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Evening. Buyer's Remorse Buy a new car. I'll be moving in. Let's get started.
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Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana.
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You what?
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So there's no.
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No, no Buyer's remorse. More like Buyers rejoice.
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I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it.
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Buyers rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana.
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Limitations and exclusions may apply.
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Hello everyone, I'm Matthew Remsky. This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the roots and intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. You can follow myself, Derek and Julian on bluesky. The podcast is on Instagram and threads under its own handle and you can support our Patreon. You can also find me personally on YouTube and TikTok as well. Antifascist dad all one word. This brief is called Cult Within a church does a schism and in it I'm going to provide some background and analysis on the July 1 schism of the Society of St. Pius X from the Roman Catholic Church when its leaders consecrated four new bishops at its seminary in Econ, Switzerland, in a six hour live streamed outdoor ceremony interrupted by ominous thunderstorms and conducted mostly in Latin except for the part where they read out their piously defiant message to Pope Leo XIV in French, rebutting his personal plea from the day before and also the weeks preceding and the Vatican's general pleas from decades going back to turn back. They wanted everyone to understand their rebuttal. Within 24 hours of the ritual, the Vatican declared the SSPX's bishops and roughly 750 priests worldwide excommunicated. The decree invalidated the sacraments of confession and marriage administered by SXPX clergy going forward and warned that lay faithful who formally adhere to the society risk excommunication themselves. So those are the bare bones. Today I'll be getting into the history and sacramental implications of this schism, but also spend time on the overall themes and politics involved, especially as they apply to our explorations of religion. Religion on this show. Namely, will the schism of a right wing Catholic sect born out of anti Semitism and anti Communism bolster American and global resistance to Leo XIV's progressive agenda? Is this the form of Catholicism that JD Vance has always been looking for, or will it shift the Overton window rightward, emboldening Vance and other tradcaths in their low key contempt for Leo because at least the Church should be grateful that they're not full schismatics? There are many places to begin with this story. I'm going to start about 45 years ago with an incident that illustrates the personalities and volatilities at play. On May 12, 1982, Pope John Paul II was ascending the altar steps at the Fatima shrine to Mary, surrounded by a throng of believers singing an ancient hymn. In his hand was a bullet from a Turkish gunman who'd shot him twice in St. Peter's Square exactly a year before. He was there to place the bullet into the crown of the Marian icon to thank her for saving his life from the assassination attempt. Video of this candlelight procession shows a normal sort of series of events, but then a sudden churn of the crowd around the Pope and a little bit later a man who appears to be a priest but with his collar flapping open at his neck, being strong armed out of the crowd by plainclothes officers. The Spanish press at the time reported that this other would be assassin. Juan Maria Fernandez y Chron, 34 years old, had yelled out down with the Pope. Down with Vatican II before lunging the at JP2 with a 37cm bayonet from a Mauser rifle that he'd drawn from a leather bag. Then, according to reports that emerged 25 years later, the Pope didn't immediately reveal that he was wounded at the time, but on returning from the ritual his secretary reported that his cassock was stained with blood. Now, four years before he attempted this assassination in 1978, Krone, who in his university days had been a member of the pro Franco phalangists in his home city of Madrid, was ordained to the priesthood by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of the Society of St. Pius X. Okay, who was Lefebvre? Born in 1905 in Tour Coin, France, as the third of eight children in a devout industrialist family, he came of age under the influence that the Action Francaise movement had over the French seminary in Rome, where He was a student in the 1920s. Now, Action Francaise was an anti Semitic put a pin in that, because anti Semitism will be an ongoing keynote. But Monarchist Integral Nationalist movement formed in 1899 in response to the Dreyfus affair. The movement was agnostic in philosophy, but it lauded the Church as a guardian, the guardian of social order. Now Action Francaise was condemned by pius XI in 1926 for its political instrumentalization of the Church and and for its radicalizing influence over Belgian youth. And this cost Lefebvre's mentor his post as rector at the Rome Seminary. And that purge might have catalyzed Lefebvre's long anxiety and grievance, this belief that he had from start to finish, that the Vatican had lost its will and ability to protect the Church from modern influence and other religions and, well, the Jews. 36 years later, in 1962, Lefebvre was working at the Vatican and elected to a position that allowed him a seat on a commission that was drawing up the working drafts meant to guide the discussions for the Second Vatican Council. And for the three years that followed. He attended every session and became a leading organizer of a caucus of conservative bishops who were resisting the reform minded majority. With his fellow conservatives, he fought on the three issues that later defined SSPX's first, the introduction of the colloquial or non Latin Mass. They didn't like that at all. Secondly, the softening of the Vatican's position toward other religions and third, the Declaration on the Human Right to Religious Liberty. So the first position that I've named here is at the heart of today's traditional Catholic or tradcath movement. And on its own, celebrating the Mass in Latin would seem to be a matter of personal preference or style or aesthetics or nostalgia or something like that. But historically that position was always tied to the supremacist values of the other two. Lefebvre and his fellow conservatives did not want the Church to give an inch on the matter of whether, as the Council's language ultimately put it, other religions might contain rays of light that lead their followers to God. They did not want the Church to give an inch on the matter of whether being Catholic was a precondition for salvation. And the reason for that is simple. These provisions would begin the long, slow theological decoupling of the Catholic Church from the machine of colonialism. Lefebvre was so incensed by these losses that he founded SSPX on November 1, 1970 in Freiburg, Switzerland. Now the society's namesake, Pope Pius X, there's a lot of Pope names, so I hope you bear with me here. Pope Pius x reigned from 1903 to 1914. He had waged the Church's original campaign against theological Modernism, condemning it in a 1907 encyclical as the synthesis of all heresies and also imposing an anti modernist oath on clergy in 1910 that every Catholic priest had to recite once a year, at least once a year, usually in September. And that went on until the 1960s. Now it's a long oath and in my view it's a kind of hysterical attempt to freeze history in amber. The key lines in it go as I sincerely hold that the doctrine of faith was handed down to us from the apostles through the Orthodox Fathers in exactly the same meaning and always in the same purport. Therefore, I entirely reject the heretical misrepresentation that dogmas evolve and change from one meaning to another different from the one which the Church held previously. I also condemn every error according to which in place of the divine deposit which has been given to the Spouse of Christ to be carefully guarded by her, there is put a philosophical figment or product of a human conscience that has gradually been developed by human effort and will continue to develop in indefinitely. Okay, so what's wild about this is that it's coming from a Pope who would seem to be abdicating his role of leadership, his prerogative to interpret unclear points of theology or contemplate changes in politics or technology, as both Leo XIII did at the end of the 19th century and Leo XIV is doing today, especially with regard to things like AI. And the paradox is that even making a statement like this is a modern intervention against modernity. And I think it just goes to show that conservatism is always an innovation itself, initiated to compete against other innovations. Now, initially, Lefebvre had Vatican approval for his new organization via his local bishop. And in its forward facing messaging, Lefebvre presented his movement as a humble conservatory of ancient values, a priestly society to preserve pre Vatican II liturgy, especially the Latin Mass doctrine and priestly formation. But beneath this was always a burning contempt for the Council's liturgical, ecumenical and collegial reforms. And that would become an existential problem. So back to krone. John Paul II's would be assassin. He was embedded in a traditionalist Catholic sect that wanted, as he shouted during stabbing attack, the end of Vatican ii. And on the whole, SSPX tried to keep their politics on the down low. But today they echo Lefebvre's own political Origins in Action networking with Christian nationalist and anti liberal currents such as the Catholics rallied around Marine Le Pen in France and the AfD in Germany. Italian neo fascists. They're tight with them as well as us trad Catholics especially associated with California's Napa Instit. So given his own Phalangist background, Krones attraction to Lefebvre and the SSPX is easy to understand. But to give a sense of just how right wing this tendency is, Kron planned his assassination attempt on John Paul II based on the belief that JP2 was secretly a communist agent, which is bizarre. But this belief came directly from Lefebvre, who built his entire movement on Red Scare theology. He called communism the most monstrous air ever thought up by Satan. And he accused Vatican II of giving communists official access to the Vatican and then impugned John Paul ii, a Pope whose entire public identity was built on defeating Soviet communism in Poland, but who in the 80s was making the blasphemous choice to open dialogue with Eastern bloc leaders as a communist influenced Pope. And let's not forget that Marian devotion at Fatima is an anti communist tradition and practice. The alleged apparition of the Virgin first appeared in 1917. This is six months before the Bolshevik Revolution, which is a coincidence that has long been seen as prophetic by true believers. The glowing and floating Mary allegedly told Sr. Lucia that if her requests were heeded, Russia will be converted and there will be peace. But if not, Russia will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. Pope Pius XII reigned from 1939 to 1958 and he came to be known as the Pope of Fatima. And he issued consecrations of Soviet Russia in 1942 and 1952. I don't really know what that looks like, but I think it's sitting in Rome and saying a prayer and saying that all of Soviet Russia is dedicated to Jesus or something like that. And he did that twice. I don't know if it worked in the United States. The Blue army of Our lady of Fatima was founded in 1947 and it was anti communist by charter. Members recited the Rosary specifically to end the error of communism. So John Paul II was right on board with all of this because remember he was there at Fatima that day to honor Mary's direct intervention in saving his life. And then in 1984 he performed his own consecration of Soviet Russia. And all of this runs parallel to the fact that anti communism has from the late 19th century been an organizing principle of Catholic identity from the Scholastic anti Communism of Catholic social teaching to the Francoist clergy in Spain to the early Cold War, anti Communism of Bishop Fulton Sheen to the macabre and sublimated anti Communism of the Catholic horror film craze of the 1970s and then the satanic panic that followed it. Anti Communism was at the center of Lefebvre's theological rejection of the council. He framed its ecumenism, its religious liberty, as one continuous revolution that had descended from 1789 through liberalism into communism. And despite all of this, Kron somehow felt that Lefebvre was too accommodating toward Rome, perhaps because Lefebvre was willing to negotiate with the Vatican over the status of their sect. But why should anyone negotiate with a communist pope? So SSPX disowned Kron after the attack. Now there's some controversy over whether he was expelled prior to the stabbing for alleged mental instability or afterwards, as is claimed by at least one insider of the time who recalls Kron still being a fixture close to the time of the attack at the SSPX home seminary in Econ in Switzerland. What is clear is that following his arrest and conviction in a Portuguese court and after serving three years in prison, Kron left the priesthood behind. He married, he settled in Belgium, and he began distributing anti Semitic magazines. So from Franco worship to SSPX to Nazi broadsides, you know, as far as I know he's still alive and I wonder if he's a QANON guy now posting anti Semitic memes. But the Krohn story is not something that SSPX likes publicized. They're also Cagey about a 2020 report that shows Father Ramon Anglais, who was SSPX's top canonical advisor and a former St. Mary's Kansas chaplain, as the alleged abuser of a boy who later died by suicide with his family saying Angles canceled family debt in exchange for silence. These are allegations that were never tried in court and SSPX certainly don't want you to know that their ranks are swarming with full on anti Semites who promulgate the Jews killed Jesus, lie and Holocaust denialists, including one priest who said the gas chambers really were just for sanitation. They also don't want you to remember that the violent streak of Kron was taken up by Javier Lopez, arrested in November 2022 with Molotov cocktails in his possession. Also smoke bombs and firearm components and ammunition. He described himself online as a radical traditional Catholic clerical fascist. He praised Anders Brevik, who is the 2011 Norway mass shooter and Then a search of his residence found Nazi insignia and a large Nazi flag with a crucifix and rosary fixed directly above the swastika. So I guess it was church first, Nazism second. Lopez had posted online about carrying out a mass shooting at a school for children with special needs. For some reason, he'd been attending an SSPX affiliated chapel in Richmond, Virginia for about seven months, and when he was sentenced in February 2025 to eight years for felon in possession weapons charges, an SSPX priest came to counsel him in jail. Now, as Dean Dettloff pointed out in his analysis of the story on the Magnificast, which is a really good Catholic leftist podcast, he does it with Matt Bernico. With this excommunication of sspx, Pope Leo may have seriously hobbled an organization that that has served as a petri dish for violent extremism. And finally, I'm sure that the SSPX wants everyone to forget that their organization also produces goofy extremists like David Bawden, AKA Pope Michael, who grew up in a family that joined SSPX after rejecting Vatican II in 1990. He and five others, including his two parents, held a self styled conclave in the Kansas thrift store the family owned and they elected him Pope on the first ballot. He wasn't even ordained at the time and he ran his Vatican in exile from a Kansas farmhouse until his death in 2022 with roughly a dozen followers. So what we have in SSPX is a small, ultra pious, super motivated sect with roots in French nationalist, monarchist and anti Semitic tendencies, distilling and concentrating all of the larger church's baseline paranoia and anti communism into a movement so committed to preventing modernization they inspired an assassination attempt on one of the most conservative modernizers in church history. Our long term listeners will know about Opus dei, another ultra conservative Catholic sect, through our reporting on its influence over Trump's inner circle. SSPX is far to the right of Opus dei, which has never gone so far as to claim that the Vatican II reforms are blasphemous and has carefully sought to maintain its communion with Rome, no matter how uncomfortable that is. But SSPX has consistently pushed at that threshold of authority, with Lefebvre going so far. In 1988, at the age of 82, to take a first run at what his descendants accomplished. On July 1 this year, against the express prohibition of Pope John Paul ii, Lefebvre consecrated four bishops to continue his work within the sspx. The Vatican immediately declared that all Parties in the ceremony had incurred automatic excommunication, which Lefebvre refused to acknowledge. But in a show of detente in an olive branch reach out by Pope Benedict XVI, the excommunications were rescinded in 2009 in this attempt to mend the rift okay, so that's a whole lot about men. Let me turn to what the impacts are of these men's belief, especially in the communities they preside over. What is it like to live in an SSPX community? On the website where is Peter? Run by friend of the podcast Mike Lewis, there's an article from June 30, this is the day before the schism event by a woman named Cassandra hackstock. It's called 7 Years in the SSPX and I'm going to read a big chunk of it for you because it's really good, but I have to give a content warning. Cassandra is going to be describing constant domestic, physical and emotional and substance abuse. So if it feels better to skip ahead by about five and a half minutes, please do so On a sunny Santa Clara mountainside, I stood in shocked silence. It was lunchtime at the retreat center and the buffet was ready. Prayers were said and everyone stood. An unassuming woman in a loose fitting dress leaned over to me and to the other women and said, stand by your chairs until the men have gone through the buffet line and then we will eat. My jaw dropped. I couldn't help it. Most of the women accepted this business of the men eating first without any visible opinions. But there was sometimes another person present in society gatherings who was more aligned with what I called normal. And as I looked at the other women, I found one. Her mouth was open too, and we just looked at each other in disbelief. During the retreat, this center would play audio commentary of the bombing of Dresden during World War II with graphic descriptions of people being burned alive at every meal to show us how horrible hell would be. Definitely would be, because our priest preached at Mass that most of humanity would be going to hell. This was what life in the society was like. Ever stranger episodes would occur, troubling my soul. People may not get divorces very often in the sspx, but couples living under the same roof for decades in mutual palpable hatred of each other can be worse, certainly for the traumatized children in these homes. Many of the young children grow up to lose their faith entirely, become addicted to drugs and alcohol, drift aimlessly and miserably into criminal behavior, beating their own spouses. Eventually, I have known more than one Family who had to flee from a vicious father, running to relatives or cheap motel rooms to protect themselves. It's actually very bad to teach men to rule their families like gods. It warps something in their psyches and sometimes leads to violence that endangers everyone around them. We were constantly taught that women were subjective beings so our thoughts could be readily dismissed as unreliable, that we were instinctively flighty, irrational and emotional. Men were taught that they were objective beings who were rational and were given the office of ruling their homes. Women had to obey the men in all things. Father X preached from the pulpit that if your husband told you to make mashed potatoes for dinner, you had to make them or else be sinning. Fathers became tyrants who spent days at work, hopefully, and nights drinking with society men, ranting about how men need brotherhood while the wives struggle to raise their 9, 11, 15 children without support. One woman had the audacity to have a nervous breakdown and was talked of as crazy and unable to handle anything. Instead of being supported and loved, as Catholics are called and even ordered to do, her daughter missed large chunks of her eighth grade education in order to raise her siblings while her mother was ill. Fathers kept drinking together, though a common saying was that if you know where you are and how to get home, your drinking isn't sinful. Thus the male alcoholism and the treatment of women as broodmares and sole caregivers continued, leaving broken fathers, mothers and children in its wake. I knew one woman who had seven C sections. Women weren't allowed to wear pants. Modesty culture was directed completely at us. Although makeup was not forbidden, almost no one wore it. Women dressed in shapeless sack dresses and the men looked like door to door evangelists. I've heard people who aren't familiar with the SSPX say that they are all poor, which shouldn't matter, but the truth is that they aren't all poor. Large families do take money, but some families are quite wealthy. The bland, shapeless clothing as part of the society look seen as modest and humble. I was pressured by the whole community there to marry a man I didn't love or want to marry. All of my friends who all went to the society church, my family members, and even the pastor of our church, Father X leaned on me hard to marry him. It can show my mindset at the time that I felt I had to ask permission to break up with him. So I made an appointment with Father. I told him what was on my heart, but Father told me to marry him anyway. You'll grow to love him after you're married, he said. I want to tell everyone who is attracted to the SSPX that the society life is not just a case of loving the old ways and being faithful to tradition. The SSPX turned a loving and kind man, my best friend, into a man who beat his wife terribly in front of his children. It will ruin your marriage and leave your children hopeless, terrified of the false God who they preach is anxious to punish us all. Father X preached that we should smile as we spanked our children since we are happy to discipline them so they won't lose their souls. I think so many of their youth turn to drugs, alcohol and promiscuity out of despair. They have lost hope in their salvation and since the future holds nothing but horror and damnation, they will self medicate to feel better now. These people are my friends and family. I love them and I hope they can find happiness now. With Lefebvre dead since 1991, the charismatic leader aspect of the cult equation is absent. There's no financial extraction model beyond ordinary church style tithing, and members generally retain outside employment, education and family contact rather than full physical and social isolation. So I'd say that this is right on the edge of the cultic and the question now is whether the schism of SSPX will fuel its growth or cut at its root of legitimacy. So there are many real people in real families and real communities who will be impacted by the schism. The sspx reports having 798 mass locations and operating 184 houses and 94 schools across 77 countries. The largest concentrations of SSPX communities are in the us In France and Germany, the Society tripled its number of chapels in Poland between 2019 and 2021, coinciding with a rise in Polish tradcath culture. The US district specifically consists of about 100 priests, 101 chapels, 22 priories and 25 schools. Globally there are currently 733 priests and 264 seminarians. That's a very strong priest to seminarian ratio, especially in the global north where the same ratio for the church proper is in the gutter. The society also counts 145 monastic brothers, 88 oblates who are dedicated laypersons, and then 250 sisters, all with an average member age of 47. Now how many laypeople does this infrastructure serve? In 2007 the Vatican watchdog overseeing the group estimated that around 600,000 people attended SSPX chapels. And this is a figure that the SSPX itself now cites and that outlets like the BBC republish, but the Guardian in the UK puts it closer to 150 or 200,000. And the traditionalist outlet, the Pillar, estimates only around 100,000 laypeople. There's no consensus number, and the counting, of course, is politicized, either to make the group seem more or less powerful or relevant than it is. But two points here. The typical priest to adherent or parishioner ratio in the non schismed Catholic church is about 3400 to 1. If you take the high estimate of 600,000 adherents in the SSPX to the lowest at 100,000, that ratio goes to 800:1 to 150:1 respectively. So however many adherents there are, they are much more tightly connected to their priest, just in numerical terms. And what, what does that closeness mean now that those priests are excommunicated and not allowed to perform marriages or hear confessions? If we assume 500,000 global adherents, so less than the Vatican's 2007 number, but also allowing for 20 years of growth, the community could expect to produce almost 700 marriages at the typical marriage incidence rate for Catholics per year. Now, this is a group, as Hackstock has noted, where having large families displays allegiance and commitment. This is an ideal, and it's baked into the entire culture, into homeschooling networks, the school system, retreat culture. One typical SSPX commentator I came across argued that fertility is never merely biological, but it's the embodied consequence of theology. And they'll openly talk about demographic reproduction as a mechanism by which traditionalism will eventually outpopulate and outlast the mainstream church. Now, one upshot here is that by declaring all SSPX marriages going forward invalid, the Vatican is striking at the heart of the SSPX home. This takeover by outpopulation strategy is also mirrored in their real estate acquisition. What typically happens is that an SSPX priory raises money through small donation tithes and buys real estate on the open market. But often these are properties that are abandoned by mainstream Catholic institutions in decline. So the flagship example here is St. Mary's in Kansas. This is a former Jesuit mission and college that dates back to 1869, and a seminary attached to it that sat empty after it closed in 1967. Archbishop Lefebvre visited St. Mary's in 1977. He loved the property and decided to establish a priory in the school there. And so the society purchased the property outright in 78. Similarly, a Retreat property in Los Gatos, California was purchased in 1991 from a couple who had been running it as a secular Christian campsite. And so in asset terms, SSPX has kind of been this bottom feeder on post Vatican II vocations collapse and religious order property liquidation. And at this point I can't move on without remembering something really distinct, which is that in the two cults that I was in, finding a home base was always this huge challenge and so was recruitment. And so the default solution followed the SSPX arc here, which is find the distressed assets of an economy in decline, snap them up, and then get your vulnerable recruits to do the task of renovation. So I want to return to this question as I start to finish up, Will this schism fuel the growth of SSPX or cut at its root of legitimacy? I consulted a range of Catholic Church watchers on this question. By the way, all sources are in the show notes, and a few consensus positions emerge. First of all, with SSPX now formally outside the sacramental system, with confessions and marriages made invalid, it's lost access to the church infrastructure of parishes, charities and university systems that make a sect like Opus DEI powerful. And I want to cite Dean Dettloff again from the Magnificast, saying that SSPX's insistence on dogmatic rupture is kind of self sabotaging because it's actually still very easy to be a hyper conservative, even neo fascist tradcath and remain in communion with the larger church. So the Napa Institute, Cardinal Burke's circle, the Qanon Pope, Bishop Strickland and Vice President Vance operate with full sacramental legitimacy and can remain at the center of the populist traditionalist convergence that maintains a polite but deferential resistance to Leo. In Commonweal, Massimo Fagioli predicts that SSPX will flare out through the excommunication as the broader traditionalist movement outgrows its lefebvrist origins and attracts converts and younger clergy who don't identify with SSPX at all or maybe even care about it. And building on that, I actually wonder whether the Vatican's July 2 decree can be read as reinforcing this split. Because by punishing sspx, Rome disciplines the fringe that it can actually technically reach, while it leaves the larger, better funded in communion nationalist traditionalist network, the one that's actually positioned to integrate with and serve nationalistic interests at scale untouched and implicitly legitimated by comparison. But I want to end with a reflection on a very big gray area in all of this. In the broadest terms, excommunication means your behavior and views are intolerable enough that you can't hang out with us anymore. And that's really severe. And historically, the Church has often opted to leave doors open for the excommunicated to return. And whether this is generosity, forgiveness, or the prerogative of a compliance regime is up for debate. But the question of how a person is included and celebrated, or excluded and shunned on the basis of their internal beliefs, like how is that handled in practical terms? How does dogma become family? How is the word made flesh? First, the threshold is higher for bishops and clergy who Rome assumes are consciously aware of how they are going off book and are additionally responsible. Responsible, therefore, for followers, they are potentially leading into error. But the followers, the laypeople, the folks that Cassandra Hackstock lived and suffered with, how are their inner lives evaluated? The Vatican's excommunication Decree has a two part test. Internally, the person must consciously place SSPX's authority above the Pope's. And externally, the person must maintain exclusive, sustained participation in SSPX's sacramental life. But something bothered me about this. As I was thinking about it, I was wondering why among the sacraments, only marriage and confession are invalid in SSPX going forward, why not the other sacraments? Baptism, confirmation, final rites? And in looking into it, I found a paradox that amounts to a loophole. The Church holds that there are two different kinds of priestly power, the power of order and the power of jurisdiction. Ordination confers what they call an indelible sacramental character that enables a priest to validly consecrate the Eucharist and baptize people. And this power is permanent. It can never be revoked. And this is why Mass remains valid regardless of a priest's canonical standing, per the doctrine called ex opere operato, or from the work worked. The validity depends on correct right, not on the minister's moral or jurisdictional status. In other words, the magic cannot be compromised by the magician. And that principle comes from St. Augustine's 4th century fight against Donatism, which held that sacraments from compromised priests were invalid. That's what that breakaway sect said. But the Council of Trent rejected that view. Confession and marriage are different because they involve matters of legal jurisdiction, meaning they are where the mystery of religion intersects with notions of worldly governance. Marriage, technically, is a sacrament that the couple administers to each other with the priest as a civil and religious witness. Confession is a little trickier. It's modeled as a judicial act requiring authority over the specific case. And this means that the forgiveness of the sin in question has to trace back to real church accountability. It can't just be one guy waving something off, oh yeah, you're forgiven. We have to know who is forgiving it. It has to be registered somewhere or backed up. And so one way of looking at it is that the sacraments the Vatican can invalidate are those that involve a priest's mediation of the subject's legal and internal status, and at the same time within a social milieu. So marriage and confession meet that standard. But what about baptism and the rest? The question is, who would invalidate a baby's baptism? Why would the Church want to invalidate, going forward, the capacity to baptize souls into the Church? It wouldn't. And then what worldly status has changed for the person who receives communion? And so ultimately, this is where the real substance of an excommunication seems to fall apart. The Church can't exclude even the worst people from its most precious sacraments. If Hitler himself had been ordained at seminary and served as a chaplain in World War I instead of dabbling in art, no excommunication would remove the magic from his throat. If he uttered the words of consecrating the bread and wine, he could have offered Mass as his last act in that bunker with Eva Braun kneeling beside him with a white lace mantilla on her head. And that bread and wine would have definitely transformed into the body and blood. And then destroying that bunker would have desecrated that holy sacrament. So hiding at the center of the SSPX story is the belief that the magic cannot be canceled by the corruption of the magician. And this leaves the door open to two A fascist apologist Vatican, which we have seen time and time again, can use the sanctity of the magic as a theological alibi for the magician, choosing not to act against a corrupt magician, even though it could. But an anti fascist Vatican such as Leo appears to run, cannot cancel out the sacred magic, no matter what. And so ultimately, the Church and the unwelcome cult within it share the same magic. And that's one reason it's so hard for even the best clerics to stand up to the worst. Thanks for listening, everybody.
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