The Jonah Reality, Valid Priests and Bishops: and Papal Infallibility

Amici,

In my previous essay, I mentioned The Jonah Reality as a possible solution to an intractable problem. 

As Bergoglio and his peeps ("Tucho" "Kissy" Fernandez and a large coven of other Modernists and deviants) do their best to disintegrate the Church, we need to take a moment and consider our options, although things are happening so fast now that "Fiducia supplicans" has been foisted on us, and as it is apparently going to be seriously defended with Tucho saying bishops can't opt out of it, full rebellion might erupt at any moment, and some bishop or bishops' conference will declare Tucho, at least, excommunicated. Now, that would be interesting! The firing on Fort Sumter and Pearl Harbor rolled into one. It's past due.

Three Options

1. We Traditionalists can pretend that Bergoglio is an actual pope, which many Trads do, for example, the SSPX itself, the FSSP, and various VIPs, such as Bishop Athanasius Schneider, Cardinal Burke (more like Cardinal Punching Bag) or Bishop Strickland.
   
2. We can be "Benesedevacantists", such as Ann Barnhardt and Dr. Edward Massa, and so far as I can tell, Archbishop Viganò himself. I myself basically take this position; i.e. that while John 23rd, Paul 6, JP 2 and Benedict 16 were very flawed and essentially heretical in various ways, they were at least still validly elected pontiffs. JP2 and B16 certainly were, though maybe not the first two. Bergoglio (for a number of reasons) clearly wasn't validly elected. (N.B. Popes are not "the Lord's Anointed" as I saw one blogger insist; they're just elected as already-existing bishops to serve as bishop of the Roman See. E.l.e.c.t.e.d. Just whether they're immune from heresy after that election is pretty much what Trads – and everyone else – are fighting over at the moment. See Papal Infallibility below.)
   
3. Or one can take the "Hard" Sedevacantist" position, such as Novus Ordo Watch or AKA Catholic, who argue cogently that a true pope hasn't existed since Pius XII died in 1958. Don't simply dismiss their efforts; they're trying to make sense of a total mess, after all.
   

1. If we take Position 1, we blow our circuits; i.e. cognitive dissonance will eventually cause us to go cross-eyed and sit in trees and chirp and eat worms. Bergoglio is that much an anti-pope.
   
2. If we take Position 2, we can at least argue that Bergoglio is an usurper and anti-pope, and none of his antics are valid. But we have still many bishops consecrated by JP2 and B16 to work with and who could – if they want – act to preserve the Church. Some seem to be waking up and doing just that.
3. If we take Position 3, we easily solve the disastrous problem of the wayward, clearly heretical (increasingly heretical with Bergoglio in charge) Vatican II Era Church. But then we create a new problem: What or Where, then, is the "true" Catholic Church? Can it be said to still exist at all?

Position 1 is we stay in the frying pan as Bergi burns the whole house down around our ears; Position 2 allows us to dump The Ogre and jump-restart the Church, or you could compare it to removing a kidney stone to save the kidney; Position 3 is a case of "out of the frying pan and into the fire" of the Unknown, a search for Apostolic Succession in the shifting sands of a very grainy desert.

• For if the "Hard" Sedes are right, they would say the Church exists here and there, extant via bishops consecrated NOT by any Vatican II bishop. (The Novus Ordo Watch provides a list of priests not ordained by Vatican II-consecrated bishops.) Yes, these priests would be excommunicated automatically for receiving ordination from an excommunicated bishop, but that excommunication would be from a Church the "Hard Sedes" regard as heretical, and thus void.

The Dilemma

In other words, a dilemma! I mean, this Hard Sede argument would insist Bishop Athanasius Schneider is just a layman in fancy dress (as we used to say of the Anglican clergy). It would mean that Fr. Chad Ripperger is just a layman in fancy dress, too. We KNOW that isn't true because of his long success against demons, those hyper-legalists of all legalists would not let themselves be pushed around by a befuddled layman!

• So, it seems, the "Hard Sedes" can't be right, either. Unless you are a very, very "Hard Sede", what does N.O. Watch offer? A bunch of excommunicated bishops and priests who may or may not have Apostolic Succession, but no standing – except in their own eyes – to confect the sacraments. That is hardly comforting to most of us.
• Or we can stay in the mainstream Church, the "Universal" or "Catholic" Church. So, what if the pope is a lunatic? Or at least a massively obvious heretic like Bergoglio? Sooner or later, Bergi's reign will end and his "Ape of the Church", his Synodal Church, will collapse – because it most definitely is not of God. We see collapse in seminarian numbers in both Poland and Germany, with the latter below 50 now, while in Poland, the number has fallen from 6,789 in 2000 to 1,690 today. That's The Bergoglio Effect and it can't continue. (BTW: Germany harbors a bit under 21 million folks who identify as Catholics, but just 1.2 million of them went to Mass. I bet a lot of those are Trads.)
• A Schism will almost certainly occur as this impossible mess cannot continue, which Bergoglio's "Fiducia supplicans" is demonstrating by the hour. The Church has already fractured de facto, but it is about to become de jure. Yet unless he is officially declared to be an anti-pope and his appointments and rulings invalid and illegal – by a significant group of orthodox prelates – we are still stuck with heretics running the show. For a time.
  

Solution: The Jonah Reality

• Hence my argument about Our Jonah Reality.
  

Jonah was an Old Testament prophet and God assigned him the job of going to the great pagan city of Nineveh and preaching to its inhabitants, sometime in the 700s BC. Jonah, an Israelite nationalist, didn't want them saved: he wanted them in Hell. So he fled God. God caught up with him on the sea and stuffed him into the belly of a whale (or fish, or aquatic creature of some sort) for three days. After that digestive experience, Jonah got himself cleaned up and went to Nineveh and starting walking straight through the metropolis, preaching away. Sure enough, via his preaching, the pagans repented and their city was saved. (Important: God, you see, clearly had a whale-sized tub of grace prepared to pour out on the citizens – as He had at Pentecost; He just wanted to work through human agency like He works through the Church.)

Jonah served as a unwilling prophet, but God worked through him anyway. The Jonah Reality is that God works through us even when we don't want Him to. Saul of Tarsus was literally Hell-bent on destroying Christians, for example, but God zapped him on the road to Damascus, and Saul became Paul, the famous Apostle. God does things like that.

So even though the Vatican II Avatar (version) of the Catholic Church is a mess and a disaster, God can work through it. Even though the Vatican II Church changed the consecration of bishops and the ordination of priests, God can still consecrate and ordain valid priests from that. It is all pure Gift to begin with, pure Grace. All existence is. God rules. And He loves; i.e. He "wills our good". He's already gone to great lengths for us (see Christ, Jesus) and we can have confidence in Him.

Reflections and Addenda

Excommunication and Power Manipulation

Excommunication the Church uses to control people. It is mean to sober sinners up, and tell them they cannot receive the Sacraments until they repent and get their life in order. Instead, the Powers-That-Be in the Church use it to slap down people and control them. An Italian priest named Father Ramon Guidetti called out Bergo

glio recently as an anti-Christ – which his parishioners immediately applauded in the church – and his superiors excommunicated him. This will not sit well with real Catholics.

When Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre consecrated four bishops for the SSPX in 1988, he and they received Canon Law-stipulated automatic excommunication, but that didn't sit well with a great many; those having "the Catholic sense" knew it was wrong, and in 2009 Pope Benedict grudgingly lifted these excommunications. God stood behind all that. Despite the mainstream hierarchy's foot-dragging, God got His priests un-excommunicated. And He had a tub of grace prepared! Pope Francis, old Begoglio himself, anti-pope and Church Smasher, the Terror of Trads and Dragon of Argentina no less, later allowed the SSPX to hear confessions, etc., and basically since then, very few except hard-core wackos would argue that the SSPX is a heretical, excommunicated sect. (One of its bishops was kicked out for preaching against the Jews, and formed his own Church, consecrating four bishops as of now, I think it is.) The SSPX's canonicity might be still a bit "unsettled", but so what? Good for them. The SSPX grows daily by leaps and bounds. Obviously, God supports it. Who can stand against God? (See Gamaliel, Rabban, in Acts 5) Jonah couldn't stand against God, the Sanhedrin couldn't, and Jorge Mario Bergoglio can't, either.

Apostolic Succession note:

• Apostolic Succession is the traditional way ancient Christianity was and is organized. Protestantism opposes it; they dismiss Apostolic Succession, root and branch, as mumbo-jumbo. You're saved by faith alone, Protestantism (usually) teaches, not good works – though most Protestants won't put up with charlatans doing evil deeds yet saying they are "saved" despite the fact that Luther specifically taught you are damned if you DO any good works! (Few, or none, modern Protestants could stand either Luther or Calvin today.) That would impinge on God's sovereignty, see? 
• However about Protestants, all the ancient historical Christian Churches: the Western Orthodoxy, aka Roman Catholicism, Catholicism in general (Latin Rite Catholics plus the 22 Eastern Rite Churches in Communion with it), the Big Fourteen Orthodox Churches that don't recognize the pope (The Russian Orthodox, The Greek Orthodox, the Serbian Orthodox, etc.) and the "Oriental Orthodox", the Copts, the Ethiopians, the Armenians, etc., ALL have Apostolic Succession, the Seven Sacraments, and so on. They are ALL based on that doctrine, and rite, of Apostolic Succession. This was how Christianity was founded, and it is central to it, for priests and bishops exist to confect the Sacraments, and it is by participation in the Sacraments by which we are saved.

The Anglican Exception

Now, many Anglicans squirmed about regarding Apostolic Succession. A lot of them didn't feel very Protestant, to put it simply. Some of them therefore wanted to claim Apostolic Succession, and asked Pope Leo XIII to recognize Anglican Orders as valid re: Apostolic Succession. But Leo sagely pointed out that since the Anglican Church was founded by an Act of Parliament, and because that Act founding this Church did not recognize Holy Orders as a sacrament, then he, Pope Leo, could obviously not recognize them as validly ordained since their founding document disallowed Apostolic Succession. Kapow! So, since then, some Anglican priests have somehow got Orthodox bishops (of one of the autocephalous Orthodox Churches, of which there are 14, as noted above), to ordain them. All so they can truly have Apostolic Succession. If that works for them. Er, well. Whatever. God will sort it out.

Popes and Infallibility

This doctrine is actually the rock upon with so many crash their barques and find themselves in the water, as Jonah did. Is the pope infallible? If so, exactly how? It's been a developing doctrine, from the ancient past down to today, but it certainly seems more headache than anything else. No one ever seemed to have thought – maybe a handful of theologians like Robert Bellarmine, for one – what would happen if a true heretic became pope. The usual idea was that God would preserve the papal office from such. Yet since all the Vatican II popes have one way or another, some more, some less, taught against Tradition and the Deposit of Faith (The Deposit of Faith equals Tradition, as Archbishop Lefebvre said) then are they all false popes? It seems a true Gordian Knot. And round and round the arguments go. 

I just touch on it here since the entire Vatican I Council dealt mainly with this Infallibility issue, and volumes upon volumes have been written about it. 

1. Part of the problem is that the Church has always had the pope, and the pope has always been the last court of appeal. Any organization needs such. It is inherently necessary. The Protestant idea that Sts. Peter and Paul and James and so on were just guys who knew Jesus and got together once in a while is not Biblically or Traditionally sustainable. There've always been bishops and there's always been Christ's vicar on Earth serving as bishop at Rome. Truly, "the buck stops with him". That's simply in the nature of the job. But obviously, the man has to be orthodox Catholic.
2. The Corinthians had an issue with their bishop about the year 100 AD, and to solve it, they didn't write to Antioch, site of a very strong Church and the first place Christians were called Christians, and where St Peter had once served as bishop. They didn't write to Alexandria, the second largest city of the empire, and center of a strong Church. Jerusalem had been destroyed 40 years previously and Constantinople didn't yet exist (and wouldn't for 230-some years). 
3. The Corinthians wrote to Rome, and they accepted Pope Clement's ruling.

So it has always been. A problem arises – Martin Luther is an example – and slowly it works its way up through the hierarchy and eventually (I say eventually) lands in the pope's lap, and he has to deal with it. Henry VIII is another example of this. But since Pope Pius IX's reign, we have had transatlantic cables. Technology altered the situation. So, since the 1870s a pope has been able to deal directly with issues on the other side of the planet. 

• Over time, this caused centralization and increased power in the Vatican. 
• The Vatican bureaucracy grew and grew, costing ever more, and the figure of the pope himself grew and grew, average Catholics began reading papal encyclicals which appeared more and more often, all this while the papacy itself became economically poorer, losing the Papal States in 1870 and thus relying on handouts, with the pope a "prisoner" in the Vatican. 
• Today, apparently, Bergoglio has sold the Vatican to the Chinese Communists for huge sums of money, which explains a lot of his behavior and his betrayal of Chinese Catholics. "Follow the money" is just as crucial in Church issues as in anywhere else. But because of our technology, should the "pope" slap some woman away from him, as Bergoglio once infamously did a Chinese woman, it is instant news worldwide. 

My point is a lot of the problems we have with the Pope are structural, as in organizational and financial. One man now is literally universal bishop, universal dictator, really. He needs a huge bureaucracy. If he's a good man like Leo XIII or St. Pius X, great. If he's an actor and a flashy Public Relations genius, like John Paul II (who was also a true hero against the Nazis and the Communists, let us never forget), well, that's nice. But if he's an out-and-out coward, as was the effeminate Paul VI, or a dunce, as was John XXIII, or a bully – as is Bergoglio; unfortunately for us, an anti-Catholic bully! – then we're in trouble.

And this is simply structural: as the Church became more and more centralized, it became more and more open to infiltration and take-over by hostile forces. Modernism the Mother of All Heresies arose with Darwinism and the idea of Evolution (we evolve, truth evolves, God evolves, we make up God and evolve Him ourselves; i.e. basic Freemason or Communist conceits). It attracted theologians to it, and they began to try to alter Church teaching. The Church resisted till Vatican II when modernism won out. Now we suffer from an over-centralized Church flinging heaps of heresy on us like monkeys in a zoo throwing poo at visitors.

We need to decentralize, but not in this false "Synodal Church" fashion, which is a fraud, but back to bishops and archbishops running their dioceses. And we see today that the African prelates may be the key to that. How far will Bergoglio push them to establish his pervert agenda? We need a pope who will free himself from the over-centralized bureaucracy so he can do his job. The job Clement I did. The job most all the popes have done. And his primary job is to defend Catholic (i.e. Universal) Church's Tradition, also known as the Deposit of Faith (Bergoglio dismisses the whole idea of that, by the way) while strengthening his brother bishops (not treating them as hogs he can slaughter, as Bergoglio does). Like the Emperor Augustus, a pope is the first among equals in the Church's Universal Republic, for all the bishops are direct descendants, via Apostolic Succession, of the Apostles. Apostolic Succession, then, remains central.

We need to get back to that model, that paradigm. It is a necessity.

 An Préachán

Looking at Sedevacantism Issues Again What with All Our Troubles Breaking Full Upon Us

A Chairde, Amici,

Opening Note: Regarding Bergoglio's official approval of blessing the carnally deviant, this is, of course a "deal breaker". It cannot stand. Already we're seeing battle lines drawn up across the globe, for and against. We, the laity, must not tolerate it. If you have a local priest or bishop who approves of such an "abomination set up in the House of the Lord", break it off with them. Vote with your feet. They've excommunicated themselves from the Lord Jesus Christ. Full stop. Bergoglio has taught a lot of heresy before (death penalty, reality of Hell, etc.) but this is too much. Of course, "Bergi" is just pushing the envelope, seeing how far he can humiliate God, God's Church, you, and me. That in itself is the story of his war against the TLM. It's all of a piece.

Things are dire. People are on edge. Millions are leaving the Church, "voting with their feet". Things seem to be getting ever worse, more insane, more frightening. Now, as noted, "Pope Francis", aka Bergoglio, via his creepy henchman "Tucho" "Kissy" Fernandez, has allowed same-sex blessings in the Church. Taylor Marshall opines here that this is to destory marriage as a sacrament. And exiled Bishop Strickland calls on "his brother bishops" to unite against this Vatican ruling (fat chance). 

What with all this literal filth – spiritual septic tank filth spewing all over us from Bergoglio's volcano – I have been studying the Sedevacantists again. Personally, I think it quite reasonable to deduce that the papal office stands vacant with the so-called "Pope Francis". As with the reports above, every day his "Magisterium" goes from bad to worse. Reading Liz Yore's recent work at Lifesite News reinforces this deduction. However, going beyond that idea, I was perusing the Novus Ordo Watch site, going through their blog posts and Most Frequently Asked questions. They are considered "hard" Sedevacantists; i.e., that there's been no valid pope since Pius XII's death back in October of 1958. As such, they do not consider the Vatican II Church a Catholic avatar of historical Catholicism at all. That has some far-stretching complications, indeed. It certainly explains a lot of the past 60 years' history, but it is the answer to our problems? I will discuss this below.

Now, in August of this year I had written an article about Sedevacantism. My question then embodied the following, in which I wrote back in August regarding the "hard" Sedevacantist thesis that:

Anyway, were these men NOT actual popes, then we don't have a Catholic Church, because the last priest ordained by the last bishop Pope Pius XII assigned a diocese to has probably passed away by now. Invalid, false popes cannot ordain or assign bishops, and invalid bishops cannot ordain valid priests. Therefore, Catholicism is dead.

Remember the priests exist to validly ordain the Sacraments, especially the Most Holy Eucharist. (It's by Baptism and the Holy Eucharist that we participate in all the ancient Covenants. The Covenant system God set up with the First Covenant, when He blessed Creation and established the seventh day for the remembrance of it. The Holy Eucharist, capstone of the system, is required for salvation, as St. John makes clear in the sixth chapter of his Gospel. So it can't come to an end, until The End.) And the bishops exist to ordain valid priests and keep an eye on them. And in their turn, popes exist either to ordain and assign bishops or approve the election of bishops elevated by local cathedral canons, etc., as it was in the Middle Ages and before....   

So, if valid popes have not existed since Pius died on the 9th of October, 1958, (or I suppose since June 3rd,1963, if one assumes Roncalli was a valid pope), then the Church is an illusion, a "maya" as Buddhists say. That cannot be true, either. Not if God actually exists and if Jesus Christ is indeed God. So, how to square this circle? Maybe it is just me, but I've never seen a sedevacantist explanation of this: a clear one, concise, instantly recognizable to one's reason, as are the First Principles of Logic and the Truths of the Faith.

This was it. I wanted a clear, concise, instantly recognizable explanation to how this could work: how could a Catholic Church still exist assuming the "long-march" 60-plus-year sedevacantism? And how could we know/find it?

Remember: No valid popes for so long means no valid bishops. No valid bishops means no valid priests. No valid priests means invalid sacraments and thus no salvation whatsoever. That is, of course unless we want to go Protestant and ditch God's entire Salvic Plan from the First Covenant (Genesis 2:1-3) down to the Seventh Covenant Our Lord Himself made with His Father two thousand years ago, as told in the New Covenant/Testament. 

But would the Lord God abandon thousands of years of Covenant, since Creation itself, in this way? Would he create a "Hidden Church" of true believers? And is that very idea very Protestant, in itself?

Trying to Understand This Thinking, What I Learned Is...

On their page Now What?, NOW helpfully provide a series of Mass directories where one can search for a Mass not hooked up in any way with the infamous "Vatican II sect", as they call it. I.e.

Look for a Mass location that is close to you, and keep in mind that you may have to go across state or country lines for your nearest Mass. The editors of these directories try hard to ensure that all of the Masses listed are sedevacantist, that is, as far as they know, the clergy who offer them profess the true Catholic Faith, are validly ordained, and do not profess communion with any false papal claimant or the Vatican II Sect.  

Notice they mean, of course, by "true Catholic Faith" the one defined for millennia, not its more recent iterations. And that they thereby totally discount ALL of the Vatican II Church, entirely. One has to find a Mass location (not a parish because those cannot be set up, things being as dire as the are) where the priest was ordained by a bishop who himself was NOT ordained by any Vatican II bishop – but would have been ordained by someone who "passes", someone somehow ordained in a line not connected with Vatican II.

So, that would be either some sort of SSPX bishop or priest who left the SSPX because the SSPX prays for Pope Francis, and the Society has not been cast off by the official Church. (Horrors!) Who fits such a description, though? Aye, there's the rub. Well, there were "The Nine" who left the Society at some point, and some of those (or maybe just one guy?) founded the SSPV, and was consecrated to the episcopacy by Archbishop Pierre Martin Ngô Đình Thục (I guess it was) at some point. (Thuc died in 1984.) One of these ordinands just died, a "founder of Congregation of St. Pius V... Sedevacantist Bishop Clarence Kelly (1941-2023)". But then in the Novus Ordo Watch comments on an obituary regarding the late Bishop Kelly, debate arises whether the entire SSPV (not the SSPX, mind you) is Sedevacantist at all. Some say yes, some no, chaos reigns. Fascinating, but a bit like getting into the details of ancient Gnosticism, that or Japanese mythology. Bewildering, in a word.

Another of The Nine, was, I believe, one Father Anthony Cekada. Though dead (in 2020), he has a large Youtube presence. Look him up. You shall thereby find links to articles about some of the issues the guys commenting on Kelly's death brought up.

Another fly in the ointment is that, if nothing else, Pacelli (Pius XII) made it plain that a pope would have to approve new bishop consecrations. Things have changed since then; i.e. the mode and words of bishop consecrations have changed, the words of ordaining priests and deacons have changed, too, for that matter. Changes galore. But not only that. If I recall correctly, from at least Pius' day, the pope has to approve a bishop's consecration, and if there's no pope...er...well, you see the problem. 

Bishops are now not just consecrated as bishop of a certain town, region, or ruin, either; regardless whether they are a titular bishop of an actual place, ancient or modern, or not; they're ascended to a higher rank of clergy and are in direct Apostolic succession of the Apostles! Bishop Strickland is still a bishop fully gunned, victualed and manned, as the old Navy would say. He just doesn't have a ship, a diocese,  not even a titular one, but he still has all the power that being a bishop entails. Therefore, even "dry-docked", he has episcopal power to fire on Bergoglio, as Lifesite reports above. This, thanks to Vatican II. But not in the pre-Vatican II Church. 

Practical Considerations

• As regards changes in the consecration/ordination rites, I personally think that too much scrutiny on that makes it into more magic than grace. A spell won't work unless the words are quite right. Just ask Gandalf.
  
• But in Church sacraments, it is not magic, but grace ("grace" means Divine gift, freely given: i.e. God does this); thus, some verbal variation might be tolerable. It depends on the sacrament, and so on. Catholic Churches of the Eastern Rites, i.e. non "Roman"-Catholic Churches, have different words for ordination and consecration than the Western Church had. They've always been valid. It's the intent that mattered. (I'm just making this notation to save folk from losing their marbles about their local clergy's ability to confect the sacraments.)
  

Bottom Line

Assuming – and I think it is a valid assumption – that Novus Ordo Watch in their research, their articles, their links, are solid for "sedes", that they're well-intentioned but that their zeal puts them on a very tall cliff, basically; i.e. they solve some problems but create new ones. Perhaps even bigger ones. What can we deduce?

I'm Not Joking

That you'd rather be Orthodox. Not a joke. (Well, sarcasm.) And I do mean one of the autocephalous Orthodox Churches, "the 14". Consider, my friends: 

1. These Churches A: have existed for centuries, 
2. B: you know that since they're not "fly-by-night" you don't have to dig around to verify whether they've Apostolic Succession, and...
   
3. C: your problem is how to adapt to a foreign national culture in your religious life: i.e.: We're Western Christians. The Orthos are Russian, Greek, Syrian, whatever. Can you deal with that? Myself, I could not. (But I love icons in general and Russian Church architecture in particular!)
   

As for the search recommendations the Novus Ordo Watch suggests, I've only one word: headache.

1. A; whatever Sede "Mass community" or "church" you found would NOT have existed for very long, and thus been proven by that cruel, exacting "Test of Time"; 
2. B: therefore you would have to spend a lot of time, energy and patience trying to ferret out whether they have Apostolic Succession.
3. And C: With the Orthodox, of course, they're national Churches. So, if you are not Russian, or Serbian, or Romanian, or Greek, or Bulgarian, or Syrian, or...well, you really think some generic Orthodox Western Church is a real thing? But with these tiny Sede break-aways that are insisting they're really Roman Catholic, does that sit well with you in your craw? Maybe your gut says yes. Maybe not. And we have to live with our gut.
   

To Finish Up

The Hard Sedevacantist situation, my friends, is nearly impossible. Honestly. On the one hand, sure, they describe well and thoroughly the very falleness of the mainstream Church. (NO doubt as to the N.O. Church.) And Bergoglio is so obviously a wild boar of an enemy of Christ that he has usurped the throne (a lot like Biden and his swamping the USA with military-aged men from China, etc.). But on the other hand, their long march attempt at a solution just doesn't work for long. 

• Spiritually, who are we to ascertain that Bishop Strickland – to take an example – is not only not a bishop, but not even a priest? That he, and Bishop Schneider and so many others are what we used to say of Anglican/Episcopalian clergy: just laymen in fancy dress.
• Morally and legally, oddly but truly, we have no right to judge these others in that way. We can judge moral action, definitely; for example, Bergoglio's sell-out of the Chinese Catholics and other Christians is a horrific evil no pope could allow. Yes. See Liz Yore here. So also his "Kissy" up to the Gays.
  
• But regarding your local bishop or priest? Unless they excommunicate themselves, as in the Opening Note, can we excommunicate them?
• And what do demons judge? They are THE hyper-legalists of all hyber-legalists. If a local bishop isn't valid, he cant appoint a valid exorcist. However, I believe Fr. Ripperger has said he can cause a demon great pain by just showing him the photograph of a local bishop. And for that matter, Fr Ripperger himself, how's he casting out demons if he's just a confused layman in fancy dress?
• And finally: Practicality. Practicality hangs over Hard Sedevacantism like Damocles' Sword. What in Heaven's name is the practicality of a layman having to do tons of research, not to mention serious travel, prayer, and simple reflecting, on whether some local off-shoot outfit is really Catholic at all? Does that sound like something we can practically engage in, time and again? 
• Yes, sometimes "the less must lead" as with confronting Bergoglio, who affects us all. We can all see his immorality and judge that. We can judge those who openly embrace his apostasy. But locally, in judging whether Fr. So-and-So is a Catholic in the first place? God set up the spiritual hierarchy of human beings for a reason, and we all agree Luther went too far with his priesthood of all believers (he himself clearly thought so after seeing its consequences). 
  

Summation

Who among the laity – except for the "hard core", whoever they might be – could stand the trouble? All this searching NOW recommends, and for what? So much would depend on our money and time as well as our will, and then our mental state rather than our rational state, and wouldn't so much depend on the charisma – or lack thereof – of the priests involved? Father Anthony Cekada exhibited a great and winning personality. It is said Father Leonard Feeney (died 1978) could be mesmerizing, too. Doesn't make them wrong – or right.

1. It's obvious the Vatican II Church has troubles, and that it has been moving further and further away from the Deposit of Faith. 
2. But that's been a process, my friends. A PROCESS. It is an arc. 
3. This latest fiasco about blessing homosexuals shows it is reaching its apogee, its culmination, its denouement. Maybe the majority of bishops in the world will submit to Bergoglo and "Kissy", thus separating themselves from the Lord Jesus. We'll all be scrambling, then. But there will remain 7,000 who have not bent the knee to Ba'al. (First Kings 19:18)
   
4. I recently watched that enemy of Tradition (and hence the Deposit of Faith and hence a Ba'al knee-bender) Cardinal Wilton Gregory, say his piece about Tradition dying a bloody death. It's stomach-churning to watch. The man parodied an actor back in a '60s "Rat-Pack" movie playing a homosexual man. Gregory is very "faggoty". He's just a parody entirely. So many of Bernadine and McCarrick's highly placed "sons" are. 
5. And besides that, it's equally obvious to EVER more people that Jorge Mario Bergoglio is not a valid pope. Whether invalidly elected or fraudulently elected (or post a valid election he abandoned his post argument) we can set aside for this discussion we're on. 

My argument is long-march Sedevacantism like this – that the entire Catholic Church except for a few eccentrics (apologies to everyone at N.O. Watch), is very valuable in a great many ways, but ultimately, I'm sorry: arguing over whether the SSPV is really and truly a Sedevacantist or just a seemingly merely Sedevacatist church, is nuts. I can't reduce Catholicism to that. I really don't think they want to, either.

Right now, we have to weather the storm that's on us as best we can. Pray. As I wrote above, the battle lines are being drawn. Fundamentally: Schism, True Schism, is now upon us all.

• Pray to St. Patrick. He went to Ireland without the approval of his bishops back in Britannia. They didn't consecrate him a bishop. They might not even have ordained him a priest. But he went regardless, and the Lord God rewarded his sacrifice pretty handsomely in the test of time. 
• There's a delightful Russian story about three monks on an island in a lake who spent their days and nights chanting, "We three below adore You Three above." So the local bishop got a boat and went out to enlighten them about the Faith. As he was boating homeward, he saw one of the monks running across the water. He ran to the boat and stood on the lake to ask the bishop a child-like question. I'd rather be one of those monks than the bishop, wouldn't you?
  

   An Préachán