[sitetest]

Dear ultima,

You need to read Wildman Williamson's letters a little bit more closely. He is promoting his foaming at the mouth as SSPX teaching:

"However, here is a pointer in the direction of normalcy: any Catholic with the least respect for Tradition recognizes that women should not be priests - can he deny that if few women went to university, almost none would wish to be priests? Alas, women going to university is part of the whole massive onslaught on God's Nature which characterizes our times."

Here's more dreck:

"From which, one must question what kind of queenship can be exercised by Novus Ordo theologians, even conservative. Normally, "conservative" Catholics who have left Tradition are in bad faith, so will be bad teachers, while those who have never known Tradition will be ignorant, and so bad teachers. Both will make a point of "rescuing" a damsel in"schismatic" or "excommunicated" distress. Therefore a Traditional girl putting herself under "conservative" teachers will, to keep her Faith, require a special effort to resist the menfolk whom God designed (and her parents paid) her to follow. She will then be voluntarily so setting her true Catholic Faith against her true feminine nature that one or the other is almost bound to suffer."

Same dreck, different letter:

"If ever there was a sign of the times, surely it was the cloud of smoke choking Manhattan after the terrorist attack of September 11th, and rising slowly into the New York sky from the ruins of the World Trade Center. Everything modern man believes in -capitalism, materialism, globalism - struck down and reduced to a lethal pile of smoking rubble! We pray for the souls suddenly appearing before God, and for their bereaved families. But there is every chance modern man will roll on into World War III.

"That is a religious and not a political calculation. Man proposes, God disposes."

These aren't his "right wing political views". These are his religious views.

He is a moral hazard, as bad as any bishop in the real Catholic Church. That he is charming and kind in person only makes him a greater danger, as he is likely to take in trusting folks with his gentle manner, and they might drink the poison that he spews.

The pope has over 3000 bishops to oversee. If he is unsuccessful in his administration of over 3000 bishops, we may ascribe that to many things; a lack of administrative competence (it would say nothing about his personal holiness, his orthodoxy, or his wisdom to say that administratively, he's not up to snuff); occasional mistakes (I know that you think all the real Catholic bishops are bad, but that's just one more delusion); factors of which we know nothing.

The SSPX has four schismatic bishops. One of them is a bad man who writes evil things and calls them "catholic" teaching. That the SSPX can't find its way to get rid of ONE lousy bishop out of a GRAND TOTAL of FOUR bishops speaks very, very poorly for the SSPX.

The Catholic Church, headed by our Supreme Pontiff, John Paul II, looks good in comparison.

sitetest

[ultima ratio]

These are NOT religious positions that any Catholic needs pay any attention to, but are the political and social views of a man who is clearly an arch-conservative. There is nothing doctrinally Catholic about them. How could they be? Catholic women have been founding and attending Catholic institutions of higher learning for centuries. No pope or council has ever proscribed their doing so. So Williamson can argue the issue all he wants--it is only his opinion and has no moral force.

Neither is his notion that God has punished America with the collapse of the World Trade Center any much more different than Reverend Jerry Falwell's comments along the same line right after 9/11. This is what religious leaders sometimes do--they get things wrong--much as the Pope did recently in condemning the war in Iraq and siding with Saddam. Nobody thinks this was a matter of faith and morals.

You need to understand the difference betweem here between promulgating Catholic doctrine and mere opinion. These are opinions. They are no more valid than the average opinion of any priest or bishop or pope giving a sermon and using contemporary events and issues to make a general religious statement. They are sometimes off the mark. But such meanderings have no significance as official teachings. Do you really think what Williamson says about 9/11 or the Sound of Music matters to orthodox Catholics?

[ninenot]

Your insight that "...[Williamson]..is as bad as any bad ["regular"] Bishop in the USA..." is dead-on.

It's not without reason that E Michael Jones keeps insisting that there ARE such things as enemies on the right.

However, I will not join your lively discussion with ultRat and his comrades. No point, and I won't deal with them because that presumes they are REALLY rational.

The presumption is a fallacy.