From the
archives - Published from 1982-96, Fidelity magazine was the predecessor of Culture Wars.
The Tridentine Rite Conference And
Its Schismatic Cousins (Part One)
by Thomas W. Case
From the February 1993 issue of Fidelity magazine
It was question and
answer time at the Tridentine Rite Conference's September 1992 conference in
Chicago. The Rev. Robert Stemper, formerly a Jesuit and now of dubious
faculties, was acting as master of ceremonies, bustling around the dias in his
soutane, taking questions from the audience, which it must be admitted were
slow in coming, spouting off various Latin phrases and generally praising the
other panelists as those in the know, those who could put some reasonable order
to the chaos which had engulfed the Church. With him on the dais were Father
Nicholas Gruner, publisher of the Fatima Crusader also of dubious faculties,
Father Paul Trinchard, who writes for The Wanderer.
Michael Davies, apologist for the late Archbishop
Marcel Lefebvre, who was excommunicated in 1988 after the illicit consecration
of four bishops, and a certain Professor White, who was the least known and in
many ways most interesting, an academic baby-boomer innocent who converted from
Marxism to Christianity of some sort, but was prevented from telling his story
by the officious Father Stemper, who had the unfortunate habit of encouraging
people to talk and then shutting them up just when their stories got
interesting.
The TRC meeting was an attempt, one of many these days, to explain
the chaos which has engulfed the Catholic Church during the past 25 years.
People have become so desperate, so disoriented that they are willing to pay
money to hear people like Father Gruner explain it all for them. And Father
Gruner, to give him credit, does his best. Maybe it was all those Bo Gritz for
President bumper stickers in the parking lot, but you know you are in strange
company when Father Gruner is cast in the role of the moderate.
"Just because the
pope makes a mistake," he tells a young priest in a shiny black suit,
doesn't mean he isn't the Pope."
The crowd. it seems,
doesn't know whether it agrees or not. One big issue at the TRC conference is sede
vacantism, the doctrine which states that since a real Pope would never
have let all these bad things happen to us, therefore the current Pope, and for
that matter his three immediate predecessors, are, and were, not real Popes.
The more things go wrong, the more the vacant seat explanation has appeal to
people who are at a loss to explain things otherwise. Veronica Lueken, the seer
at Bayside and a master at capitalizing on the fears and longings of the disaffected,
even announced that Pope Paul VI had been kidnapped. One woman who was there
that night and has come to have second thoughts about Veronica's visions
described how the thrill of recognition swept through her busload of pilgrims
as the explanation set in. Here. at last, was an explanation that made sense.
The euphoria of sudden understanding spread through the crowd like a shot of
morphine through the nervous system of a patient with terminal cancer. But that
was then and this is now. The euphoria of the first shot of spiritual dope,
taken right after the ravages of the Vatican council became apparent, is never
duplicated by subsequent shots. And now 27 years down the road from the
councils end the dosage keeps getting increased and the effect keeps
diminishing.
Gruner is no stranger to
the calming effect of the all-encompassing explanation. For years he, waged a
campaign against the Vatican claiming that the consecration of Russia called
for by Our Lady of Fatima had not taken place in 1984. Thousands of letters
were mailed to the Vatican demanding that the consecration be redone according
to Gruner's specifications. Eduard Cardinal Gagnon's phone number was published
in the Fatima Crusader, with the admonition to call and enlist him in this cause.
The result was that the Cardinal was awakened so many times in the middle of
the night by the weeping of hysterical women that he had to have his number
changed. Gruner then alleged on the cover of his magazine that Gagnon agreed
with him that the consecration hadn't taken place, a fact which Gagnon promptly
and publicly denied, calling Gruner, among other things "a liar." And
then, worst of all from Father Gruner's perspective, came the events of 1989
and 1991, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the failed Communist coup in Moscow and
the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Now Father Gruner is forced to find
other villains, or other explanations for the malaise we feel. Even though he
still somewhat grudgingly refers to the "so-called fall of communism"
in his talks, the fact remains that, one of the main conspiratorial causes has
disappeared. Instead of rejoicing, there is simply more consternation. How do
we explain the chaos in the Church now?
The questions on the part
of an increasingly bewildered laity keep coming and the number of groups which
steps forward to answer them in the current authority vacuum in the Church
increases apace. The TRC conference was a dramatic substantiation of the claim
that nature abhors a vacuum. There will never, so a corollary of this law goes,
be more bewildered people than there are groups who are willing to charge a fee
to answer their questions. As Gruner drones on at the microphone, a lady
wanders over to me and shows me, for some reason, a question she has written
down on a small piece of paper. "What is the connection," she
wonders, "between the Novus Ordo Missae [the mass
promulgated after Vatican II] and the Novus Ordo Seclorum found on the
dollar bill?
Good question that. The
answer which pops into my head almost immediately is that both are the result
of Masonic conspiracy. That should be obvious from the common use of
"Novus Ordo," which means "new order" in Latin. I do not
give her this answer primarily because I don't believe it myself but consider
it an ominous sign that I am caught up so readily in the spirit of the
gathering. At a certain point people who should know better, people trained by
the Jesuits long ago for example, start giving answers more for the effect they
have on people than for the truth value of what they communicate. This is known
as pandering and it is never easy to detect when there are so many crazy
theories around but it is never far from the surface at gatherings like this.
Father Stemper evidently
has a short attention span. After about five minutes into Gruner's talk he
stands up and looks a bit impatient, as if ready to get on to bigger and better
things, but Father Gruner drones on and on. Evidently Stemper feels
uncomfortable interrupting a priest in a way that he did not in interrupting
what I felt at least was the more interesting story of Professor White. But
eventually Father Gruner runs out of things to say and Father Stemper gets the
next question:
"According to the
prophecies of Malachi this is the last Pope. How does this agree with the three
days of the darkness and the chastisement predicted at Fatima?"
For once, Father Stemper
is at a loss. I really don't know he says. But then as if to direct the
conversation back to familiar ground he criticizes "communist
disinformation and infiltration of the media" evidently unaware of Father
Gruner's reference to the so-called fall of communism. This is why you come to
conferences like this he continued evidently unaware that he had not answered
the question. To get your marbles together and get them in a straight line.
Father Stemper may or
may not have all of his marbles together but he is at least partially right
here. The reason people come to the TRC convention is that they have been traumatized
by the aftermath of the Council and live in a world which seemingly no one can
explain in any cogent much less compelling fashion. The TRC is just one small
contingent of a vast army of bewildered Catholics who have decided to vote with
their feet. Marching beside them are the various phony apparition addicts, the
supporters of fundamentalist televangelists and hordes of those who are just as
alienated by reckless change but whose allegiance shifts with the moment.
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The TRC is the
brainchild of Father Francis LeBlanc of Phoenix and Father John Quinn of
Chicago though LeBlanc is said to be the dominant character of this pair. At
the TRC's last convention in September 1991 in New Jersey, Fr. Paul Wickens was
elected president and Fr. Robert Stemper vice-president. Fr. LeBlanc is not an
officer at this time having for his own reasons withdrawn (at least publicly)
from the organization. Regardless of the TRC's current leadership the
LeBlanc\Quinn connection that gave birth to the TRC a few years deserves some
scrutiny. The bizarre nature of the circumstances surrounding its birth make it
noteworthy for that reason alone. Beyond that there is value in warning people
away from something that can do them serious spiritual harm no matter how pious
it seems at first glance.
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Dominguez on his "Papal" Throne |
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Dominguez in Death |
On August 6th, 1978, a few
hours after the death of Pope Paul VI, a Spaniard by the name of Clemente
Dominguez, who had been claiming to receive apparitions and locutions from the
Blessed Virgin in the town of Palmar de Troya, declared himself Pope Gregory
XVII, the first Marian pope. On the strength of anti-pope Clemente Dominguez
mystical claims a Chicago area priest and two laymen traveled to Palmer de
Troya Spain and eventually got themselves consecrated as bishops. There they
met an English dwarf, Mrs. Patricia McElliot who like Pope Clemente heard
voices too. Mrs. McElliot who had been living in Palmar de Troya took the three
Chicagoans under her wing and began traveling with them back and forth between
her new Marian order in Italy and the bogus Marian Shrine at Necedah Wisconsin.
Necedah is the site of a
42-year old cult built up around a false apparition every bit as blasphemous as
Bayside. A typical locution allegedly from Our Lady as strained through the
mind of Necedah seer Mary Ann van Hoof would consist of fifteen minutes of
shouted diatribe against the Godless Supreme Grand Master the Black Pope. (She
meant Pope Paul VI.) The shrine and its supporters were placed under an
interdict whereupon Mary Ann affiliated the cult in 1979 to the Old Catholics.
And so the cult of Necedah remains condemned locally and by Rome; all Catholics
are forbidden to support it in any way under pain of excommunication;
nevertheless drawing to its web a crowd of disaffected and disobedient
Catholics of every stripe. It is interesting to note that Mrs. McElliot's
voices took her and the priests under her influence to such a disreputable
Catholic sideshow.
Fr. John Quinn was one
of those priests. One night in 1981 he visited Necedah and was consecrated
there by Clemente bishops Maurice Revaz, William Daly and the former layman
Richard Corr. "Bishops" Corr and Daly are two of those who had gone
to Palmar de Troya from the Chicago area some years previously and had become
entranced by Mrs. McElliot's voices. In 1982 less than a year later those same
(or different?) voices told Mrs. McElliot to return to the Church. Richard Corr
was laicized and Fr. Daly died in 1982 after being regularized. These two men
along with the English seer apparently came out from under the spell they had
been under but John Quinn remains a bishop technically under the jurisdiction
of the Anti-Pope Gregory XVII. As "Fr. Quinn," he hosted the
September convention of the Tridentine Rite Conference.
Supposedly Fr. Quinn has
been regularized also. When the sudden consecration took place Fr. LeBlanc from
Arizona telephoned and told Fr. Quinn that Fr. Quinn had incurred
excommunication for his irregular act -- but LeBlanc would fix things. LeBlanc
went off to Rome and came back with a piece of official looking paper
supposedly exonerating Fr. Quinn. The piece of paper meant nothing.
Regularization is something that has to be done by the schismatic priest
himself after a full abjuration of his errors. But Fr. LeBlanc is famous for
going to Rome and seeking special favors some of which he claims have been
granted. In 1985 he tried to talk Cardinal Ratzinger into granting him special
dispensation to form an independent papal order with permission to say the pure
Tridentine Mass. (The 1984 Indult was not good enough since it permitted the
John XXIII Mass which includes minor alterations that LeBlanc could not
accept.) LeBlanc's plea was refused. Then in 1988 or 1989 he claimed to have
received an Apostolic blessing on the newly formed Tridentine Rite Conference
from the Pope himself. In reality the papal blessing was given indiscriminately
to a general audience (an audience that happened to include Fr. LeBlanc) and
the TRC, no matter what they say have no Papal brief for existing. (This is
confirmed in a letter from Msgr. Camille Perl for the Ecclesia Dei Commission
in the Vatican.)
A Priests for Tradition
meeting a precursor of the TRC -- took place in Chicago at a Howard Johnson s
motor lodge in late 1985. Hosted by Fathers Quinn and LeBlanc the convention
drew about twenty-five priests. It would be enlightening to run down the whole
list to show the length and breath of the motley crew in attendance. We will
identify only a few to give a taste of things to come. Fr. Fred Nelson of the
Powers Lake, N.D. traditional Marian shrine was there. Fr. Leonard Giardina.
O.S.B. came from Alabama and Fr. Daniel Jones from Colorado. And then there was
Archbishop Zaboroski of the Mariavite Church. An offshoot of the Old Catholics,
the Mariavites were originally a Polish sect whose priests and nuns joined
together in mystic marriages to produce immaculately conceived offspring for
the Final Age.
Father Wathen of the
counterfeit Order of St. John attended and Fr. Fouhy an independent priest who
now resides at Mount St. Michael in Spokane, Washington, and Fr. Joseph Vida
Elmer who in 1987 became Bishop Elmer (by way of Robert McKenna through Guerard
des Lauriers out of Ngo-dinh-Thuc.) The cult at Mount St. Michael and the
schismatic Thuc lineage will be described later.
The show moved to Phoenix
the following year when the Tridentine Rite Conference was formally instituted
under the direction of Fr. Francis LeBlanc.
Who is Fr. Francis
LeBlanc? He apparently received his priestly orders in Canada. He spent years
in the paratroopers as a military chaplain. At what time he conceived a dislike
for the Conciliar Church is not known. He tried to become incardinated in a
diocese in Los Angeles but was refused. He spent the next 20 or 15 years going
from place to place in California saying the Tridentine Mass for small groups
of disaffected Catholics. Sometime in the late 1970s he came to Phoenix and
according to Lefebvrite Fr. Finnegan tried to horn in on Finnegan's scene
there. Eventually LeBlanc gathered a flock for himself and established a church
with the aid of a munificent lay benefactor.
LeBlanc was never
actually made president of the TRC. The first was Msgr. Rucsitto (a California
priest whose faculties had been suspended for saying the old Mass without
permission) then Fr. Stemper and now Fr. Paul Wickens. LeBlanc remains a power
behind the scenes though for public relations reasons he claims to be out of
the TRC entirely.
Fr. Robert Stemper.
formerly president and now vice-president of the TRC was originally a Jesuit.
He is a confederate of Fr. LeBlanc and now has his own parish of irregular
Catholics in Mesa, Arizona. Early on he taught at the Jesuit University in
Tokyo. Later he was an assistant pastor in Madison, Wisconsin. In the early
1980s he resided at the Shrine of Our Lady of the Prairies at Powers Lake, N.D.
a conservative Catholic compound (the Tridentine Mass was said there) which was
under the direction of the now deceased Fr. Nelson. On at least one occasion a
couple of years ago Stemper visited the place of the phony apparitions in
Necedah. He was then in the company of Father "X" a reputed prophet
who advertises himself as the true seer for Necedah and Bayside -- thrilling
mystic credentials indeed. Father "X" is actually Gary McLaughlin, a
gentleman who was convicted of mail fraud and impersonating a priest in New
Mexico in 1987.
A couple hundred miles
east of Powers Lake in North Dakota is a religious center called Our Lady of
Victory International Shrine. McLaughlin after unsuccessfully trying to take
over the Shrine at Powers Lake established the Orrin, ND shrine two or three
years ago. Here he rules and receives rather wordy messages from the Blessed
Virgin and Jesus on such subjects as the New World Order, the International
Bankers Conspiracy and the Masonic bishops and cardinals leading the Church
today. In the middle of one of these long-winded locutions Our Lord proclaims:
"The Great
Pontiff of the future shall be an American and come from the Shrine in North
Dakota. I see the Pontiff and I am amazed. He rules the Church with the
tenderness of a Shepherd and the iron rod and smites the enemies of Church with
his breath.... Oh! It is horrible. I now see the destruction of those seers and
laity who refuse to unite with this Shrine. I see the Bishops and Cardinals and
Priests being executed in the Chastisement. I see Veronica Leuken [the seer of Bayside] in a
turmoil, Satan buffeting her for a small space. I now see Veronica saying:
"Yes Father McLaughlin is the future Pontiff. . . obey only Seers that are
united with Orrin, ND and Bayside. I am in union... total union with you Father
and you shall lead all Seers worldwide."
Fr. Stemper's
association with this Great Pontiff-to-be and his involvement with the cult at
Necedah might make one wonder a bit about his judgment if not his religious
sanity.
Fr. Paul Wickens seems
to be the most energetic promoter of the TRC. He visits Richard Williamson (the
Lefebvrite bishop of North America) in Winona, Minnesota; Williamson has
performed confirmations on children at Wickens traditionalist chapel in New
Jersey. Wickens also gives sermons to the Sectarians at Mount St. Michael,
visits Fr. Dan Jones independent Catholic chapel in Westcliffe, Colorado and is
often in the company of Leonard Messineo, Grand Master of one of the factions
that make up the scurrilous (Shickshinny) Order of St. John.
Dan Jones, a friend of
Fr. LeBlanc, is on the fringier edge of the traditionalist movement. He has
been an independent priest since the early 1970s and a sede vacantist for five
or more years. He prints a newsletter called Sangre de Christo Newsnotes:
in recent editions he has printed articles by Gary Giuffré promoting the theory
that Cardinal Giuseppe Siri was the truly elected pope at both the 1958 and
1963 Conclaves. (Or the 1963 and 1978 Conclaves according to which article you
read.)
The articles in Sangre
de Christo presenting Giuffré's Siri Theory are a fantasia of
wish-it-were-so. The underlying assumption is that since the Vatican II popes
are false popes a real pope must have been elected and then through some
conspiratorial treachery was denied the papacy. The treachery must somehow have
occurred within the Conclaves that ended up electing the "false
Popes" John XXIII and Paul VI (or Paul VI and John Paul II). Since Giuseppe
Siri represented the traditional Church for many (he died recently) he becomes
the obvious candidate for an alternate papacy.
None of this is
explained in the articles. The proof in the articles of Siri's true papacy is
the fact that in 1958 when a Mass was held in a circus arena before a great
crowd of the faithful in Genoa a flock of pigeons was released: and one of
these pigeons (or doves reasons Giuffré) landed atop the blessed head of the
presiding bishop Cardinal Siri. The symbolic descent of the Holy Ghost verified
Gods intention. Siri was obviously destined to be the next pope.
Another proof is based
on a prediction from the Lafayette apparition that "the Holy Father would
suffer greatly.... The wicked will make several attempts on his life...."
Giuffré applies this prediction to the "true Pope" Siri who he says
endured 33 years of exile from the papacy as well as constant blackmail and
threats and was possibly murdered. This is fabulous history. In real history it
is Pope John Paul II who was shot in Rome and nearly knifed at Fatima a year
later.
Of course Pope Siri
would never have called the Council, the modernist horrors would never have
taken place and the Church would have remained in the pristine state it enjoyed
in 1958.
But all is not lost. The
word has gone out from the Giuffré camp for the cardinals secretly consecrated
by Siri to come out of hiding now and take their place in the sun. To gather
together that is and hold a Conclave to elect a true pope and thus return the
Church to the succession and make It once again One and Holy and Catholic.
Why dignify this fairy
tale with the retelling? Because it demonstrates the lengths some people will
go to resolve what seems an unsolvable problem. John XXIII a tool of the
Illuminate? (Why else call the Council?) Paul VI a secret Mason? (Why else let
Archbishop Bugnini ruin the Mass?) Siri not elected pope? There must have been
a plot!
Thomas
W. Case is an expert on cults and a frequent contributor to Fidelity.
Part
Two was published in the March 1993 issue of Fidelity.
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