -- that bespattered canvas of gaudily grinning errors---and the brazenly meretricious proposition that the Unacum market-cornering ploy is dogma. How else could we have listened to the nonsense that burbles forth from the pulpits of ill-formed MHT clergy, distinguished more for their blinding defects than for their illuminating learning.

We're not talking about the indolent acquiescence of the gullible and invincibly ignorant-- the witless wonderment of wan and sad-eyed Traddie women shrouded in their impossibly long, dirt-gathering calico skirts; or the surly aggressiveness of their pot-bellied and grim-lipped menfolk straitened by their seam-bursting, unlaundered polyester slacks three 0r four sizes too small. On the contrary, the Readers mean the educated and affluent Traddie minority, who would see the sham were they to awake from their inertia.

Without something substantial of the Church's intellectual tradition, the Traddie movement is nothing other than a cult. As the old ads used to say, Accept no substitutes. The un-credentialed Blunderer, "One-Hand," the rector, and other even more ignorant pretenders have no grounding in genuine Tradition. They are but a pedestrian re-imagination of the Church.

The problem will only get worse.

Just look at the shriveled and rotten fruits of MHT: One forgot the consecration at Mass. Another couldn't perform a burial service. A third was unable to bless holy water without an operatic mad-scene of self-doubt and embarrassing false starts. Today we have a fresh Lutheran convert from ultra-modern Scandanavia, who was fast-tracked to the priesthood. Next up is a Russian who was only received into the church when he entered MHT. Not only is learning flown away, but so is Catholic culture, the unspoken requirement of the priesthood.

In light of their scanty gifts, these purblind clerics are barely fit to offer Mass. No one need be a scholar to sense the sham so close to the surface. Why is it that so few laymen have detected these deficiencies in the manifest failures of the rector's completers? or in "One-Hand's" maudlin sermons? or in the Blunderer's howlingly laughably below-par effort, Work of Human Hands? The only explanation can be intellectual lethargy.

Pistrina invites the witted to wake up and shake off their sorrow about the intellectual good of the Church in exile. Refuse consent to a flight from the standards of good Catholic scholarship by condemning the Terrible Trio. Dispel your tedium. Subdue your turpitude by resistance to all these tempter-beggars disguised in grubby collars and shabby amaranthine robes. The Traddie movement simply cannot produce scholars or intellectuals. The rejects it possesses are only -- and just barefly -- fit to offer Mass and provide the other sacraments. Tell them so. Tell them to stop pretending and to get back to the basics. Demand they be silent until God raises better men. If they will not see that they can never be part of the Restoration, then

STARVE THE BEAST, STAY HOME ALONE, SAY YOUR ROSARY, MAKE YOUR ACT OF PERFEC T CONTRITION.

BITING OFF MORE THAN HE CAN CHEW

...with small men no great thing can really be accomplished. Mill

The beginning of February has the Readers expectantly awaiting this month's MHT Newsletter. No, we're not looking for the rector's big $30K plan, the delivery of which has been unfulfilled since last spring. (That bit of beggary was a non-starter from the hour it appeared in print.) What we want to read is his commentary on the Osservatore Romano article by Mgr. Ocáriz Braña. Of greatest interest will be any remarks on what in January the rector called its "serious errors."

To be sure, Ocáriz Braña is a modernist, and his short article reflects the cant and New-Age vocabulary characteristic of Novus-Ordite writers (for instance, this little gem of rhetorical puffery: "an assessment of... [post-Conciliar] teaching should transform a possible situation of difficulty into a serene and joyful acceptance of the Magisterium..."). Secular academics know, that's what it takes to get published nowadays, and the bathos mustn't cause us to forget that Ocáriz Braña is, unlike the rector and the Blunderer, a man with rock-solid scholarly credentials.

Born in 1944, Ocáriz Braña studied physics at the University of Barcelona, a world-renowned public institution of higher learning considered the best university in Spain. In 1969 his received his licentiate in theology from the Lateran University in Rome and in 1971 his doctorate in theology from the University of Navarre, Spain. His formation took place in the early years of the Novus Ordo, at a time when Catholic educational institutions were in transition. During that period, some of the old standards remained (even at the Lateran, which owed much to Roncalli). Furthermore, the Opus-Dei University of Navarre is recognized as one of the finest private universities in Spain, and it ranks among the top schools in the world. Entrance requirements at these selective Spanish universities were and are high. Only the best and the brightest matriculate.

So it's no surprise that we're looking forward to watching our Brooklyn-schooled rector -- someone brought up during the struggling, chaotic, nascent years of Écône -- as he confronts a professional endowed with a world-class education and an advanced degree. Will it be a contest between David and Goliath? Or will this be a tale of a gnat annoying a lion and then flying off into a spider's web?

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