By All Means, Attend Mass At An SSPX Chapel!

So, should we attend a SSPX Mass? Most people (even conservative ones) say “no”. Other people say “of course”. I personally say “by all means, but paying attention it does not lead you culpably go down the wrong path”.

The short, but already meaningful history of this little effort shows than not a few are the cases of people who start attending a TLM – which can easily be in a SSPX chapel – and after a while throw away the child with the bath water and become either Sedevacantists or so venomous against the Church that one does not understand what their understanding of Catholicism is.

I cannot – in the same way as Bishop Schneider – detect any area in which the SSPX are not Catholic. It is, therefore, a mystery to me how this previously unknown concept of “imperfect communion” may work. The SSPX are as Catholic as they come, and infinitely more Catholic than the Pope – as every good Catholic is, by the way – and they merely refuse obedience to the pope on matters in which a sound Catholic has always been entitled to refuse obedience. You can’t be half pregnant, and you can’t be in imperfect communion. Most of all, you can’t be something that never existed before, and the fruit of a verbal gymnastics invented after V II to describe someone who does not want to give in to Neo-Modernism (or outright Modernism) when the hierarchy in Rome does just that.

By all means, go to a SSPX mass if you can. Only pay attention, if you want my advice, that this does not create in you a siege mentality, according to which only a little moat separates the SSPX from the Whore of Babylon.

I find it a useful experience to also attend at NO Mass. It teaches me obedience. It tells me that the Church is my mother even when she nourishes me badly, and at times seems to hate me. It helps me to avoid the moat thinking, and the siege obsession. It reminds me that horrible as her state may be, this organisation that celebrates these NO Masses all over the world is, in fact, the Only Church; and I prefer to bring this kind of sacrifice as a penance rather than run the risk of slowly persuading myself I am too good for the Mass the Church gives me.

By all means, attend Mass at an SSPX Chapel. But do not think that there are too churches, of which the Vatican is the wrong one. There is only one Church, and he who does not see that the SSPX is 100% part of it probably cannot be helped anymore.

M