Our Aversion to the Leprosy in the Church

The crisis of apostasy from the Catholic faith is still as evident as ever, with no strong or effective proponency from within the church to derail it. One need only visit a diocesan parish and suffer through a wedding or funeral to verify that the ill-formation of priests from the 1960’s forward still haunts a preponderance of the church.

I recently attended a Novus Ordo funeral for an infant who died after only 3 weeks of life. This was the first child of a young couple married a little less than a year. Although this child was baptized, the 55 year old priest told his parents “We pray that God will accept Emily into heaven”. Yet another example of the diabolic disorientation of the church where when adults die, we attend their white-vestmented canonization service and yet when this tender infant dies and our faith assures us of her place in paradise, for some reason, we have to pray that God will accept her. To the bafflement of even the modern Catholics in attendance, this bearded balding priest added “Do not let anyone tell you that it was God’s will that Emily died. It was not His will.”
I am not sure how one reconciles this with the traditional belief that every beat of our hearts and every breath that we take is ONLY by God’s will, who sustains our very existence every moment of our lives. Of course, I am being sarcastic, it cannot be reconciled along with much of the nonsense that one hears from the modern pulpit.

I recount this story up not to add to the sad and wearily long list of what we have and still suffer in a church so crippled with priests who have been formed, not to nurture souls with the food of the true faith, but rather to synthesize an ad-hoc in-the-moment psychological ministry that he somehow attempts to placate the human spirit with to the exclusion of the soul.

I bring it up to lay it before my eyes, like a bloodied and diseased body, and force myself to understand that the time that I have spent blessedly separated from all this nonsense in the comparative Valhalla of an SSPX chapel may soon come to an end. Maybe ‘end’ is too harsh, let’s say, ‘a transition’. I may really now have to play a role in the extrication of the disease. I may now have to do more than just complain about it or shake my head 'yes' when Father complains about it from the pulpit. Here, I believe, I may lay bare the core of what nauseates many SSPX’ers about the possible regularization of the Society. We use the excuse that all other groups have been swallowed up into the Novus Ordo obscurity and are no longer ‘visibly’ fighting the good fight. We may wring our hands and worry that a bishop will demand that we close some 2.5 year old fledgling SSPX chapel in rural Michigan. We point to Bishop Rifan and somehow worry that eventually all of our Bishops will be saying the Novus Ordo. After all, wasn’t Bishop (then Father) Rifan a part of the Operation Survival ceremonies at Econe in 1988? You can see him in the pictures assisting Bishop de Castro Mayer.

It is not really any of these or even Benedict XVI’s stilted appearance at Assisi. It is that we do not want to be involved with the stinky business of the Novus Ordo. We don’t want that smell on our chapel veils. We do not want to be in the same chain of command with the Bishops whose clown and gay-friendly Masses are still widely celebrated. Come on, admit it. We do not want our sedevacantist friends to laugh at us and completely write us off as the ‘new’ enemy in collusion with the Roman Leviathan. We will not be able to bear what the purveyors of Trad-porno like Traditio are saying about us.

So take a deep breath and consider this stinking body I’ve laid before you. This leprous body that, as diseased as it is, is still the Mystical Body. The hemorrhaging sores make it no less the Spouse of Christ.
What is our obligation for tending to the wounds of this mess, if any?

What do you think moved St. Damien to minister to the lepers of Molokai? He certainly ministered to their ailing bodies but I would guess that if it were possible for him to eliminate the source of their illness, he would have put much effort into that. At some point, one must have compassion on the sick to the extent that one becomes engaged in eliminating the source of the sickness.

That is where I believe we are headed, my friends, with this rapprochement. We must certainly use all of our graces and prayers as a shield, lest we contract the illness, which would not be impossible. Modernism is tuned to the pleasures of the world and they will be enticing, especially in small innocuous doses. We must take this fight to the church, to the source of the illness. Most importantly, we cannot despair of the help from St. Michael the Archangel or even Marcel Lefebvre who I think is in a position to intercede for us. As a veteran of a few battles, my experience is that one either takes the fight to the enemy, or one waits on the sidelines for the enemy to bring the fight to you. The advantage usually goes to the former.