That Moment You Finally Realize the Chair is Empty

    It was the fall of 2020 and I was standing at the sink in the men’s room of a church 140 miles from my house.   If you don’t remember the fall of 2020 let me remind you – there were mostly peaceful riots breaking out all over the nation, so taking a 140-mile trip away from my home wasn’t exactly high on my list of things I wanted to do.  I splashed water on my face, looked into the mirror, and laughed about the strangeness of my situation.  I had just driven two and a half hours (through the nation’s most notorious speed trap) to attend a Catholic Mass when by all appearances there was one taking place that Sunday at the church LITERALLY within walking distance of my house. 

    As I stood there my mind went back to the time that I was at a church function and a deacon led us in prayer before our meal.   In his prayer he decided to reference Exodus 3:5 where God tells Moses to remove his sandals because he’s standing on holy ground.  For some reason, the deacon thought we needed the visual of him actually taking his shoes off during the prayer to prove his point.  It was hokey and awkward and frankly not exactly what you want to see right before dinner. 

    I was still standing at the sink laughing at the memory when my son walked in and asked me to help him with his tie (traditional Catholics do not wear jeans and T-shirts to Mass).  I told him that it would be best for us to go stand behind the SUV so as not to draw a great deal of attention to ourselves.  As I stood in the grass behind the parking lot adjusting his tie, I suddenly felt dozens of hot, sharp pains on my legs.  I was standing in an ant bed.  I immediately ripped off my socks and shoes and started beating the column of ants marching up my pant legs.  So much for not drawing attention to ourselves.   When I finally got the situation under control, I sat in the back of the SUV and it suddenly hit me – I had just removed my shoes because I was standing on holy ground – just like the ill-advised deacon all those years prior.   “That’s odd,” I thought.  It was about to get even odder.    

    Once we finally made it into the church I sat in the pew and reflected on the strangeness of what had just happened.   “Could it possibly be a coincidence?” I asked myself.  "Or something much, much more?"  A few minutes into the Mass I felt more stings on my legs – I had not gotten them all.  Maybe it wasn’t supernatural after all, maybe I just stepped into a mound of angry ants.  I quietly brushed them off as best as I could and hoped/prayed that I’d finally gotten them all.  Another 20 minutes passed, and it was time for the sermon.   The priest, incredibly, brought up Exodus 3:5 -  God telling Moses to  remove his shoes because he was standing on holy ground.  I was truly stunned.  No longer could this be considered “just a coincidence” by any reasonable person.   There was no way I could have known what the priest was going to talk about.   Exodus 3:5 was not a part of the readings that day, so I didn’t somehow know the schedule on a subconscious level when I thought about the barefoot deacon.  No, this was not a coincidence.  This was a sign from God that I was right to drive 140 miles to attend the true Catholic Mass instead of going to the Catholic-in-Name-Only church across the street from my subdivision.

    The purpose of this blog post is not to convince anyone to believe the same as I do.  Of course, I would love it if all my friends and relatives shared my beliefs – as of the time of this writing exactly zero do.   No, the purpose in writing this is simply to document the events that led me to where I am today.  It will be necessary, therefore, to clarify a few things before I get started.  When I reference the “diocesan church,” I mean the tons of churches that litter the landscape of major cities and small towns across the world.  These are the mainstream churches, the ones that are “in line” with the local bishop and by extension the guy in Rome that many refer to as the pope.  You’ll also notice that I won’t use the name that he chose (Francis) because I do not wish to imply in any way that I recognize him as the leader of the Christian church.  So, I may refer to him as Jorge Bergoglio (his actual name) or Jorge, or George, or King George, or Comrade Juri, or the antipope, or the Argentinian Communist, or “that guy who calls himself the pope.”  It may seem disrespectful to some that I am calling the pope disparaging names, but please remember, I do not believe that Bergoglio is the pope.  In fact, I see him as an infiltrator intent on destroying 2,000 years of Christian teaching - a true enemy of the church, and therefore a true enemy of Christ.  The official term for the current state of the church is sede vacante – Latin for empty chair.   This means that the chair of St Peter, the first pope, is empty.  We have no pope, and the chair of the papacy is therefore vacant.   I will not try to convert you to this belief system in this blog post.  If you want to hear about it, come to my house and we’ll spend a few hours on the porch over a drink or two. 

    My journey has been a wild one.  I have been a member of dozens and dozens of parishes in my lifetime.  I have literally been called “wishy-washy” by friends for doing so.  I get it.  In theory, one Catholic church SHOULD BE as good as the rest.  It doesn’t matter if you go to St Patrick’s on the Northside or Holy Family on the Southside, you’re going to get the same readings and the same liturgy.   In theory it should be the same every Sunday in Florida as it is in Wyoming as it is in Mexico and Brazil and Nigeria.  But that was never my experience.  I found that what passes for Catholic churches in my diocese is as varied as the hundreds of local Protestant churches.  Some are liberal, some are conservative, some preach Christianity, while others blatantly defy Christian doctrine.  It all depends on the local priest, sadly.  Nine times out of ten, the supposed Catholic church nearest to where I lived has been woefully liberal and decidedly not Catholic.   So, I’ve lived in Fleming Island and been a member of a church in Arlington.  I’ve lived on the Southside but travelled to Orange Park on Sundays.  Every time I thought I’d found a home church, I would hear the most blatant heresy from the pulpit, or the most nonsensical music blasting from the rock band choirs.   Bad confessors, bad sermons, Protest music, and an absolute army of women in power pantsuits running the show seemed to be the norm no matter where I attended.    

Sometimes the decision to leave a church was easy.  Sometimes the heresy in the sermons was so blatant and so disturbing that I had no choice as the spiritual leader of my family to pack up and move on.  At one particularly liberal parish, I took my daughter to an all-day First Communion retreat where they had teenagers dramatize a recreation of the Last Supper.  Some of the Apostles in the re-enactment were girls, and, of course, they had a teenage girl playing the part of Jesus.  In hindsight, I sincerely wish I would had gotten up and walked out and never looked back. But I cowardly sat there and let them fill my daughter’s impressionable mind with liberal heresy.  The lame excuse that there weren’t enough boys to play all of the parts would not be valid.  Those recreating the Last Supper were Confirmation candidates, and there were just as many boys as girls in the class.  Even if there weren’t enough boys, fathers like me could have filled in as the Apostles, and of course a boy, any boy, would have made a less nonsensical portrayal of Jesus.  But it was not just a nonsensical portrayal of Jesus Christ, it was an obviously agenda-motivated act meant to undermine the priesthood as well as the dignity of the role of women in the Church.  It was disgusting and I regret not leaving the moment I realized I was attending an indoctrination ceremony, not a children’s retreat.

    Against my better judgement we stayed members of that parish until my daughter received her First Communion, but we left shortly thereafter.  We had heard that there was another parish nearby that was very old fashioned and conservative in its views.  The priest was over 75 and, in many ways, adhered to the traditional Catholic ways – except when he played secular 1970s music as part of his sermon, but no one’s perfect, right?  Anyway, his sermons were normally relatively pious, and he was certainly a good man, but there’s only so much power a priest yields in the modern church.  From the religious education classes to the music, it was obvious that liberalism/modernism was creeping in.  My oldest son was enrolled in a Confirmation preparation class at a this supposedly conservative parish, but we finally decided he’d had enough social justice indoctrination and pulled him out.  I could write 2,000 words about the heretical social justice nonsense they subjected my boy to, and maybe some other day I will.  But I resent the lies they taught him and suffice to say I feel guilt for allowing it to happen as long as I did.    

    Shortly after the Confirmation prep debacle we decided to attend a Traditional Latin Mass.  We had researched it online quite a bit and had even attended a few at the basilica in downtown Jacksonville out of curiosity many years earlier, but this time we wanted to experience it with the realization that it was the true Mass of the Christian church, not just some outdated novelty from the past.  Ironically, one of the few approved parishes to offer the Latin Mass was, by almost all accounts, the most modernist liberal church in the diocese.  So, while everyone who attended the weekly Latin Mass was devout and well-meaning, the parish itself was anything but Catholic.   We were subjected to offensive and sacrilegious cartoons in the weekly bulletin, as well as the disgusting film produced by the diocese every year begging for money.  Disgusting because every year without fail it is a 20-minute social justice lesson more suited for a Colin Kaepernick rally than a Catholic Mass.    

    Going back to the last few months we were members of the supposedly conservative parish; during that time my wife was conducting extensive research on Archbishop Marcel Levebvre who started the Society of Saint Pius X.  Levebvre identified immediately that the Vatican II innovations of the modern church were a grave error, so he started his society to preserve the Traditional Latin Mass.  One Sunday afternoon in 2017 I had taken my son to a Trunk or Treat Halloween party at the supposedly conservative parish we were still members of.  While we were gone my wife watched a documentary on Archbishop Levebvre.   When I got home, she asked me what my opinion was of the archbishop.  I told her that I’d always heard he was a defiant rebel who defied the pope and was therefore outside of the church.  She said she used to think that too, but that my opinion might be changed if I watched the documentary.   I did and my opinion of him was changed immediately.   After much prayerful contemplation we started attending a local chapel serviced by priests of his order.  Everything I had been told about Archbishop Levebvre was a lie.  He was not a disloyal villain, but a hero loyal to his God and to the true church.  In hindsight, how appropriate is it that I had my son at a pagan celebration at this defining moment of my life?

    As we drove to our first Mass serviced by priests of Levebvre’s Society of St Pius X (SSPX) in the spring of 2018 my teeth were literally chattering - the first and to this date the only time that has ever happened to me.  That’s how nervous I was.  Although my wife had been the one to find the Levebvre documentary, it was my decision as the spiritual head of the household to make the final decision.  I had made that decision and I was now literally leading my family to an SSPX chapel - to a church that I had been told was schismatic, outside of the church, and most assuredly not Catholic.   The small SSPX chapel was located in a residential neighborhood with houses on all sides.  The parking lot was just grass/dirt and there was no hall to speak of, just a small modular home that felt like sardines in an overstuffed can with even 20 parishioners inside.  What I also found was the friendliest, most devout, most CATHOLIC people I had ever met.  In the first SSPX sermon I ever heard, the priest spoke of “boys dreaming about becoming astronauts or cowboys, and girls dreaming about becoming mommies or princesses.”   This was no old, dusty, stodgy 95-year-old priest, this was a recently ordained priest in his 20s.  From the priests, to the altar servers, to the ushers, to the average families – these were my people and I knew it immediately.

    Shortly after we started attending the SSPX chapel their bishop was available for Confirmation, so we decided that it was time to try again.   Even though we tried to obtain Confirmation, this time for all my kids, fate (or providence) intervened, and it just wasn’t mean to be.  So, we regrouped and decided to try again yet again the very next time the bishop was nearby, whenever that may be.  When we went to Mass the Sunday following the Confirmation we had missed, I was pulled aside by one of the older church members.  He told me that the parishioners wanted to buy airline tickets and a hotel room for my son and I to attend the next Confirmation in Georgia.   I was blown away.  Again, I thought, “These are my people.”

    I loved this parish – the people, the priests, the Masses, the small community feel – everything.  But there was a problem bubbling just under the surface that I could not ignore.   The SSPX, and by extension this chapel, still had a connection to that horrible little man who calls himself the pope.  There was a picture of him in the vestibule when you first enter the chapel, and they said his name in the mass to proclaim that they are in union with him and with Rome.   The priests would give sermons where they would announce their disgust with everything that Jorge was doing and saying and would proclaim that he and his teachings were anti-Catholic.  Then they would literally end the sermon with “but he IS the pope.”   I sometimes wondered who they were trying to convince – the congregation or themselves.

    I could not in good conscious walk into a building with that man’s picture on the wall anymore.  I could not attend a mass where his name was evoked as the pope and the Mass was proclaimed to be in union with him.  It felt like pretending.  Previously, I had pretended to be okay with a diocesan church singing Amazing Grace and preaching heresy, and now I was pretending that I was okay with an SSPX church having a picture of that evil little Argentinian in the entrance way.   I came to the inevitable conclusion that you really should not have to overlook obvious anti-Christian details when you attend a supposedly Christian church.  

    The SSPX church in Jacksonville had a small library full of Christian books that anyone could check out.   Towards the very end of our time there, I checked out a book entitled “Sedevacantism: A False Solution to a Real Problem.”  It’s a small 75-page book put out by the SSPX intended to refute the position of sedevacantism – the belief that there is no valid pope and has not been since the Second Vatican Council.  The book did not accomplish its intended goal – at least not for me personally as I soon found myself accepting the obvious truth that all of the post Vatican II popes are not valid popes since they adhere to and teach a religion that is in direct opposition to 2000 years of Christian teaching.  If they do not adhere to traditional Christian teaching, not only are they not popes but they aren’t even Catholics.

    I said that at the outset that I would not try to convert anyone during this lengthy blogpost, and I won’t.   But I will just tell you very quickly why I believe what I do.  My beliefs are based not just on theology and philosophic truths but are based on pretty simple logic.  Consider this syllogism: all popes must be Catholic.  Jorge Bergoglio is not Catholic.  Therefore, Jorge Bergoglio is not the pope.   How do I know he’s not Catholic?  Because he’s made it crystal clear each and every time he’s spoken into a microphone that he does not believe anything that the church has ever proclaimed.   Another syllogism.  To be Catholic one must believe and profess all teachings of the church.  Bergoglio does not believe and profess all teachings of the church.  Therefore, Bergoglio is not Catholic.  And if he’s not Catholic, he’s not even eligible to be pope. 

    So, my family and I find ourselves in a precarious situation – minorities not only in the world, but minorities amongst our friends and even within our own families.  Not just in our beliefs but in our practices.  We don’t eat meat on Fridays – any Friday, not just during Lent.   We don’t eat meat on the eve of Holy Days.   Which means we don’t eat meat on Christmas Eve.  We also don’t celebrate or participate in that October 31st festival – I won’t profane the word “holy” by calling it a holiday.  We reject popular culture in all aspects, which frankly isn’t hard considering the “quality” of what’s put out by the entertainment industry.

    We find ourselves on the outside looking in, but with no desire to dive back into our prior lives.  But it is a strange and sometimes lonely existence.  Without the Internet it would be almost unbearable.   I have sedevacantist friends in Nigeria, Canada, and India that I have never seen in real life.   In some ways, the ways that really count, they are my family – my Christian family.  We not only share a belief system, but we share the same struggles as well.   Most, probably none, of my relatives understand our faith.  Old friends accuse us of changing (we have).  I’ve been called Amish.  I’ve been accused of being a Protestant.  I’ve been told I joined a cult.  Think about that last one for a minute.  I practice Christianity in its purest form – the way it was for millennia before the counter-cultural revolution of Vatican II, and I’m accused of joining a cult.    What I actually did was join the Catholic church.  I had been a member of the Protestant Vatican II church basically my entire life, but a few years ago I converted to Catholicism.  If I lose some friends and family along the way because I refuse to eat chicken wings on Christmas Eve or celebrate Halloween, then so be it, I’ll be the outsider.  

    Now on Sunday mornings I get up, put on my dress pants and a collared shirt, and head downstairs to watch a Catholic Mass live-streaming on YouTube.  Sometimes I watch Mass streaming from Ohio, sometimes from Idaho, sometimes Nigeria.  Every few months I drive 140 miles through that notorious speed trap all the way to Southwest Florida to fight the ants in the parking lot and await a sign that I’m doing the right thing.  “Heavy is the head that wears the crown,” or something like that.  I’m responsible not only for my own eternal soul but also for those four others who live in my house.   I think I’m doing the right thing.   I know I am.  No way those ants were lying.