Concerned About Girl Altar Boys? At This Late Date?

It is almost twenty years since I wrote my first article, Words Have Meanings, Including Those of Father Ratzinger, April 30, 2006, about the possibility of sedevacantism being the true explanation of the state of the Church Militant here on earth in this time of apostasy and betrayal. Although it took me several more months to announce my own conclusion about the truth of the matter publicly, the aforesaid article contained the following passages from one who had come to recognize that the “resist while recognize” position was untenable:

Look, let us be honest. The late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, a genuine hero of the Catholic Faith, said publicly on several occasions in the 1980s that he had been considering a declaration about the legitimacy of the pontificate of Pope John Paul II. The questions about the Catholicity of Pope Benedict XVI are much graver, believe it or not, much clearer. There is too much disturbing evidence about the former Father Joseph Ratzinger’s writings, even those published while he was the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to ignore as one bad episcopal appointment after another is made, as worship is rendered to false gods on the grounds of Catholic cathedrals and churches, as what purports to be Catholic “worship” features pagan rituals and other profanations, as outright dissidents are permitted to remain in “good standing” to corrupt souls, as those who adhere to the fullness of the Church’s actual Tradition and who worship as Catholics in the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church have always worshiped. It is time for each of us to face this fact: Pope Benedict XVI has indeed deviated from the Catholic Faith throughout his priesthood. And Pope Paul IV himself wrote in Cum Ex Apostolatus Officio that even a mere deviation from the Faith was enough to disqualify anyone from holding ecclesiastical office.

Whether or not Cum Ex Apostolatus Officio still binds the Church is a matter of some dispute in traditional circles. Regardless of this dispute, which I hope can be aired in a conference at some point in the near future, those of us who ignore the Second Vatican Council, as His Lordship Bishop Tissier de Mallerais is urging the entire Church to do, and who resist the statements and actions of popes and cardinals and bishops while conceding, at least publicly, that they hold the offices they appear to hold must stop making war against those who have come to a conclusion that the See of Peter is vacant. The sedevacantists (either those who have made an actual declaration in this regard or who contend that it is a legitimate theological position to hold this belief) are not the problem facing the Church today. The possession of ecclesiastical offices by Modernists and those influenced by the ethos of Modernism is the problem facing the Church today.

Meaning not to minimize the important theological distinctions between material and formal heresy, it is also important to recognize that Pope Paul IV said that a mere deviation from the Faith disqualified one from holding ecclesiastical office, including the papacy. Neither can we ignore the plain fact that Pope Benedict XVI does not think as Catholics have thought traditionally. He not simply a product of the Second Vatican Council. As Mrs. Martinez demonstrated, he was part of planning the revolutionary agenda for the Council. Can a man who has professed heresies, as Bishop Tissier de Mallerais termed some of what is contained in the writing of Father Joseph Ratzinger, and who has not abjured them publicly sit as a Successor of Saint Peter? Leaving aside Cum Ex Apostolatus Officio, the opinion of many saints and theologians is that a heretic not only falls from office but expels himself from the Church. This possibility cannot be dismissed as an absurdity in the case of Pope Benedict XVI.

Additionally, it is time for those of us who have made no formal declarations concerning the See of Peter to stop thinking we are superior to those who have made such a declaration. In actual point of fact, you see, those of us who criticize the Novus Ordo Missae, which was promulgated by Pope Paul VI, and who ignore the statements and actions of popes and cardinals and bishops are acting as though the See of Peter is vacant. Many over the years have asked the sedevacantists how long they can continue to refuse to recognize a pope. Well, perhaps it is time for those of us who have thus far not embraced the sedevacantist position to ask ourselves this question: how long can we exist outside of the official ecclesiastical structures and ignore the words and actions of the men we state occupy those structures legitimately? How long can priests who have left their dioceses to embrace, quite rightly, Tradition without compromise expect to stay outside of the official structures? How long can they serve as their own pastoral guides without any adherence to the dictates coming from Rome? They have no clearer answer to that question than do the sedevacantists have about when a Catholic will be restored to the Throne of Saint Peter.

Indeed, what binds non-sedevacantist traditionalists who work outside of the official ecclesiastical structures while conceding the legitimacy of those who hold those offices and sedevacantists together, among other things, is this: a trust that God Himself will effect a miracle to bring about a restoration. Those who do not hold to sedevacantism would be hard-pressed to name a current cardinal who would serve as the next Saint Pius X. They have to trust that God will intervene to restore the Church and wipe away the nightmare of the Second Vatican Council and the Novus Ordo Missae. Well, the same is true of the sedevacantists, who cannot say how another pope is going to ascend to the Throne of Saint Peter. Neither side can say how long this will go on. Both sides trust in God, Who can bring this all to an end as quickly as He calmed the waves while the Apostles cried out in fright about their height and fury, believing that they were going to die. Both parties trust that God will effect a restoration through the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Perhaps this is a good starting point for at least some degree of respect and good will?

Making no effort at all to resolve these questions (I am not a visionary), I would like to implore all traditional Catholics who believe in the necessity of resisting and rejecting the novelties of the recent past to at least treat each others as brothers and sisters in Christ. Yes, I recognize that the warring camps may never cooperate with each other, making us more akin to the Anglicans and Presbyterians and Methodists in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries than to Roman Catholics. However, I do think it is time to let people come to the conclusions that they believe are right. For it is entirely possible that those who have embraced the sedevacantist position long ago have been correct. We shouldn’t be too quick to denounce people who may have been right all along.

Mario Francesco Cardinal Pompedda, the former Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura of the Roman Curia, stated last year, when discussing the possibility of Pope John Paul II’s resigning the papacy, that the See of Peter, that the See of Peter would become vacant in the case of heresy. The sedevacantists are not propagating some “myth” that is beyond the realm of possibility. Joseph Ratzinger has, as Bishop Tissier de Mallerais noted, professed heresies. Much more than the disputes that took place during the Great Schism, which lasted from 1378 to 1417 and centered on politics and personalities, the disputes within traditional circles at present center on matters of doctrine. Those traditional Catholics, therefore, who recognize the harm of conciliarism and that it must be resisted (this, obviously, does not apply to many, although certainly not all, of those in the indult world, some of whom pray the “Luminous Mysteries” and even make excuses for ecumenism and religious liberty) must at least stop shooting at each other if they want to really get down to the business of propagating the perennial truths of the Church to those still steeped in the Novus Ordo and to non-Catholics.

We are dealing with nothing other than a fundamental rejection of the Catholic Faith as it has been handed down to us. While Our Lord did promise us that the jaws of Hell would never prevail against the Church, He did not say that the adversary would not win a few battles now again, either in our own lives or the larger life of the Church in her human elements. The final victory belongs to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. May we work and pray for the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, keeping close to her through her Most Holy Rosary as we seek out the Faith of our fathers in the catacombs and reject, utterly and completely, everything and anything to do with the Second Vatican Council and the rotten ethos that has corrupted so many souls and thus added to the problems we face in the midst of the world.

The late William C. Koneazny, the very sagacious founder of the Catholic Rendezvous in the Berkshire Mountains who died on June 16, 2004, said, “Our Lady will come and throw the bums out.” May we pray for this day to come as the fruit of the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary sooner rather than later.

Obviously, I was taking a few baby steps with the commentary published twenty years ago as I talked to several sedevacantist priests and bishops. The arguments I made then have been sharpened to reflect the fact that the Catholic Church, she who is the spotless, mystical spouse of her Divine Founder, Invisible Head, and Mystical Bridegroom, cannot give us error or ambiguity of any time. The problem is not with this or that putative “pope” but with the false religious sect whose false doctrines and sacrilegious and sacramentally barren liturgical rites that they have either themselves instituted and/or propagated while rejecting and disparaging almost all that Holy Mother Church, guided infallibly by the Third Person of the Most Holy Trinity,

Thus, it is beyond absurd at this late date for anyone to be concerned about the fact that Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV used—lion, and tigers, and bears, oh my!—girl altar boys when he staged the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical travesty publicly in a Roman parish for the first time since he began his career as the seventh in the current line of antipopes on May 8, 2025:

Two altar girls assisted Pope Leo XIV’s celebration of Mass at a parish in Rome over the weekend.

On Sunday, for his first public Mass at a Roman parish, Pope Leo visited Santa Maria Regina Pacis in the coastline neighborhood of Ostia. Two female altar servers assisted at the Mass — at least one of them was seen wearing Adidas sneakers. (Female altar servers assist Pope Leo XIV at his first public Mass in Rome.)

Huh, why is this news at all in some resist while recognize circles?

What does this matter thirty-two years after Karol Jozef Wojtyla/John Paul II granted permission women to serve at the Cranmer table after over twenty years of their being able to serve as lectors, “extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist,” and “leaders of song” in the sanctuary itself, to say nothing of the de facto use of girl altar boys in many parishes around the Western world, especially here in the United States of America?

Look, as I have noted in the past, I don’t know what anyone who is aghast at this non-news was doing thirty-two years ago when word began to circulate in Rome that the “pope” was going to grant this permission, but I, making my last “hurrah” to “save” the irredeemable, was tasked by Father John Anthony Hardon, S.J. to track down Mother Teresa of Calcutta to have her personally intervene with “Pope John Paul II” not to grant such permission.

Father Hardon said to me over the phone, “Tom, you must call Mother Teresa and ask her to call the pope to put a stop to this.”

By this time, you see, I had become somewhat prominent in the conciliarverse because of my commentaries and news reports in The Wanderer, which is one of the reasons that Father Hardon, whom I had first met in 1979 during a day of recollection at the Church of Saint Ignatius of Loyola on Park Avenue in the Borough of Manhattan, City of New York, New York, had asked me to contact Mother Teresa.

It took about five or six phone calls to track Mother Teresa (Incompatible With True Sanctity) down to a Missionary of Charities convent in Vietnam, but she took my call and listened intently to Father Hardon’s request, saying very clearly, “This will be a disaster for the Church. They will be pushing for women priests next." She agreed to call Karol Jozef Wojtyla/John Paul II, reaching his omnipotent secretary, the then Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz, now the retired conciliar "cardinal" archbishop of Krakow, Poland, being told that the decision had been made. I was told by Father Hardon that Mother Teresa was flabbergasted by the turnaround. Boy, if only that "pope" had known, huh? 

Young boys and adult males are permitted by the special permission of the Church to enter the sanctuary as altar servers in the Mass, serving as the extension of the hands of the priest, who is a male. No other personage, male or female, is permitted in the sanctuary. This is not so in the Novus Ordo service, where the priest sits at almost every Mass as a proliferation of laity "participates" in reading and singing. This blurs the distinction between the sacerdotal, hierarchical priesthood of the ordained priest and the common priesthood of the lay faithful. This is yet another fact about the Novus Ordo service that obliterates the sacrosanct nature of the sanctuary during Mass, thereby eliminating the sense of the timelessness of the unbloody re-presentation of the Son's one Sacrifice to the Father in Spirit and in Truth on the wood of the Holy Cross.

That was it for me.

Although I had been very active in my efforts to expose the agenda of the International Commission for English in the Liturgy (ICEL), including interviewing is executive director at the time, John Page, shortly before the translation wars at the 1993 meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Conference, and had been working with a few “conservative” “bishops” behind the scenes before that meeting, the girl altar boys indult was the last straw for me. I had been going to the modernized version of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition since 1990 in various places on Long Island and in Manhattan but vowed then and there to avoid the Novus Ordo on Sundays, although it took another eight years from 1994 to stop going to the travesty altogether. “Let the dead bury the dead,” I said to myself while resisting coming to the proper conclusion that was staring me right in the face from the following canon of the Council of Trent:

CANON VII.--If any one saith, that the ceremonies, vestments, and outward signs, which the Catholic Church makes use of in the celebration of masses, are incentives to impiety, rather than offices of piety; let him be anathema. (Session Twenty-Two, Chapter IX, Canon VII, Council of Trent, September 17, 1562, CT022.)

I was not open to seeing or accepting this truth thirty-one years, ten months ago. However, it was there for me to see. The blinders came off about eleven years later as I did my due diligence in 2004 and 2005 before coming to the correct conclusion in April of 2006. Even before announcing that decision, however, I had begun the process of examining the General Instruction of the Roman Missal sequentially in the written pages of Christ or Chaos between 2000 and 2004 before publishing it in book form then and, after over fifteen years of additional study and writing, published a completely revised edition five years ago (G.I.R.M. Warfare: The Conciliar Church's Unremitting Warfare Against Catholic Faith and Worship).

Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV is of one mind and one heart with the late Jorge Mario Bergoglio on false ecumenism, “outreach” to those steeped in unspeakable sins of perversity (see Leo XIV meets with ‘married’ homosexuals at Vatican and 5 transgender activists will dine with Pope Leo at 'Jubilee of the Poor' event Sunday, Leo officially appoints McCarrick-linked bishop as new archbishop of New Orleans), globalism, open borders, the ever-expansive reach of the “consistent life ethic” (seamless garment), and the “synodal path, and he has even approved of the “beatification” of a presbyter in Ecuador who committed acts so gross, so perverse, so unnatural and wretchedly horrid with native Amazonian children that I simply cannot link to the story describing these grotesque that are not only not the stuff of sanctity but the absolute perfection of soul who was diabolically possessed.

How can anyone think that such a “beatification” can come from Holy Mother Church, thus making a mockery of the purity of our legitimately canonized saints, many of whom (Saints Lucy, Philomena, Maria Goretti, et at.) preferred martyrdom to any hint of defiling their Holy Purity and innocence?

It is simply as impossible for the Catholic Church to approve of any these things as it is for her to have made warfare on Catholic Faith, Worship, Morals by attacking her Divine Constitution and the nature of dogmatic truth, which is an attack on God’s immutability, that has been undertaken as follows by her counterfeit ape, the conciliar church:

1. The unicity and infallibility of Holy Mother Church, which has been granted a “perfect immunity from error” (e.g., cf. Pope Pius XI, Quas Primas, December 11, 1925.)
2. The ends proper to Holy Matrimony, which have been inverted by the conciliar revolutionaries according the “personalism” of Father Herbert Doms and Dietrich von Hildebrand that was condemned directly by Pope Pius XII on April 1, 1944.)
3. The very nature of the papacy itself, which was become an object of derision, ridicule, and abject disobedience in the past sixty years with the recrudescence of the Gallicanism by the Society of Saint Pius X and then by scores of others in the “resist while recognize” movement.
4. Sacrilegious and sacramentally invalid liturgical rites.
5. Religious liberty and the separation of Church and State.
6. New ecclesiology.
7. Episcopal collegiality.
8. Ecclesial synodality.
9. False interpretations of Sacred Scripture.
10. Misrepresentations of the teachings of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the Apostles, Martyrs, Doctors, and Confessors.
11. False Mariology.
12. False Eschatology.
13. False Canon Law.
14. False Ecumenism and inter-religious “prayer” services.
15. A rejection of the fact that the Old Covenant was superseded by the New and Eternal Covenant instituted by Our Lord at the Last Supper and ratified by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on Good Friday.
16. Endless praise of pagan religions that deny the doctrine of the Most Holy Trinity and thus of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’s Sacred Divinity.

This is only a partial listing of the ways in which the counterfeit church of conciliarism has attacked Catholic Faith, Worship, and Morals. However, even this partial listing is more than enough to demonstrate that it is impossible for the Holy Catholic Church to be associated with or responsible for any of these travesties.

We must pray to Our Lady every day so that the spiritual eyes of our immortal souls will be enlightened by the ineffable graces that her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, won for us during His Passion and Death and that flow into our souls through her own loving hands as the Mediatrix of All Graces, and that will be persevere in truth while maintaining ourselves with abundant charity towards all those who do not as yet see or accept it. It took me over thirty years to see and accept the truth. Thus, we pray for all others to come to the recognition that the conciliar church has not been, is not now, nor can ever be the Catholic Church.

On this Thursday after Ash Wednesday, therefore, we beg Our Lady to help us be humble, not proud, to be pure, not worldly, and to make penance for our past sins as we strive with her maternal assistance, especially by our prayer recitation of her Most Holy Rosary, to root out all attachment to sin from our hearts and souls as we give ourselves unto her Divine Son as his consecrated slaves through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart as it is her loving heart that is the path of the restoration of a true pope on the Throne of Saint Peter and thus of right order in the Church and the world.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, pray for us.

Appendix A

Dom Prosper Gueranger on the Thursday after Ash Wednesday

Although the law of the Fasting began yesterday, yet, Lent, properly so called, does not begin till the Vespers of Saturday next. In order to distinguish the rest of Lent from these four days which have been added to it, the Church continues to chant Vespers at the usual hour, and allows her Ministers to break their fast before having said that Office. But, beginning with Saturday, the Vespers will be anticipated; every day, (Sundays excepted, which always exclude Fasting,) they will be said at such, an early hour, that when the Faithful take their full meal, the Evening Office will be over. It is a remnant of the discipline of the primitive Church, which forbade the Faithful to break their Fast before sunset, in other words, before Vespers or Even-Song.

The Church has given to these three days after Ash Wednesday a resemblance to the other ferias of her Lenten Season, by assigning to each of them a Lesson from, the Old Testament, and a Gospel, for Mass. We, of course, insert them, adding a few reflections to each. We also give the Collect of these three days.

Yesterday, the Church spoke to us upon the certainty of death. Die we must: we have not only God’s infallible word for it, but no reasonable man could ever entertain the thought that he was to be an exception to the rule. But if the fact of our death be certain, the day on which we are to die is also fixed. God, in his wisdom, has concealed the day from us; it becomes our duty not to be taken by surprise. This very night, it might be said to us, as it was to Ezechias: Take order with thy house, for thou shalt die. (Isaiah 38:1) We ought to spend each day, as though it were to be our last. Were God even to grant us, as he did to the holy King of Juda, a prolongation of life, we must come, sooner or later, to that last hour, beyond which there is no time, and eternity begins. The Church’s intention in thus reminding us of our mortality, is to put us on our guard against the allurements of this short life, and urge us to earnestness in the great work of regeneration, for which she has been preparing us during these last three weeks. How many there are of those, who, yesterday, received the ashes, and who will never see the joys of Easter, at least in this world! To them, the ceremony has been a prediction of what is to happen to them, perhaps before the month is out. And yet the very same words that were pronounced over them, were said to us. May not we ourselves be of the number of those, who are thus soon to be victims of death? In this uncertainty, let us gratefully accept the warning, which our Jesus came down from heaven to give us: Do ‘penance; for the Kingdom of God is at hand. (Matthew 4:17)

The Sacred Scriptures, the Fathers, and Theologians, tell us that there are three eminent good works, which are, at the same time, works of penance: Prayer, Fasting, and almsdeeds. In the Lessons she gives us on these three days, which form as it were the threshold of Lent, the Church instructs us upon these works. Today, it is prayer she recommends to us. Look at this Centurion, who comes to our Savior, beseeching him to heal his servant. His prayer is humble; in all the sincerity of his heart, he deems himself unworthy to receive Jesus under his roof. His prayer is full of faith; he doubts not, for an instant, that Jesus is able to grant him what he asks. And with what ardor he prays! The faith of this Gentile is greater than that of the Children of Israel, and elicits praise from the Son of God. Such ought to be our prayer, when we solicit the cure of our souls. Let us acknowledge that we are not worthy to speak to God, and yet, let us have an unshaken confidence in the power and goodness of Him, who only commands us to pray that he may pour out his mercies upon us. The Season we are now in is one of Prayer; the Church redoubles her supplications; it is for us that she makes them; we must take our share in them. Let us, during this Season of grace, cast off that languor which fastens on the soul at other times; let us remember, that it is Prayer which repairs the faults we have already committed, and preserves us from sin for the future. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Thursday after Ash Wednesday.)

Appendix B

Saint Augustine on Today’s Gospel (As found in Matins in the Divine Office)

Let us consider whether Matthew and Luke are at one as touching this centurion's servant. Matthew saith: “There came unto Him a centurion, beseeching Him, and saying: ‘Lord, my servant lieth at home sick, of the palsy.’” This seemeth to differ from what Luke saith, namely: “And when he heard of Jesus, he sent unto Him the elders of the Jews, beseeching Him that He would come and heal his servant. And when they came to Jesus, they besought him instantly, saying: “That he was worthy for whom He should do this; for he loveth our nation, and he hath built us a synagogue.” Then Jesus went with them; and when He was now not far from the house, the centurion sent friends to Him, saying unto Him: “Lord, trouble not thyself; for I am not worthy that Thou shouldest enter under my roof.

If it were done thus, how is Matthew truthful, when he saith that the centurion came unto Him, seeing that, in fact, he sent his friends? We must then look well into this, and we shall see that Matthew only made use of a common form of speech. Now, we use to say of a man that he cometh to a place even though he be not already come: whence also we say, He arrived close; or He arrived long way off, that is, to that place to which he would come; yea, we speak of that coming, toward which he tendeth, as though it had already taken place, when he that should be come at, seeth not yet him that cometh, but is come at for him by friends, to obtain his favour, which is needful for him that would come to him. And so much doth this manner of speaking hold, that they are commonly said to come at a great man, (who is beyond their personal reach,) who, by means of suitable persons, succeed in laying before him such things as they desire.

Therefore it is not strange that Matthew should make use of the common short phrase, and say of the centurion, who reached the Lord's sympathies, by mean of friends, that he came unto Him. Also we must needs not pass by lightly the mystic depth which underlieth the words of this holy Evangelist. It is written in the Psalms xxxiii. 6: Draw near unto Him and be enlightened. Thus did the centurion in faith draw near unto Jesus, and the Lord so praised him that He said: I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel. Of him of whom these words were spoken, the Evangelist deemeth it wiser to say that he had found his way to Jesus; that he had got to Christ, than that they came, through whom he sent his message unto Him. (Saint Augustine, as found in Matins, the Divine Office, Thursday after Ash Wednesday.)