Tradicat

 + JMJ Principle 2: Know the Faith as the Catholic Church Teaches or Taught it. A knowledge of the Faith and familiarity with the history of the Catholic Church for at least the past 200 years provides a good foundation for weathering this storm. Bias, Opinions and Misbeliefs One landmine that undermines principle #2 is the mixing of personal opinion with doctrine. These opinions, beliefs by another name, are sometimes held in a death grip. In some cases they are just prejudices against various real groups such as immigrants, Jews, communists, masons etc. In some cases it extends to conspiracy theories such as sedevacantism. These firmly held beliefs prevent people from both understanding Doctrine as Taught by the Church and making the necessary distinctions. For example, which religions offer worship to the True God? Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, Jews and Muslims. Some people suck in their breath through their teeth creating an noticeable hiss at the above statement....

 + JMJ Principle 1: Realize that something is amiss in the Catholic Church The world in which I had my Traditional Awakening, is one in which practically anything pre-Conciliar such as liturgy, doctrinc, and even dogmas are either suppressed, ignored or re-framed to be acceptable to the ‘world’. What is more, the people adhering to these pre-conciliar teachings and liturgy are persecuted by other members of the Catholic Church. The things that non-Trads say about Trads can be quite extreme. For example, accusations against Traditionalists include that they are: A revival of the Jansenists (link) , Schismatics, Heretics, Uncharitable, Lefebrists Radicals Integrists When one group of Catholics is persecuted by the others for simply wanting to live as Catholics before them did for generations … well something is wrong. Further, we need to realize that when what was previously condemned is now promoted and what was previously promoted as the trut...

 + JMJ Introduction Since the 1980’s when my family started going to Fr. Normandin’s mass (link: https://tradicat.blogspot.com/2026/05/stories-early-days-of-tradition-part-5.html ), I have seen the oppressive attrition resulting from the continuous pressure on Traditional Catholics and the inexorable passage of time. In Ecclesia Dei (link) , I intuitively recognized it as an attempt to scare people into submission with vague threats and ambiguities. Later on, when I studied ED, the chasm between disobedience and schism was one that seemed insurmountable – declaring an action contravened Canon 751 when it wasn’t included in the Canonical warning was akin to declaring something illegal after-the-fact (link) . Now we are faced with an objective repeat of the 1988 Episcopal Consecrations and the media frenzy and well / not so well intentioned voices are crying out all over the wilderness of the internet. Are they sirens calling us to our immortal damnation or voices of reason ...

 + JMJ So ... let's say that the ChatGPT correctly synthesized the positions of the SSPX vs Vatican as: At the end point, I think the LLM collects an interesting if somewhat skewed perspective: The SSPX mapping hinges on this claim: That Vatican II affirms (at least implicitly) propositions that the Syllabus of Errors explicitly condemned. The broader Church response is: The same propositions are still rejected—but Vatican II is addressing different categories (political, pastoral, anthropological) rather than reversing doctrine. If the "broader Church response" is not a hallucination brought on by the 'flavour' of the texts online ... then why was the preample of 2012 rejected and modifying footnotes that changed the meaning to unconditional acceptance of V2, the magisterium that came after and the Novus Ordo??? Me thinks the LLM protesteth too much! P^3 Doctrinal Preamble presented to Rome by Bishop Fellay 15th April, 2012 We promise to be always faithful to the...

 + JMJ Part 5b How Did We Get Here??? So in the previous ChatGPT analysis the LLM ‘concluded’ that there was continuity in doctrine. So now we’re going to explore this element. There is some repetition but I don't have time right now to do a lot of editing.  I think instead we'll have a Part 5c where I try to pull it all together with some old fashioned human sense making. At the end point, I think the LLM collects an interesting if somewhat skewed perspective: The SSPX mapping hinges on this claim: That Vatican II affirms (at least implicitly) propositions that the Syllabus of Errors explicitly condemned. The broader Church response is: The same propositions are still rejected—but Vatican II is addressing different categories (political, pastoral, anthropological) rather than reversing doctrine. While the summary of the SSPX position seems close, that of the broader Church seems to be either an outright AI hallucination or a consensus point from the literature that it used...

 + JMJ This is the fifth in this series and I think it may require a part b to show the controversial documents and teachings of the Pope post V2. P^3 Part 5 How Did We Get Here??? Introduction My family became ‘Traditional’ in early 1980’s and I didn’t realise until years later how early we entered the Fray. So the SSPX was slightly over a decade old when we started going to Mass. That is a young organization, as someone said at the consecrations “Aren’t you a little young to be a bishop?”, the response was, “That is something that time will change.” 1970: SSPX founded with diocesan approval (Abp. Marcel Lefebvre) 1974–1976: Vatican II disputes escalate; Lefebvre suspended a divinis 1988: Illicit episcopal consecrations → excommunications declared 2000: SSPX Jubilee pilgrimage to Rome (signals openness to talks) 2009: Excommunications lifted by Pope Benedict XVI 2011–2012: Doctrinal talks with CDF collapse 2015–2017: SSPX granted faculties for confessi...