Another Diocesan Priest Rejects Novus Ordo

Father Paul Sretenovic, a priest of the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey, who was ordained to the priesthood in 2002, has abandoned the Novus Ordo in order to embrace Catholic Tradition without compromise. Father Sretenovic (pronounced Stre-ten-o-vich) informed his ordinary, the Most Reverend John Myers, the Archbishop of Newark, of his decision in a letter mailed to his Excellency’s home address on the Feast of the Holy Innocents, Wednesday, December 28, 2004:

“Your Excellency: I am writing to inform you of my decision to leave the Archdiocese of Newark. It is a decision that is eighteen months in the making, and it has finally come to a head. This archdiocese, while retaining some very good priests, is, like every other diocese in the Catholic Church today, plagued by the heresy of modernism in many different forms. I recently attended a Monday afternoon of Reflection at Southmont with the Opus Dei priests and listened as one of them said that we are not looking to return to Christendom. To me, that said it all. It is not just about the Latin Mass. It is something much, much deeper, and it is the basis of my decision. Pope Pius XI in his encyclical, Quas Primas, said that Jesus Christ is not only the Lord of every individual, but also of every human society. The Syllabus of Errors of Blessed Pius IX, #77, in particular, exposes the error of separation of Church and State, a doctrine now upheld by the Vatican as the ideal, using both the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Liberty, which could very easily have been called the Declaration of Religious Liberty (reference to our Declaration of Independence intended), as well as individual decisions from the Vatican to accelerate such a separation in what were otherwise thoroughly Catholic countries, such as, among others, Colombia, 98% Catholic. The orientation of the Church is now very much in line with the principles of the French Revolution, namely liberty, fraternity, and equality. Hence, the mainstay catchwords from the Council—religious liberty, ecumenism, and collegiality. That is not a coincidence, and it is evil. The Liturgy is just one of the many lambs to be slaughtered along the way towards a Christian Democracy, which, to the dismay and shock of many in the Church, will lead directly to the worldwide takeover of Atheistic Communism, warned of indirectly by Our Lady of Fatima in 1917, and communicated by Sr. Lucia to the Catholic historian William Thomas Walsh in 1946. Russia has still not been consecrated, and she continues to spread her errors until one day, it will be too late. In the meantime, I choose to exercise my priesthood in the way intended by Almighty God, teaching sound doctrine and leading the flock by holiness of life, as St. Paul exhorted St. Timothy in his pastoral epistle.

“In the situation in which I am now, and basically in any Novus Ordo parish anywhere in the world, let alone this particular Archdiocese, I always have to watch my back and I always, at each and every Mass that I offer, have to compromise. Whether it is in the bad wording or bland prayers of the Sacramentary, or in the distribution of Communion in the hand, or in the virtually mandatory use of Extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion, there is always something there to remind me, as the song goes, and it stops now. I pray to God and to Our Blessed Mother that you obtain the grace necessary to perceive the gravity of the present situation and to act accordingly. I include my email address below for further correspondence. I know this is a shock, but for me, even the FSSP would be a compromise. Haven’t we all done enough of that?! As people were looking East this Advent season, Our Lady was leading me to, go West. In Christ the King, Fr. Paul Branko Sretenovic.”

In an e-mail to this writer sent on January 9, 2005, Father Sretenovic explained the sequence of events after this point:

“To give you the backdrop of my correspondence with the Archbishop, he said that parts of what I wrote, without specifying, were ‘inaccurate’ and ‘unfair.’ I responded through the Vicar General for the time-being that what I wrote was not ‘inaccurate’ and ‘unfair.’ I then asked the question as to whether the Archbishop would say that Cardinal Ratzinger was either of the two, specifying the terms, when he wrote that through the Council, the Church had ‘come to terms with the principles of 1789.’ I left it at that and will write the Archbishop directly within the week.”

Father Sretenovic had determined quite clearly that he could no longer make any further compromises with a Mass that did not give God the full honor and glory that are His due and a pastoral approach to the problems of the world that was premised upon a rejection of a defined teaching of the Catholic Church, the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ, and an actual embrace of the errors of Modernity and Modernism.

Father Sretenovic did indeed head west, leaving Our Lady, Queen of Peace Church in Maywood, New Jersey, on Thursday, December 29, 2004, the Feast of Saint Thomas a Becket, to drive out to Our Lady Help of Christians Church in Garden Grove, California, joining Father Patrick J. Perez and Father Lawrence C. Smith in the offering of the Traditional Latin Mass and the totality of the Catholic Faith in all of its integrity to Catholics in one of the most liturgically revolutionary places in the whole Church, the Metropolitan Province of Los Angeles, California. Father Sretenovic distributed Holy Communion to the faithful at Our Lady Help of Christians on the Feast of the Holy Family on Sunday, January 9, 2005, saying, “I have never before felt like I did in my first Traditional giving of the Eucharist, or however you want to put it. It was awesome and I felt like a priest in a way that I haven't before. The formula is much better, not to mention the signing of the Cross, and the use of the paten for the Sacred Particles, AND the posture of the people with open mouths, heads tilted upwards like chicks eagerly welcoming their mother with the food that she is providing for them.” [He offered his first Traditional Latin Mass there on Sunday, January 16, 2005.]

Father Sretenovic, who was born on January 8, 1974, found his way to Our Lady Help of Christians within three months of meeting Father Perez at Father Nicholas Gruner’s Fatima conference in Glendale, California, at the end of September, 2004. Father Perez’s mother, Mrs. Margaret Perez, saw Father Sretenovic and told him that he had to meet her son, making sure that the two of them sat down for dinner after Father Perez’s talk at the conference. Father Sretenovic was impressed with Father Perez’s knowledge of the Faith and of the development of the Mass. Mr. John Vennari, the editor of Catholic Family News, also spoke to Father Sretenovic about the crisis in the Church and of the necessity of fleeing from the Novus Ordo structures. Seeds were being planted.

Father Sretenovic contacted this writer in early December of 2004, and a luncheon meeting was arranged in Wayne, New Jersey, following a First Friday Mass at Our Lady of Fatima Chapel in Pequannock, New Jersey, on December 3, 2004. This writer and his wife, to put it charitably, pummeled Father Sretenovic, asking him bluntly as to how long he could continue to give out Communion in the hand and continue to offer a Mass that less fully communicates the truths of the Catholic Faith and does not render God the full honor and glory that are His due. Father Sretenovic listened, particularly to Mrs. Droleskey’s heartfelt plea to give Our Lord and His flock unfettered access to the fullness of the Catholic Faith. Father Sretenovic promised to contact Fathers Perez and Smith. He also wrote fairly immediately to Father Stephen P. Zigrang, whose association with the Society of Saint Pius X prompted the soon-to-be promoted Archbishop of Galveston-Houston, the Most Reverend Joseph Fiorenza, a protégé of the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, to suspend him for an association with a “schismatic” group that, among other things, denied the “enduring validity of the Old Covenant God made with the people of Israel.”

Father Sretenovic carefully weighed his options, keeping in close contact with Father Lawrence C. Smith, who left the Diocese of Davenport, Iowa, on September 8, 2003. Father Sretenovic also had contact with priests in the Society of Saint Pius X, determining ultimately that it would be best for him to be with Fathers Perez and Smith in California. Father was most intent on placing himself in a situation where the gaps in his preparation for priestly ordination could be closed and he could concentrate on his own personal sanctification while offering Catholics the Immemorial Mass of Tradition. He arrived at his decision after a great deal of reflection and a bit of indecision, coming to the conclusion in the final analysis that he needed to make a clean break from the diocesan structure sooner rather than later, understanding that the faithful have a right in perpetuity to the Traditional Latin Mass, which can never be subject justly to any limitations or conditions by any bishop, including the Pope himself. Father Smith was most instrumental in helping Father Sretenovic to come to this decision, saying that “it was his call that put me over the edge. Within 20 minutes after my conversation with him, I was writing my letter” to Archbishop Myers.

Father Sretenovic was not heedless of the fact that his own ordinary, Archbishop Myers, though not a traditionalist himself, has been sympathetic to priests desirous of offering the Traditional Latin Mass. Father Sretenovic also understood, however, that the embrace of Tradition, while it starts with the Mass, involves quite fundamentally an embrace of the totality of the Catholic Faith without any taint of corruption by the novelties and errors of the past forty to forty-seven years. Father Sretenovic also knows that ordinaries come and go, a point demonstrated quite graphically when Bishop John Myers of Peoria, Illinois, was elevated to the archbishopric of Newark. Although Bishop Myers had granted permission to Father Michael Driscoll, the pastor of Saint Mary’s Church in Rock Island, Illinois, to offer the Traditional Latin Mass on a daily basis, that permission was revoked by Myers’s successor, Bishop Michael Jenky, who demoted Father Driscoll to the post of an assistant hospital chaplain at Saint Francis Hospital in Peoria. Father Sretenovic, understanding, as eight cardinals noted in a finding sent to Pope John Paul II in 1986, the binding nature of the Traditional Latin Mass can never be abrogated, did not want to subject himself to the vagaries of episcopal arbitrariness. He realized that he needed the stability offered by the Traditional Latin Mass for his own sanctification–and that the people have the absolute right to safe harbor found therein.

The story of Father Paul Sretenovic continues, therefore, a remarkable display of courage on the part of diocesan priests who have been willing to forsake all of their canonical safety and human respect in order to embrace Tradition without compromise. Men such as Fathers Sretenovic and Zigrang and Smith were ordained after the implementation of the liturgical revolution had begun. Father Zigrang was ordained in 1977. Father Smith was ordained in 1997. Father Sretenovic was ordained in 2002. Although there have been priests (such as Father Stephen Somerville) who were ordained in the Traditional rite and have returned thereto, the embrace of Tradition by priests who are relatively young (in the case of Father Zigrang) or very young (in the case of Fathers Smith and Sretenovic) is particularly galling to the liturgical revolutionaries, men and women who brook no opposition and who protest with great vehemence the glories of the “liturgical renewal.” How can it be, they ask themselves, that men who have been immersed in their handiwork all of their lives can become counter-revolutionaries and reject all of their “enlightened” schemes and programs?

The revolutionaries can protest all they want. The plain fact of the matter is that there are a number of priests across the nation who may be following the examples of Fathers Zigrang, Smith and Sretenovic. More than a handful of priests are on the fence as this is being written. Some are waiting for Rome to come to their “rescue” by means of an Apostolic Administration. Some are afraid of what will happen to their sheep should they simply leave their diocesan assignments. Others are simply afraid to pray for the graces to muster up the courage to stop participating in sacrileges such as the distribution of Communion in the hand. From the vantage point of one who travels great distances across the nation to get his family to the daily offering of the Traditional Latin Mass, it is time for our shepherds to give us our due, the Immemorial Mass of Tradition, understanding that Our Lady will take care of their temporal needs and that the rectitude of their actions will be understood fully only on the Last Day at the General Judgment of the Living and the Dead.

Indeed, the witness given by Fathers Zigrang, Smith and Sretenovic, as well as the witness given by the bishops and the priests of the Society of Saint Pius X, to the necessity of proclaiming the fullness of the Catholic Faith without compromise and without any dilution serves as an inspiration to the sheep who are seeking safety and security in the midst of doctrinal and liturgical instability and turmoil within the diocesan structures. They are willing to be calumniated, even by fellow traditionalists who have anointed themselves to be in the august and pristine "mainstream," in order to bear a witness to the authentic Tradition of the Church without any compromise at all. No loss of human respect and no amount of name-calling or sloganeering will ever deter them from giving their sheep the fullness of the Catholic Faith.

At least some of the sheep will respond when their shepherds put themselves on the line to give them what is their due, namely, the Traditional Latin Mass. Hundreds upon hundreds of people, for example, have found their way to Our Lady Help of Christians Church in Garden Grove, California. Most of these people have never heard of The Remnant, Catholic Family News, or Christ or Chaos. They've never heard of Christ the King College and most of them probably think that GIRM Warfare has something to do with bacteriology. They're just Catholics who understand that the first law of the Church is the salvation of souls and that they do not have to sit idly by and be subjected to the rot of conciliar novelties in the context of what pretends to pass for the Church's liturgy and catechesis. These good souls are fed up with what is going on in their local dioceses and parishes and they simply want the fullness of the Catholic Faith to be made manifest to them during Holy Mass and in the life of their parish. The same is true of the fifteen families who have found their way from Saint Andrew's Church in Channelview, Texas, to Queen of Angels Church in Dickinson, Texas (and Saint Michael the Archangel Chapel in Spring, Texas), following after their inimitable pastor, Father Zigrang. The sheep want Christ and His truth to be made manifest to them without novelty or dilution. This is nothing other than one of their baptismal birthrights as Catholics.

Father Paul Sretenovic finds himself some 3,000 miles away from his parents, who are residents of New Jersey. He has gone this distance to serve sheep without compromise. He is in need of our prayers. More of his brother priests need to follow his example of humility and fidelity, to say nothing of his courage. As a son of Our Lady, Father Sretenovic has entrusted himself entirely to her Immaculate Heart. He knows that she will take good care of him as he acts in the person of her Divine Son as a sacerdos. Father Sretenovic delivered his first sermon at Our Lady Help of Christians on Sunday, January 16, 2004, stating that he had come to realize that the devil has essentially used the hierarchy of the Church to communicate the belief that one can eat from all of the trees in the "garden" today (Judaism, Islam, the New Age Movement, Wicca, Modernism) except the tree of Tradition, from which it is forbidden to eat. He said that the Novus Ordo Missae breeds lukewarmness, crediting Father Paul Kramer’s The Devil’s Final Battle and this writer’s G.I.R.M. Warfare with helping him to see how he was stuck in this lukewarmness himself. His sermon resonated with the 700 parishioners in attendance at the three Masses offered at Our Lady Help of Christians.

Our Lady Help of Christians, pray for Father Sretenovic. Pray for all traditionally-minded priests to follow his example of pure love for Tradition without fear of the canonical and/or temporal consequences. Pray for us sheep, that we might make the sacrifices necessary to help our shepherds feed us with the pure milk of Tradition.

Do you guys read what you write before hitting the "Post" button? You act more like poorly raised angry teenagers than well catechized Catholics. What's next, mother jokes?

I'm nearly convinced that God is using the ill-fruits of the New Order in order to give us contrast. Whether those ill-fruits are sexual deviants, criminals, the heterodox, the banal, the apostates, or pathological trad-haters. NO-Catholicism is in the process of handing its head to itself, it needs no help from traditionalists. All they need to do is pray and follow the faith.

I'm not sure if I've thanked you (and others like you) lately for the immense contribution you've made to the traditional cause on Free Republic. I'm not being flippant either. Many of us have received personal messages from Protestants and Catholics alike informing us that they are embracing the tradtional faith as a result of reading the threads here on FR. I've received several myself.

Thank you for your good works.

You don't imagine that I have any use for the Maryknolls with or without this latest evidence opf their adherence to the interests of communists in all contexts? Tip O'Neill's aunt, a Maryknoll nun, convinced him (according to Tip) to support the Sandanistas and other Latin American commubnists after convincing him of the alleged merits of the Vietnamese communists.

If you support the SSPX schism, yiou are not entitled to refer even to Maryknoll facilities as "our" seminaries unless you see them as commubnist seminaries and support that idea too.

Whatever may be true of the Maryknolls and the dioceses allegedly cooperating with the Chinese "Patriotic" Association, it does not let the execrable SSPX schism off the hook as schismatics led by excommunicates. Moral relativism is not applicable against the judgments of the Holy Father.

It is not as though the Roman Catholic Church would be losing anything of value in the event that those who find themselves persuaded by the Marcellian schism and associated evils leave. It just clarifies the battle lines and purifies the Roman Catholic Church.

Support of the Roman Catholic Church and of His Holiness is always a good work. The traditional Faith is, of course, headquarted in the Vatican as it has been since the end of the captivity at Avignon or even the Napoleonic imprisonment of Pius VII.

Roma locuta. Causa finita.

Ubi Petrus, Ibi Ecclesia.

If people wrongfully imagine themselves Catholic without adhering to those principles, they can find themselves a nice, self-worshipping nest of schismatics to pat them on the back for the slights that their respective imperial judgments and ids have suffered from that mean old pope.

I am ever happy to provide such good works to separate the Roman wheat from the Marcellian chaff.

It just clarifies the battle lines and purifies the Roman Catholic Church.

I agree with you that there is discernment taking place and that lines being drawn, only it's not as you would like to imagine it.

Liberals, gays, criminals, the un-catechized, modernists, relativists, new agers, heretics, neos, tradition haters and other various disruptors gravitate towards New Order Catholicism, a non-organic invention spawned by suspect men with bright ideas the 1960s. Those who value the aspects of our faith which transformed the planet by spreading the Gospel through the centuries embrace tradition.

The former either ignore, deny or wickedly participate intentionally in the ongoing destruction the Mother Church has suffered because of this miserable failed experiment. The latter pay attention when they hear wisdom calling.

What you haven't realized Mr. Elk, is that our traditional faith has that good ol' dynamic that it always had; The harder you push against it, the more fertile and productive it becomes. The problem for the antagonists is that it becomes fertile and productive anyway, even if they attempt to ignore it. Hence they are in the frustrating and unenviable position of not being able to stifle it, yet not being able to ignore it.

The pharisees 2,000 years ago were faced with this same unresolvable dilemma. We witnessed a modern day microcosm of this dynamic during the dustup when Mel's "The Passion" came out. The more they pushed, the bigger it became.

The Pope's promulgation of Canon Law supercedes your inane argument that he did not "personally" write every jot and tittle thereof.

I realize now that you don't seem to have the candlepower in your small brain to actually come up with an intellectual argument based in reality. As you make up the doctrine of papal impeccability you drift further and further away from the Catholic faith. In your mind the Pope cannot be wrong or be unscrupulous and sinful in his judgement? Where is this in Catholic Doctrine? Answer: Nowhere.

But inanity seems to be your specialty, as you continue to object without grounds that the Pope does not have the authority to approve, through the Congregation of Worship or otherwise, the NO.

Silliness. I realize by the sheer hysterical snideness of your comments that you are out of ammo like Blechh Ilk (who had no ammo to begin with) You keep inventing new arguments instead of actually dealing with them. No one said he doesn't have the right to foist a sucky liturgy that is built to fail. You seem to think that people should passively swallow the crap sandwich he feeds and rub our tummies and say, "mmmmm..."

Were you to acknowledge the validity of the Pope's action while holding that the ICEL translation sucks, we would be in complete agreement.

The Latin Novus Ordo sucks. The ICEL translation sucks more. You're just a hypocrite because the Pope allowed and continues to allow the sucky ICEL translations. If you don't like the ICEL you are a "schizzie" you are defying the promulgationg of the sucky rite by "the Vicar of Christ, The Supreme Pontiff, the Patriarch of the West" LOL!

But you choose to walk and talk like a Schizzie instead. May God help you to a reconciliation with the Roman Catholic Church.

What would you know about the Catholic Church? Go enjoy your apostasy. Keep you head in the sand, (or wherever they tell you to put it) When the walls come tumbling down on the conciliar organization, you'll have no one to blame but yourself and other lazy, nonthinking, faithless, Protestantized "Catholics"

Roma locuta. Causa finita. Those words are as vital to Roman Catholics as are the words "Non serviam" to Lucifer and Marcel's cult."

Nonsense. (again) I've seen scrabble games with more doctrinal authority than your scatterbrained pithel above. I'm surprised you don't start throwing in ABBA lyrics to support your position.

If the traditional pieties of the actual Roman Church offend you, you can take your refuge in "Non serviam." It's a tradition odf sorts just not of a Catholic sort.

Since you haven't demonstrated that you know the least about Catholicism. Your statement is worthless at best amusing. But only marginally so. Sort of like watching a monkey at a typewriter.

How nice it must seem to you for you to have found a new and quite eccentric cult conceived by the excommunicated Marcel in his own image and likeness and yours.

You sound like those outside of the Church who accused the early Christians of cannibalism. And by early Christians I don't mean the 1960's and 70's , I mean the 60's and 70's.

Perhaps, God, in His infinite mercy has somehow admitted Marcel to the shack by the river in eternity in spite of it all.

That's not Catholic teaching. If he's excommunicated it's all over. But I guess anything goes in the Universal Salvation of the post conciliar era.

That might give hope to those who have apostasized for Marcel and hilariously believe that there is no salvation outside the Church which they imagine to be their tiny circle of malcontents.

Well it's only a matter of time before a website a credit card and the Vatican URL will provide sainthood for anyone who asks. You really are defeating your own argument here. Since everyone "may" be saved. "Schism" as you believe in your fantasy world of do it yourself Catholcism shouldn't be a big deal.

Roma locuta. Causa finita!

A penny saved is a penny earned. What else you got? Nevermind. I already know. Nothing. After the catch phrase, "Shazam!" you supposedly have imparted some kind of wisdom that needs no explanation.

So much to say and so little time!

So much to say and so little value in what you say. Maybe a little more observation and you'll learn something.

As a schizzie, you have no standing to argue against His Holiness and be heard as a Catholic critic.

You just keep making it up as you go along. On what do you base this pearl of wisdom?

Perforce, you cannot be a Catholic critic unless you are a Catholic. You have to return to the Catholic faith, discipline and practice to do so.

Really? There is no command that I must attend the bogus Ordo. In fact, since JPII hates the papacy so much (judging by his actions and inactions), he never orders anyone to do anything.

Even then we are a Church and not a democracy or a moral anarchy in the pews subject to the opinions of the chronically offended and unbalanced and unCatholic.

Keep dreaming with your head in the sand. YOU ARE IN MORAL ANARCHY, ESPECIALLY IN THE QUICKLY EMPTYING PEWS brought on by the morally offensive and unbalanced, faithless bishops. The only hope for servile saps like yourself is to get some good shepherding and that will only happen when the worthless bunch currently in charge gets their just desserts. God will raise a real Apostle as Pope someday, and he'll right these horrid wrongs by modernist infested Rome. It may not be for a while but he's left us with enough to know what we have to do.

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