Ecclesia Dei was a result of Archbishop Lefebvre’s actions. Those of us who presently attend diocesan or Institute of Christ the King or FSSP Masses can only do so because he acted to preserve the Latin Mass. Popes Paul VI and JPII were not inclined to preserve it. The reason Archbishop Lefebvre performed the consecrations was because he knew that at the Vatican they were just waiting for him to die, at which point the Latin Mass would have disappeared due to attrition. They did not act in good faith in their treatment of him.
It’s interesting that for decades the faithful were led to believe by Rome that the Latin Mass had been abrogated, when this was never the case. It’s also interesting that Lefebvre predicted and dreaded the modernist crisis in the Church that we are now living through. Lex orandi, lex credendi.
The hierarchy and priests in many cases are refusing to uphold the Faith. It’s not unreasonable to wonder whether many of them even HAVE the Faith. Just today, for example, I read that Enda Kenny, the pro-abort president of Ireland (who has supposedly incurred latae sententiae excommunication, as did Lefebvre) not only was given Holy Communion by the bishop, but actually had Communion brought to him in his pew, as though he was royalty. In the Archdiocese of Boston, the Cardinal promotes homo priests and allows priests to preach blasphemy (e.g. Monsignor Garrity referring to homosexual “families” as on par with the Holy Family at the Masses this past Christmas). The list of horrors goes on and on, and the faithful are left to wander in heterodoxy and confusion.
We are living in strange times and circumstances aren’t necessarily as black and white as they may seem. If you had to choose between a hideously heterodox diocesan Mass where your children would be indoctrinated with gay propaganda from the pulpit or an SSPX mass, which would be the better choice?
I am going to take your paragraphs out of order. This promises to be an overly long response which is what happens when I am being respectful.
As to your second paragraph, it certainly appeared that the Tridentine Mass had been abolished via the work of the execrable Archbishop Bugnini in Rome and, in the United States, by the misbehavior of Bishops Imesch (Joliet, IL) and Trautman (Erie, PA) and the International Committee on English Liturgy (I may have the group's name wrong but that describes what they functioned as). Pope Paul VI made many prudential errors and the issuance of his missal with the Novus Ordo Mass in the vernacular was near the top of the list.
The Second Vatican Council, as I understand it, called for the addition of an Old Testament reading and for it and the Gospel and the Epistle to be read to the congregation in the vernacular (in our case, English) and the rest of the Mass was to be left alone in Latin, as always. Bugnini was charged with modifying the rubrics and went infinitely beyond the desire of the Council. Nonetheless, Novus Ordo was promulgated by Paul VI. He too was pope but, other than Humanae Vitae, he is not fondly remembered by Traditionalists. Nor is John XXIII who is about to be canonized nonetheless. Nor, at the rate things are going, will Francis be fondly remembered by Traditionalists. Each, however was pope and a successor to Peter, whatever we might have preferred.
Holy Mother the Church is emphatically NOT a democracy or even a republic. It is, in fact a monarchy, with its popes chosen by the cardinals elevated by the preceding popes. In the too brief tenure of John Paul I, the lengthy tenure of soon to be canonized John Paul II and the too brief tenure of Benedict XVI, we had 45 very grateful years to begin to recover from the gushy liberal enthusiasms that briefly (but all too long) overwhelmed the Roman Catholic Church "in the Spirit of Vatican II" which seemed to mean whatever the Bernardins and the Suenens and so many other Jadot-era prelates imagined as their wish lists.
Personally, I made it (barely) through John XXIII and Paul VI as a Catholic by telling myself that the Holy Spirit guides the Conclave in the choice of popes and sometimes we need to be punished. I barely avoided becoming Russian Orthodox in an American church meant to be far more anti-communist than the one in Russia. A good friend persuaded me to subscribe to the Wanderer for a year before making such a decision. By the end of the subscription, Paul VI had died and been replaced by John Paul II. That was the end of my personal crisis in Catholicism.
The circumstances prevailing at the time of the two conclaves of 1978 were very well explained in Fr. Malachi Martin's novel The Final Conclave, published one year before Paul VI's death in 1977. I don't know your age or whether you read that novel or its sequel Windswept House (JP II in the late winter of his life, disabled by age and illness with the vultures circling) but both should be read by every Catholic who wishes to understand "the Spirit of Vatican II" insanity that forced corrective action by the cardinals in electing John Paul I (long a protege of Cardinal Ottaviano but a bit estranged over differences in submission to papal authority) and Blessed John Paul II and where things were heading as the great pontiff slowly died over several years.
Lex orandi, lex credendi: I never pray what I don't already believe and I bet you don't either and I bet that our beliefs on matters of faith and morals are remarkably similar. We apparently differ only as to personalities and certain assertions of what we respectively believe to be facts.
As early as 1970, I requested of the then newly installed Archbishop of Hartford permission for the saying of a Tridentine Mass for a conservative political conference in the vicinity of Hartford. The organization's national chairman, a convert, had requested that I try to arrange it. Not only was it allowed but the Tridentine era chapel at the seminary was made available as was a priest willing and able to say the Tridentine Mass. The archbishop signed the letter of permission.
A year later, I requested another Tridentine Mass at New Haven under similar circumstances. That request was enthusiastically and emphatically denied by an archdiocesan Msgr. "poobah" who informed me (but not in writing) that anyone favoring the Tridentine Mass was "sick." I was convinced that it was Msgr. "poobah's" decision and not that of the archbishop but it was too late to communicate to the archbishop.
Meanwhile, in the very early 1980s, a group of New Haven and Yale Catholics successfully petitioned Archbishop Whealon to grant the wish of the St. Gregory Society to sponsor Tridentine Masses at New Haven, at first monthly and then weekly on Sundays and on Holy Days of Obligation. The St. Gregory Society, unlike some less successful Trad groups, made a point of being polite to a fault, acknowledging the validity of the Novus Ordo but also expressing a sincere desire to attend the Mass of their ancestors regularly. Music has always been provided by a first rate choir known as the Schola Cantorum of St. Mary's Church (the one where the Knights of Columbus was founded by Fr. McGivney). The Archbishop did require that the Tridentine Masses be said in the second oldest New Haven Catholic Church (Sacred Heart Church built in about 1858) in an attempt to save what had become a ghetto parish. Masses were said by various priests including the pastor at 2 PM on Sunday afternoons.
Another group at Hartford successfully petitioned for a monthly Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows there.
By 1986, the archdiocesan Msgr. poobah had been stricken by lung cancer and was replaced by a nun (!) whom my wife and I reference as "Sister Mary Sandanista." We petitioned the Archbishop for permission to have a Tridentine wedding Mass at St. Mary's to be said by an old school Jesuit friend at what had become a Dominican Church a century before. We observed the usual formalities and assured the Archbishop that a denial would be understood and accepted but that we very much hoped that he would grant our request.
His answer granting our request came back typed on a rickety manual typewriter (a sure sign that he typed it personally). We also got a gushy letter from "Sr. Mary Sandanista" congratulating us and wishing us many children. THEN, someone explained to Sr. Mary Sandanista what a Tridentine Mass was. On the Friday afternoon, at 4:55 PM, on the day before the Tridentine wedding, she called the pastor to tell him that a terrible mistake had been made and that it MUST be a Novus Ordo wedding Mass. I was informed by the pastor almost immediately and I called the chancery just as immediately.
Under the circumstances, my bride and I were steamed. Sister Mary Sandanista had left for the weekend (apparently immediately after trying to screw up our wedding and make fools of us in front of our guests. The chancery had already closed but a priest from another diocese was there to pick up another priest for an army reserve meeting. He answered the phone, said that, although the archbishop was still there, he would communicate my emergency to the archbishop but thought any further communications would be to the pastor from the archbishop personally. I had asked to speak directly to the Archbishop but what the priest said made sense.
I went straight to the rectory agout a block and a half away and I was greeted by the pastor who said: "Great news! The archbishop called, said it will be a Tridentine wedding Mass and anyone who says otherwise had better have a higher position in the archdiocese than the Archbishop. John Paul II declined to overrule but I doubt he had heard of the situation and also doubt that he would have interfered.
As to your third paragraph, you may recall the Clint Eastwood movie Hang 'em High about the Oklahoma Territory when it seemed to be ruled by a notorious federal ":hangin' judge" whose chambers were in Fort Smith, Arkansas, That judge kept his US Marshalls sooooo busy that he had to build a gallows for ten activated by pulling the metal ring beneath each respective trap door and, by passing a long metal pipe through two or all ten of them, could hang ten at a time.
We should dust off the blueprints for that ten nooser, construct a new one, revive the Holy Inquisition as it used to be under the distinguished Dominican Fra Tomas de Torquemada and train a new hangman to man the pipe as often as necessary to really clean house. Among my very first nominees for the noose and trap door would be Sean Cardinal O'Malley, Oscar Cardinal Madriaga of Honduras, the Brazilian Joao Cardinal Braz de Aziz, Fr. Jenkins of Notre Shame University and his predecessors Monk Malloy and Theodore Hesburgh, Roger Cardinal Mahoney former ordinary of Los Angeles, and too many others to cite here but you get the idea. Throw in the bishop (Was it Diurmid O'Martin?) who desecrated the Host by giving it to Enda Kenny (in his pew no less????) Also throw in Msgr. Gerrity who is apparently ignorant of what goes where and wants to pass that impious ignorance to your family. Enda Kenny tops the list of "Catholic" politicians who deserve to drop with a noose but we cannot forget such phonies posing as Catholics as John Forbes (did you know he served in Vietnam, but served whom?) Kerry, Joseph Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Rosa DeLauro, Tom Harkin, Little Dickie Durbin, Kathleen Gilligan Sebelius, Maria Cantwell, Senator Robert (he gets no credit for his fine late father) Casey, Sandra Day O'Kennedy of SCOTUS.... On a Clear Day, You can See Forever.... You get the idea. If we cannot burn them alive nowadays, maybe we can have a private collective post-mortem cremation after each pull of the gallows pipe.
As to your fourth and final paragraph, bearing in mind that St. Francis of Assisi reportedly was asked whether he would receive the Eucharist from an ignoble priest said that he would enthusiastically receive the Eucharist from any priest, if, as is suggested by your post, you reside in the Boston Archdiocese, surely it has, even after Bernard Cardinal Law and his immediate predecessor, more than one Catholic Church in communion with its bishop (sigh!) and the pope (sigh!) still exist in the formerly uber-Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. Have the churches of my South Boston ancestry been taken over by heathens? Where does the sainted Billy Bulger attend Mass? I believe that O'Malley will be 70 on June 29 (but who is counting? I am, I am) and that he must submit his resignation by June 29, 2019, only a few years after Obozo is scheduled to step down. If all else fails, call Massachusetts Citizens for Life and ask to be put in touch with Bill Cotter who will know where you may take your children to actual Catholic Masses by non-schismatic priests.
The answer to your question is that you must find an appropriate church to which to lead your family for Mass, not one preaching perversion as normalcy and not one associated with the likes of LeFebvre, de Mallerais, Williamson, de Galareta and Fellay. There is an Opus Dei House at Plymouth with Latin Novus Ordo Masses with the tabernacle where it belongs and the priest facing it with his back to the congregation, as God probably intended. Not perfect but they don';t preach perversion either.
If Boston is too far gone, move to Rockford. Bishop Thomas Doran is retired now but Bishop Malloy shows promise so far and Doran left an outstanding cadre of young and very orthodox priests. It costs money to move from New England but we did and (except for the weather this winter) it has been worth it. St. Mary's Oratory of the Institute of Christ the King was elevated by Bishop Doran to Oratory status to guarantee its permanence. Bishop Doran knows his stuff on Canon Law in that respect having long served as one of seven members of the Signatura which is the Church's supreme court.
I am probably not going to change your mind on the content of your first paragraph, but it seems to come straight out of the SSPX play book. I will agree on one (perhaps unintentional) point. The excommunications contained in Ecclesia Dei WERE the direct result and the only possible result of LeFebvre's gross disobedience and violation of his priestly vow of same along with his illicitly consecrated bishops and their vows.
My personal favorite living SSPX bishop for excommunication purposes is de Mallerais and his infernal mouth as to soon to be St. John Paul II. If de Mallerais were burned at the stake, it would partially atone for the treatment of St. Joan of Arc. You can see why God did not make me pope.
Luther had his asserted reasons. Henry VIII had his, Elizabeth I had hers. Calvin had his. Zwingli had his. So did a host of others down through history. I say this as a Catholic and not to offend our separated brethren or to instigate arguments with them since they do not claim Catholicism while SSPX does. Most of those named have gone to the ash heap of history. Jesus Christ promised to be with HIS Church (not its offshoots) to the very end. His judgment and His marker are infinitely more reliable than Marcel's.
If anything in this post, including its length (which is just me being me), offends you in any way, I assure you that it was not intentional. God bless you and yours and may He extend every assistance to you in your marriage and in the raising of your children now and always!