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I realize that our liturgical tradition as Catholics cannot be preserved apart from John Paul II and all the other legitimate successors of St. Peter. For his voice is the voice of Catholic Tradition in the Church today — a Tradition that has been passed down to him by Christ and the Apostles.

Else He lied, right?

Else He lied, right?

Yes ... Interesting that the author took up the study of Canon Law in searching for truth. Note also the following.

* * * * * Traditional Rome vs. Modernist Rome
The question of Rome eventually weighed in on my conscience, as it should for anyone who leaves the Church. Given what Catholic Tradition consistently teaches concerning faithfulness to Rome, how could I justify my separation from the Roman Pontiff? In fact, even five years after reconciling myself to Rome, the question of communion with Rome and the local Bishop remains the catalyst for much of my theological and canonical exploration.

While I was with the SSPX, however, I accepted their solution to this problem. The SSPX claimed that the questionable behavior of the post-Vatican II popes had divided the faithful into two camps. One camp, the institutional Church, was faithful to contemporary Rome, which the SSPX claims has been infiltrated by modernists and liberals. In the other camp rests the SSPX, who naturally are faithful to Traditional Rome.

Nevertheless, I was unable to deceive my conscience. So I kept wondering whether Catholic Tradition actually sustained the argument that a Catholic could be faithful to Traditional Rome, without remaining faithful to temporal Rome.

“Our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they rest in You,” remarks St. Augustine at the opening of his Confessions. My heart was spiritually restless because it didn’t rest in full communion with Christ’s Mystical Body, the Church. Yet Christ also promises us in the Gospels that if we seek the truth, we will find it (see Matt. 7:7).

In my case, the truth lay in the back room of my parents’ basement. There I found an abandoned box full of old papal encyclicals left over from my father’s college days. At the bottom of this box was Pope Pius XII’s masterful papal encyclical Mystici Corporis.

Curious as to the content, I immediately opened this work to the following passage: “We think, how grievously they err who arbitrarily claim that the Church is something hidden and invisible, as they also do who look upon her as a mere human institution possessing a certain disciplinary code and external ritual, but lacking power to communicate supernatural life” (par. 64). This theological discovery from Catholic Tradition as expressed by the pre-Vatican II popes astounded me even more than my previous St. Anastasius discovery in Denzinger.

Here, from the Church’s Tradition, was the teaching that we cannot separate the Church into a mere spiritual communion as opposed to a mere human institution. In short, the Rome of Tradition and the Rome of Today were the same Rome. Everything suddenly made sense to me about Catholic ecclesiology. Just as at the Incarnation Christ was fully human and fully divine, without sacrificing either nature, so too must the Church, as Christ’s Mystical Body, be a perfect union of the visible and the invisible.

Popes may break with tradition as well as anybody else. When this happens, they must be resisted. The New Mass is Protestant. There is no getting around it. It supports the Protestant perspective on the Lord's Supper and opposes Trent. This is not Traditional, whether or not Envoy Magazine argues to the contrary.