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Trent merely codified the previous fifteen hundred years. The so-called Tridentine Mass, for example, is really the Mass handed down from Apostolic times. This is at the heart of the clash with modernists who believe the Catholic Faith began with Vatican II. What Hand and others who support him want is for thinking Catholics to simply shut up and ignore truly scandalous papal acts such as kissing the Koran and pouring out libations in the Togo Forest, not to mention numerous statements and documents contradicting centuries of Catholic teaching. But the Catholic faith doesn't do away with the law of non-contradiction. Either the Church before Vatican II was wrong for two millenia, or the present Vatican II crowd has got it wrong. And judging from their miserable record for the past thirty-five years, my guess is it's the latter.

One final point. Hand throws the word "schism" around a lot lately. So do many others who use this charge as a means to dampen enthusiasm for the Traditionalist movement. EWTN has recently joined the bandwagon. But it is exceedingly doubtful that Archbishop Lefebvre was anything less than a saintly man who placed the Faith before even his obedience to the Pope. Canon Law explicitly provides that no penalty accrues if one disobeys the pope out of a state of necessity. Not only this, but even if such a state did not in fact actually exist, no penalty accrues if an individual in good conscience simply believes a state of necessity existed. No one can doubt that the Archbishop believed the Church was indeed in crisis and that a state of necessity existed. Nor can anyone who is honest fault him for believing this.