My Narrow Escape from the Devil's Snare

How I was nearly fooled by Sedevacantism, and How I narrowly escaped

👆The episode segment that prompted this essay (5 minutes)

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In a recent podcast, I explained how Sedevacantism is responsible for many lies and falsehoods that have crept into traditionalist circles within the proper Catholic Church—specifically, the lie that the Mass is no longer offered to God because the celebrant in the ordinary form Mass is not facing the tabernacle.

The Podcast Episode: Audio Format

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I’ve mentioned my near fall and narrow escape from Sedevacantism in the past, but I never told the story of how that all came about. I’d like to share that story with you today, in the hope that it contributes to your own wisdom and cunning—enabling you to avoid the snares the devil uniquely sets to trap well-intentioned Catholics.

It was roughly 1998. AOL—the then-popular online service provider offering 20 hours per month of a stymied internet experience—was at peak popularity, and unmetered internet service providers offering unlimited access to the ’net were on the rise.

Not being limited to 20 hours per month, I spent a lot of time getting into reading and contributing to newsgroups. Think of newsgroups as the Reddit of the ’90s but much cooler. One of the Catholic newsgroups I read and contributed to was a Traditional Catholicism group.

Don’t think of it the way we understand “traditional” or “traditionalist” today. At the time, “traditional Catholic” simply meant you were faithful, you were orthodox—you were an old-school Catholic not to be associated with the heterodox culture of the 1970s kumbaya Catholics. Traditional Catholicism simply meant normal Catholicism, and nothing more than that.

People flooded that newsgroup with questions or comments about the Catholic faith—challenges to Church teaching, commentary, and personal accounts or reflections. I spent a lot of time—about a hundred long-form posts per week!—responding to challengers or answering questions that participants had about the Catholic faith.

Sede Va-what-ists?

It was through my participation there that I became involved with Sedevacantists. “Sedes” believe the Church after Vatican II is an imposter Church lead by an invalidly elected (fake) pope. I had never heard of Sede Vacantism before and none of the Sedes I was talking to identified themselves as anything but “Traditional Catholics” (sound familiar?). So I saw them as brethren, not vipers. Their theology seemed orthodox and reasoned, they spoke the right language (“Our Blessed Lord” “The most holy Virgin”) and they were fun and interesting to engage with, or to partner with against hecklers and challengers in the newsgroups.

One of the women in the group turned out to live only 20 miles from me. So she and I started having conversations over email, and then gradually we upgraded to phone calls and coffee shop meetups. Nothing romantic, so don’t get excited. It was during these one-to-one conversations that she revealed something that shocked me—that the chair of Peter was vacant, and that Pope John Paul II was not a legitimate pope.

She made what seemed like a strong arguments, and they were thoroughly shocking to me. She told me about how the papacy effectively broke from the Church as a result of the second Vatican council; how the Novus Ordo mass was not a valid mass, how priests are no longer validly ordained, and so on. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing but it was hard to deny that it was believable. I mean she had links to all sorts of papal bulls, encyclicals, and other authoritative writings that all seemed to validate everything she was telling me. All of the talking points were there:

• The Church isn’t supposed to change but it did after Vatican II (That was the strongest argument because it was the most apparent)

• The Church has always taught that only Catholics go to Heaven but Vatican II changed church teaching to include Jews and Muslims in God’s plan for salvation

• The Church isn’t allowed to change doctrine, but “As you can see, they clearly did!”

• Latin is supposed to be the universal language of the Church, spoken everywhere,. But the Novus Ordo mass, lectionary (etc) are in Englisssshh! [insert gasp here]

This went on for weeks, and the list got longer—and more believable. I vividly remember being in bed one night wanting to cry—I was so distressed. The Church I loved was a fraudulent copy of the “real” Church; the priests I loved were all accomplices; the people I loved were all going to hell (apparently) because they weren’t in the real Church. And after all, only real Catholics go to Heaven.

I think mostly I was angry—fuming angry—that Christ’s Church had been hijacked, and I could hardly think of a greater offense against God. In my heart, I wanted to rescue the Church for Him. I even said that to Him that night, lying in bed with all these thoughts racing through my skull: “Tell me what to do, and I’ll rescue the Church for You.” God never answered. He tends to be funny that way.

Over the next year, I spent a lot of time in Sede circles, attending the occasional Sede Mass—while never missing Sunday Mass at my parish church, just in case it was a valid Mass. I was genuinely distressed about the whole thing for a couple of weeks before I could settle down and try to look at the Sedevacantists’ arguments with a cool, level head. That’s when things started to “blip on my BS radar,” as I say.

“The dots didn’t connect…”

Something wasn’t right. Actually, several things. As I said in the episode last week, the dots weren’t connecting—or they were connecting to create a blob that made no sense. I was beginning to see inconsistencies within the reasoning behind their claims and questionable interpretations of documents they said supported them. But ultimately, all roads lead to Rome, because the question I kept arriving at was: How could the Holy Spirit allow all of this to happen?

If the Holy Spirit wasn’t with the Council Fathers at Vatican II, was He even guiding the Fathers of the First Vatican Council? What about at Trent or Carthage? When exactly did the Holy Spirit stop showing up for work—and why!? Wouldn’t that make Jesus a liar?

The more I pressed them for answers that satisfied me, the more defensive they became—not just with their words, but also with their cadence, tone, and body language. I had long known those to be signs that the “opponent” has been backed into a corner and doesn’t know how to get out. Which means the opponent doesn’t know what they’re talking about. And that means they’re either ignorant (in which case they shouldn’t be speaking, but whatever!), or they’re defending a lie.

Lies can’t be defended. I always knew that. You can try, and you may do alright to that end for a little while, but eventually the lie will fall under the weight of scrutiny and logical challenge. Lies wear the material of reality, but they are not reality. They don a suit pieced together by patchwork, and if you start to pull on a dangling thread, you start to undo the disguise and see the lie for what it is. Truth is firm and tells on itself. Lies are flimsy imitations that can’t defend themselves, or be defended by anyone. Trust me when I tell you that, my friends.

Well, I found that dangling thread in the patchwork suit! I found a few of them. But I pulled on the one that most stood out—How could the Spirit allow this? And in uncovering one lie, the others started to fall like a house of cards. I started to see the patterns of the Sedes’ misinterpretations and trickster rhetoric. Pretty soon, I saw their once “bulletproof arguments” to be not only vulnerable but completely unworthy of consideration. Bulletproof? I had thought so. But I gradually saw them as stick figures being passed off as great masterpieces of art.

This yearlong entanglement with Sedevacantists is why I’m so sensitive to anything that smells like Sedevacantism. It’s why I spot it miles away, why I’m so defensive of my brethren who seem infected by it, and why I’m so aggressive toward it. Sede-ism is a cult of dangerous lie upon dangerous lie, and these lies have made their way into the real Catholic Church. They’re in various traditionalist camps, to greater or lesser degrees, and—being a cancer—they are eroding Catholic unity during a period in Church history when we most need it.

I learned a lot during this episode in my Catholic life. I gained wisdom through extensive research into Church documents and history, persistent questioning, and a long pursuit of even the tiniest truths about the life and legacy of the Church and her intellectual tradition. And I want to pass on to you three main points of what I learned:

• Always trust the Catholic Church. As the Mystical Body of Christ, guided by the Holy Spirit, protected by the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Church is in very good hands. Never worry, and never be afraid

• Remain loyal to the Holy Father, and loyal to the Church. The pope is the shepherd of the flock, and the Church is the wellspring of grace, and the stronghold of spiritual safety. Practice the faith, grow in holiness, and leave everything else to God to sort out, even if it’s a legitimate drams going on in the Church.

• Stay away from any and all subcultures of the Church, whether on the left or on the right. Be normal Catholics; that’s already challenging and rewarding. Let “Catholic” be your only identity, and your only label.

You follow those three guidelines and you’ll be fine. Better still, you’ll be a saint.

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