The first two pieces of this little mini-series on the heels of the SSPX consecrations last week asked whether the SSPX-Vatican frame is a trap, and whether “universal acceptance” can really settle a papal legal problem nearly all Catholics have never been taught to examine.

This final piece asks what Catholics of goodwill should do next, and why the focus on the process there will be just as telling as the destination.

The Hour to Force the Question

Carpe Diem.

After the foundation above, much of which has been discussed in this space before, the question is whether Catholics have the courage to force the question so many empty responses out there are being used to avoid.

When one reads the Bible to cull the mind of God instead of simply for moral training, a most consistent pattern—as to how He moves a people, comfortable and stiff-necked, in the direction He wants them to go—becomes clear. If Providence is indeed permitting this sequence of “news” to unfold in a string of most unfortunate events, then Catholics should not treat the timing of it all as meaningless. The Church has feasts, calendars, jubilees, anniversaries, fasts, octaves, vigils, and seasons because God teaches men through time and over the course of generations. That is one of the main reasons why the machine erased so much of it in the 1970s—we aren’t trained to think along the mind of God anymore.

Carpe diem, then, cannot mean the worldly or even falsely religious impulsiveness of hunkering down even more angrily inside our predetermined tribes. It means recognizing the day God has placed before us in the tiny Hildebrand saga and refusing to let its obscurity determine our level of respect for it.

This is where the SSPX has a rare historical role. The Society is large enough to be noticed and visible enough to create the clarifying clash Catholics may need, much more so than those of us on Substack trying to push this story into the conversation. That is not praise for every decision the SSPX has made. It is a recognition of position, and God often uses position, the souls who happen to stand where history needs the turn.

To the SSPX: This is not the hour for institutional self-preservation alone. It is the hour for Catholic initiative, for an authentic return to the Church Militant. The SSPX does not need another decade or 38 years of explaining why it is not what the Vatican says it is. It needs to seize the moment and ask the deeper question the Vatican’s accusation has now placed in front of everyone.

And that accusation has spotlighted something we’ve been beating the drum on for a long time: the law.

If the Vatican is going to ignore so many faithful Catholics inside the SSPX—the “mob” so to speak—in favor of the law, then God has just done for everyone what the natural progression of things was keeping obscured from even well-meaning Catholics.

And the return to such a right foundation, the law instead of popularity of opinion, must then apply to matters of Leo and the papacy as well.

It is why I keep telling my good friend that this is quite possibly the best thing that could have happened, and even if I do end up being wrong, such mysterious movement is exactly how God works in Scripture.

He reveals His mysteries to the elect and obscures them from the rest. Just read what Christ says to His apostles when they ask Him why He teaches in parables.

If the Society, and the sedes for that matter, have the courage to test Hildebrand’s existence and claim publicly, they may do more than defend themselves. They may force the Catholic world to confront something even their local priests would have never dreamed.

What is that expected decision? I don’t think there’s any way they will do what I am challenging here concerning Hildebrand. Obviously I don’t think many will even come across this article.

But the test for them is here nonetheless. And I’ll leave the rest to Providence.

If Leo XIV is truly the pope, albeit an incredibly flawed one, then the SSPX must answer the law as applied by the man it recognizes as pope. It can’t continue this double-mindedness of recognize and resist, not 70 years later.

If Leo is not the true pope, and is indeed an antipope, then the entire conversation must change, and it must change now. Because the question is no longer whether the SSPX defied lawful authority, because it clearly didn’t if that case proves true. At that point, the spotlight is placed squarely on whether an unlawful claimant and the hierarchy around him were knowingly attempting to punish priests who have already spent decades trying, however imperfectly, to preserve Catholic doctrine, worship, the priesthood, and the sacramental life.

Read that paragraph again if you must. Because if Leo isn’t the pope—and there is much textual evidence to indicate that he isn’t—and the SSPX is perhaps the largest and loudest body that could convince enough Catholics to break the tipping point of belief in that, then the entire house of cards in Rome must fall, and it must fall hard.

Catholics who keep shouting “Jesus said the gates of Hell will not prevail against it!” will realize what was staring them point blank in the face the whole time—that the gates of Hell may well have been operating through this postconciliar Church that took on the outward robes of Catholicism but tricked everyone, even the most well-meaning, and yet God somehow someway, despite men’s best efforts to conceal the truth, came through, and came through in the most mysterious of ways—on a seeming dark day for the Church that appeared to produce only more vexation than peace.

That is why this moment cannot be wasted.

That. This is about making way for God’s glory, His answer.

This is the hour to stop managing the crisis with the same old themes everyone knows already. It is the hour to stop depending on pixelated images of men and women on electronic screens. It is the hour to stop shadow-watching in a cave.

It is the hour to instead start pushing the boundaries of the frame, to start breaking down the walls of the cave. It is the hour to stop asking only whether the SSPX and its followers can survive the Vatican’s condemnation and start asking whether the accuser has any lawful standing in the first place. It is the hour to move from the perpetual cycle of outrage and calm on social media to the manly militancy of true Catholic movement.

Carpe diem, seize the day, not with Trad swagger, not with Trad noise, not with online Trad bravado, all of which have kept us in the rut we are currently in, but with the simple valor and grit to bring the law into the open so again…

God can walk through.

If that seems an underwhelming call when so much noise has been telling us to fight each other for so long, I’m sorry. But in my humble opinion, that is what God is asking us to do.

The issue is not whether the SSPX has reasons for its resistance. The Society has argued those reasons for decades. The issue is whether those reasons now require a further step. If the crisis is grave enough to justify emergency measures, then it is grave enough to test whether the man condemning those measures is the lawful Roman Pontiff, and whether there is indeed someone else waiting, ironically, for enough public recognition to emerge safely from hiding.

Final Words

Is Hildebrand a real person or not?

And if so, is he the rightful claimant to the papacy or not?

Those two questions are the hinge for everything that follows.

The answers would not be chaos for its own sake.

They would be a Catholic act of judgment, and movement.

It would force the tribes to reveal themselves. The SSPX of goodwill, the SSPX-Resistance of goodwill, sedevacantists of goodwill, the FSSP and ICKSP of goodwill, independent priests of goodwill, cautious Novus Ordo resisters of goodwill, bishops with half-formed doubts with goodwill, and laymen of goodwill tired of living in contradiction—against everyone else with bad will. Finally, after all the false binaries, we would be back to the only one that matters—the one found in Genesis III.15. Everyone would all have to ask the same question in public: Have we been duped by the media and by decades of life and entertainment in general, once again?

And then—who exactly is the pope, the Vicar of Christ?

And finally—have I prepared my soul well enough to accept the answer that comes?

Carpe diem to the SSPX and the sedes, it must be. Unite all Catholics of goodwill, and pursue Hildebrand in a way that forces the dismissal of him to prove itself as thoroughly as the postconciliar popes have been defended. Don’t give Leo or an empty Chair the benefit of the doubt; do everything possible to give Hildebrand the benefit of the doubt.

He seems to have the papal backing to prove it, after all.

As long as the law remains true as you investigate, why wouldn’t you?