Nanquan Cuts the Cat, Part 2

Book of Serenity, Case 9; Gateless Barrier, Case 14; Blue Cliff Record, Cases 63 & 64

May 13th, 2026.

  

 2. Obfuscation and Silence

When I entered the Jesuits in 1966, the Second Vatican Council had just ended. The Catholic world was experiencing the exuberance of John the 23rd’s throwing the windows open. A General Congregation of the Jesuits had just elected a Basque priest, Father Pedro Arrupe, as our new Father General. He was charismatic. We younger Jesuits felt he could lead the largest and most educated religious order in the post-Council era. He’d been less than 10 kilometers from the epicenter of the Atomic blast in Hiroshima, a horrific event that weighed heavily on my generation of Americans, including most of the men who entered the Jesuits with me.

Arrupe’s predecessor, Father Jean-Baptiste Janssens, had been elected two years after the defeat of the Nazis. We’d heard his reputation as a strict disciplinarian. We also knew that he’d worked with the clandestine Benedyk Grynpas network during the occupation of Belgium, but for some reason, that was rarely acknowledged. He forged baptismal certificates for Jewish children, but never required that they be baptized. He taught them to say the Hail Mary but only so they could pass a Nazi interrogation if caught. He hid a large group of Jewish children in his own residence. He quietly encouraged other Jesuit houses, monasteries, and convents across Belgium to hide Jews. He undoubtedly knew the 43 Jesuits who died in the camps and the more than 100 other priests who were murdered resisting the Nazi regime. He’d been their superior. He knew that if he were caught by the Gestapo, he would be executed, but he did the right thing.  He was honored with the title of Righteous Among the Nations by the Knesset of the new State of Israel in 1954.

I didn’t have to go back to 15th-century England to find examples of heroic men of conscience. Most of my superiors, teachers, mentors, and spiritual guides had been trained by this very courageous man. Many had worked with him directly, but he never wore his resistance like a badge. If he ever spoke about it, we never heard it. The job of piecing together the Jesuit order after the war, coupled with managing the largest influx of “vocations” in the order's 500-year history, was enormous, equal to responding to the plight of Jews during the Holocaust. It was another task of matching actions with words and sacred promises, but without the real threat of execution 

The stain of antisemitism in the Catholic church is extremely troubling; the record of the institutional Church during the Third Reich has become the topic of a heated debate. There is one group that claims that Pope Pius XII did his duty and maintained absolute neutrality, but to others, he appears cowardly, even sympathetic towards the aims of national socialism. The role of Father Włodzimierz Ledóchowski, the head of the Jesuits during the war, is equally mixed. He certainly saw reports about the extent of the mass murders. Claims that the Nazis were skillful at hiding their atrocity feel like an excuse. Both Pacelli (Pius XII) and Ledóchowski have been described as “benignly” antisemitic. Many old noble European families were. It was part of an ancient class stratification that Americans don’t understand. How could priests, bishops, and popes keep silent unless they were hedging their bets, or even being sympathetic to the Nazis?

After months of wrestling with a vague, undefined flight between Nanquan’s monks of the eastern and western halls, it was no longer speculative. A question whose answer determined life or death was right in my face; it was a question that cut so deeply there was only silence, or an answer whose horrific consequences were impossible to escape.

In my mind, I convened a Board of Examiners—three professed senior priests—to interview the monks of the western and eastern halls—a typical Jesuit tactic. I asked if the English Reformation had been a power grab among 16th-century monarchies, was the Jesuit mission doomed from its conception. Was the sacrifice of the English martyrs even justified? When I extended that hypothesis into the ambiguity of the Catholic response to Hitler, I was told that I was being revisionist in my reading of history. It reeked of the same equivocation that Father Garnet was accused ot. I couldn’t recall the sainthood of the English Jesuit martyrs, though opposing the cause of Eugenio Pacelli might be justified depending on a more careful review of the history. The hard fact that both the Jesuits and the College of Cardinals, right after the War, elected men, Janssens and Roncalli, who were named Righteous Among the Nations, tells me that they wanted to land on the right side of history.

However, my questions missed the point of the koan. I wasn’t being asked to speculate: if a group of Jewish kids showed up at my door, and I knew that helping them would put me in the same grave danger they faced, would I rise to the moment? Right now is not five centuries ago.

The tone is correct. It didn’t have the urgency and the immediacy required, but at least I had managed to put breath and blood into the argument between the eastern and western halls, one that carried the weight of life and death. The koan ends with Zhaozhou taking off his shoes and putting them on his head. We are told, in a scholarly tone, that this was an expression of grief in ancient China. 

Could I go through a painful experience of dealing with questions about my entire religious life and end with a funeral joke? I’d caught a few laughing Zen students take off their shoes and prance around, with no sense of how profoundly their world has been turned upside down. But there it was, a note about an ancient Chinese funeral ritual in the marginalia, handed down through at least a dozen roshis, and brought into the dokusan room where we dealt with the question. 

I’ve never seen convincing evidence to support the ancient Chinese funeral rite story. I searched Google. Did this practice, display, or joke exist in China during any dynasty? I did find some customs that stretch Western norms. In Taiwan, the bereaved family hires strippers and pole dancers if the obsequies go beyond three days. The motivation is not otherworldly. If the attendees are entertained, they don’t go home, and the priests maintain their minyan, or quorum, for the ceremonies. But we were being asked to believe that it was normal for Chinese mourners to dance with their shoes on their heads. This is at least suspect. 

There is a more straightforward answer: Up is down. Down is up. 

___________

References:

Rebellion of the Righteous: Jesuit Partisanship for Jews. In: Journal of Jesuit Studies, James Bernauer S.J.

Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, John Cornwell

The Jesuits and the Third Reich,  Vincent A. Lapomarda.

The American Jesuits, Schroth, Raymond A. Published by NYU Press 

The American Jesuits: A History. NYU Press, 2007. Project MUSE.

I’ve written three sections that will appear separately. Here’s the first. https://jesuskoan.blogspot.com/2026/07/nanquan-cuts-cat.html

Syncretism, Syncretic Occultism, Carlos Castaneda and the Monetization of the Occult

Dated June 21, 2023, in my notebook

Claudio Naranjo, Carlos Castaneda, and a raccoon share a moment.

When asked by an interviewer if Don Juan Matus existed (as well as straightening out some inconsistencies in his biography), Carlos Castaneda replied, "To ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics ... is like using science to validate sorcery. It robs the world of its magic and makes milestones out of us all."

What I take this to mean is that the Yaqui sorcerer don Juan was a convenient fiction made up by an anthropology student with a vivid imagination and a few too many peyote buttons. But Castaneda was a compelling storyteller, and we all believed it — and bought his books. It is not surprising that he and Naranjo became friends. He visited the early SAT groups, and perhaps used Naranjo’s SAT group process to create his own Tensegrity, “the modernized version of some movements called magical passes developed by Indigenous shamans who lived in Mexico in times prior to the Spanish conquest."

One deep root of modern Western Enneagram teaching lies in the small world of Latin American esotericism and its deep, though convoluted, connection to native shamanism. Claudio Naranjo’s own story is tied up with that of Oscar Ichazo, who was never very clear about his sources — usually some version of the story of stopping for lunch at an ordinary wayside ristorante in Argentina and the waiter handing him a note from a group of ordinary-looking men inviting him to their table where, while sipping afternoon aperitifs, they exchanged the latest in their research of the inner workings of the human psyche. 

Another partially verified story is Naranjo’s journey to Arica Chile where, after some vague initiation into a mystery cult, and receiving instructions from Ichazo in his role as an esotericist who, by the way, was guided by his Kabbalist spiritual guide, the highest Archangel Metatron, Naranjo went out into the Atacama Desert for 40 days, the driest place on the face of the earth (drier than the place where Jesus stood down the devil in his 40-day retreat). There, he told us that he had undergone a rebirth experience and that, having been trained as a medical doctor, he could recognize all the stages of an embryo's formation, the organs beginning to function, etc. I remember wondering how high he was when he told that tale, probably as high as he was when being reborn, something about his intonation and phrasing.

But I did believe that Don Juan was real until the raccoon encounter.

Claudio told us this story by way of introducing Castaneda.

Naranjo’s house was down on the Berkeley flatlands. I can see the house clearly in my memory and almost remember the exact address — 14 hundred-something Alston Way. It was not all gentrified in those days, but a modest, even run-down neighborhood of California bungalows. There was a small creek that ran at the back of the property, and Claudio had thrown up a shack, his study house, on its edge. Carlos and Claudio were doing some kind of drug, and a raccoon came and sat by the screen door, watching them in what they perceived to be a rather intense way, or so they said. Castaneda was sure that the raccoon had been taken over by a spirit being to deliver a message. The contents of that message were also apparently an occult secret.

Guys, you were high and tripping out on a raccoon looking for a yummy garbage dinner. I'm not using science to invalidate your sorcery. I am suspicious of the drugs.

Nanquan Cuts the Cat ({Part 1)

Book of Serenity, Case 9; Gateless Barrier, Case 14; Blue Cliff Record, Cases 63 & 64

May 13th, 2026. 

At least nine Jesuits have been authorized to teach the koan curriculum, which is by far the largest representation of any specific religious order among Zen teachers, but there haven’t been any Jesuit commentaries on the koans. Today, the opening of Parliament in the UK began with a ceremonial search of the Palace of Westminster's basement, a nod to the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605, which is also known as the Jesuit Treason. I will take the occasion to write a thoroughly Jesuitical* commentary.

The Koan:

The priest Nanquan found monks of the eastern and western halls arguing about a cat. He held up the cat and said, “Everyone! If you can say something, I will spare this cat. If you can’t say anything, I will cut off its head.” No one could say a word, so Nanquan cut the cat in two.

That evening, Zhaozhou returned from outside and Nanquan told him what happened. 

Zhaozhou removed a sandal from his foot, put it on his head, and walked out. Nanquan said, “If you had been there, the cat would have been spared.”

A Jesuit Commentary: 

1. Equivocation

In my view, this is one of the most consequential koans in the curriculum. Outside of the No koan, I’ve spent more time wrestling with this case than any other that I’ve tackled.

How did this koan earn a place in three of the collections? 

It’s no plate of milk. Many Zen students are repulsed. It even seems to condone violating the first grave precept. The title is “Nanchuan Cuts the Cat,” not “Nanchuan Plays with the Idea of Killing a Cat.” It doesn’t settle the moral question of cat killing; that’s not the point. But it doesn’t evade murder and death either: Nanchuan actually kills a helpless, innocent cat who has no say in the matter. We don’t know if it was a cute little house kitty or a nasty old street cat, but for sure, there was splattered blood and two halves of a dead cat. 

Most introspection begins with an inner battle. I am no opponent of grandmother Zen. I normally give myself plenty of room for fluid inquiry. However, I will begin this commentary by focusing on another aspect of the story: its language. The request for a response becomes a demand: “If you can say something, I will spare this cat. If you can’t say anything, I will cut off its head.” I have a say in the matter, a word, or maybe even several. All we know with certainty is that some monks, probably with too much time on their hands, got into an argument about a cat—a few words, a question, perhaps an insult, perhaps a confused answer or no answer, anger, then silence searching for an appropriate response, and finally a dire consequence. It’s easier to leave the koan’s argument without form and content, but (at least in my experience), koans don’t work like that. We fill them with our shadows.

In 2009, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival produced a play by one of my Jesuit classmates. Father Bill Cain’s “Equivocation” was very well received, as I would expect. Bill is a talented, inventive writer and committed Christian. However, I’m not going to borrow much other than the title and the predicament: the setting is England during the reign of James the First; the situation is the plight of the Jesuits who were sent to minister to Roman Catholics in a militantly Protestant country, and the martyrdom of 34 saints and 149 blesseds, even one bearing my surname, Blessed William Ireland, S.J. They were part of a larger movement of “recusant” English Catholics, waiting, hiding and organizing the reestablishment of religion under the Pope. They were divided over tactics; they were hunted down; many were arrested; many would die, and ultimately, they would fail.

The title “Equivocation*” refers to a contemporaneous manual that outlined a highly controversial defense strategy for Roman Catholics to survive the "bloody questions." The Jesuit missionaries were coached, and in turn coached others to use ambiguous language or a "mental reservation," misleading answers that would not reveal the identities of their fellow Catholics. As scrupulous religious people, they had to sort out the moral consequences of lying. Priests had the additional burden of guarding the seal of confession. If anyone refused to sign the Oath of Supremacy, recognizing Elizabeth I, and subsequently James I, as the head of the church, they became “recusants,” and faced severe penalties—fines, property confiscation, and imprisonment. It could include high treason, the punishment for which was horrific: execution by being hanged, drawn, and quartered*.

We do not know the author of “Equivocation,*” though there is a definite Jesuit turn to the argument. In fact, this is the origin of the less-than-flattering definition of “Jesuitical” to mean someone who practices crafty, deceitful, intricate arguments designed to mislead, dissemble, or dodge direct answers. We know that a copy of the treatise was found among Father Henry Garnet’s books, the Jesuit superior in England, when he was arrested after the failed Gunpowder Plot, also known as the Jesuit Treason of 1605. It was used against him in his trial. 

Garnet was a very refined, highly educated priest, a trained musician, and an unlikely leader of a terrorist plot to kill the King, a large number of nobles, and MP’s. Guy Fawkes Night is celebrated to this day with fireworks and the burning of effigies of the man caught guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder in the basement of the House of Parliament. Fawkes and Garnet knew one another. Garnet had been seen meeting with Fawkes. Garnet claimed that he’d been trying to persuade Fawkes to find a nonviolent tactic for finding accommodation for Roman Catholics. 

We don’t know for certain whether or not any Jesuit actually plotted the terrorist attack, though I think it’s highly likely. Shakespeare knew about it and had an opinion. In Act 2, Scene 3 of Macbeth, the drunken porter, acting as hell’s gatekeeper, welcomes a parade of condemned souls into the castle, including an “equivocator that could swear in both scales against either scale,” . . .  the "open and broad lying and forswearing." 

When Garnet defended himself, his words seemed to match the circumstances, but canceled out other words. The Privy Council used the handbook that outlined this type of argument, “Equivication,” as evidence to condemn Garnet. The resulting action was swift. He was executed on 3 May 1606, three days after the verdict. Toothless grannies pushed to the front row at his public execution with clean napkins to mop up the martyr’s blood as a talisman. 

These events happened more than 400 years ago. How could they enter my life in a real way if I didn’t share something with the martyrs? I have no enthusiasm for converting the Church of England. In fact, I’m quite sympathetic towards the beauty of the language and form of its liturgy. There is a high probability that I am related to Blessed William Ireland, but it still feels worlds away. 

When my teacher gave me the koan, the cat’s dark shadow began to appear very slowly in my own life — the fight between the monks became the execution of Jesuits who had been trained at the English College in Rome or Douai. Yet it became personal. We sang the same Te Deum that the 16th-century Jesuits sang when they learned of a Jesuit’s execution in London. We celebrated their feast days. We’d heard stories of their torture and death, which were presented as heroic qualities we should emulate.

___________

Notes: 

*Although many Jesuits of other eras might have entertained the idea that a consistent spiritual and moral tone might be identified as “Jesuitical,” I am afraid that I only use the term to refer to my 11 years in the Society of Jesus. I’ve worked with the koan under a teacher’s guidance on at least 4 occasions without any access to anyone’s commentary. This last time was quite different; connections with my Jesuit training kept me company. At times, it became very difficult. What follows are field notes from that exploration.

Equivocation is a critically acclaimed 2009 play written by American Jesuit priest and playwright Bill Cain. The play premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The definition of equivocation is “the use of ambiguous language to conceal the truth or to avoid committing oneself; prevarication.”

*Michel Foucault uses a brutal public execution involving drawing and quartering in the opening pages of Chapter 1, "The Body of the Condemned," in his seminal 1975 book, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. While the traditional English sentence was precisely "hanged, drawn, and quartered," Foucault specifically details the French variation of the punishment inflicted upon the regicide Robert-François Damiens in 1757. Damiens was condemned for attempting to assassinate King Louis XV.

"Part 2. Obfuscation and Silence" is now available here: https://jesuskoan.blogspot.com/2026/07/nanquan-cuts-cat-part-2.html

A 250th Freedom Day Post: Tempest in a Teapot!

Happy 4th of July. Today I joined our President and kicked over the bucket of paint in the Reflecting Pool. It soaked a lot more than the odd bits of junk that were lying around waiting for me to feel motivated to clean them up, maybe next week.

I was thinking about the fashion sense of the Society of Saint Pius the 10th, those weird, ugly fiddleback vestments that our priests used to wear, and some still long for, a bit, I guess, like Mormon underwear. For my generation, our families were integrating into the predominantly white Protestant culture; what our priests wore said we were Catholic, probably either Irish or Italian, probably white, with mostly well-behaved kids, and even priests and nuns in the family, at least back on the old sod. After only a few generations, we were gaining enough majority in the ward to grab some political power from the uppity Yankee fat cats and their cigar-smoking cronies, the sons of bitches, down at city hall. Finally, some fat chickens for the cousins and me. 

Or at least that's how the story usually goes after a bottle of Jamieson. I’m starting to sound like Eugene O’Neill. Leave Joyce for the Jesuits to pick apart with that brainy cousin, bonehead, the one who’s probably gay. I’ll stand with the likes of Flanagan, the priest who just tells us to toll the beads and trust our Lady, forget what the Protestants say about her in their neat white meeting houses on the town square. And I will support Father O’Halloran’s fund to build a Catholic school. I’ve heard that they’re starting to make jokes about our priests wearing dresses at their fancy dinner parties. The up-and-comers want us to make O’Halloran wear pants when he walks his dog. I say he wears what he wants as long as he moderates his hell talk to a brush fire when he launches into it at the 11 o’clock.

Tempest in a Teapot!

At one time, for some odd reasons which are self-evident, I became obsessed with several ultra-conservative offshoots of the Roman Catholic Church. I wrote about having dinner with a bishop in the Old Catholic Church in America after I left the Jesuits in the mid-70s. I also wrote about Benedict’s problem when he lifted the excommunication of the neo-Nazi SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson in 2009. I’ll give you license to make up your own mind. Just because my attention has drifted doesn’t mean that you need to follow my change of heart. 

The dates of Jesus' birth and death are only estimates. Why nail your spiritual operation to one specific day out of the 738,000 days (or over 2,028 years) since the birth of Jesus? The Society of Saint Pius X seem to have arbitrarily pulled December 4, 1563 out of the hat, the closing of the final session of the Council of Trent, or perhaps it was July 18, 1870, during the First Vatican Council in the constitution Pastor Aeternus, when Pius 9 got what he wanted—the word of the Pope reverberates in Heaven, or perhaps August 20, 1914 when Pius 10 left us with his war against Modernism in limbo. But one thing was crystal clear: the final design of the fiddle-back chasuble was indelibly etched in fashion history. Pick an auspicious date to start a real religion. Dress up and cement your creed in time.

While there is no official or exact count for all Christian denominations worldwide, sociologists and researchers (such as the Center for the Study of Global Christianity) estimate that there are over 45,000 distinct Christian denominations or sects worldwide. How to choose our enemy? One criterion might be that they believe something that differs from what you and your peeps believe. That’s a popular choice. Another might be the size of their army. 

I find SSPX a bit of an outlier for the Papal enemies list. It must have been their history, having been courted by Pope Benedict with special treatment. Even though, according to Leo, AI is the Devil’s workshop, I had some fun with it. Let’s run the numbers.

 

In the photo, Alfonso de Galarreta, Bishop of the Society of Saint Pius X, ordains four bishops for the SSPX without the approval of Rome. The Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) has approximately 1,500 formal members (including bishops, priests, seminarians, brothers, and sisters). Additionally, the traditionalist Catholic society claims a global following of roughly 500,000 to 1 million lay adherents. Robust numbers compared to what follows.

By contrast, the older Old Catholic Church of Utrecht—through its global federation, the Union of Utrecht—has far fewer members worldwide, ranging from 58,800 to 115,000. They also question the authority of the Pope, though on slightly different grounds than the SSPX, but they’re ancient history, having stepped out of the Roman fold at the end of Vatican I, October 20, 1870, when the question of infallibility was settled, according to mainstream Roman ecclesial history. My advice to Leo would have been to follow the example of your recent predecessors and not pay any attention to the anachronistic theatrics of SSPX/

The Palmarian Catholic Church is an independent traditionalist sect not affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church. They have their own popes (the current one is Pope Peter III) who reside in the town of El Palmar de Troya in the Andalusia region of southern Spain. After the death of Pope Paul VI in 1978, Clemente Domínguez claimed that he had been mystically crowned Pope of the Catholic Church by Jesus Christ and was to reign as Pope Gregory XVII from El Palmar de Troya. There are an estimated 500 to 1,500 Palmarian Catholics worldwide today. Small change. Piddling army.

The origins of the Palmarians as a distinct body can be traced to the alleged Marian apparitions of Our Lady of Palmar in Andalusia, Spain, beginning in 1968. Two men became particularly associated with this movement over time: Clemente Domínguez y Gómez and Manuel Alonso Corral. The former was known as a charismatic visionary and seer, while the latter was the intellectual éminence grise. The messages of these visions were filled with traditionalist Catholic pushback to the liberalising changes introduced by the Second Vatican Council and alleged a Masonic infiltration of the Roman Catholic Church. 

But don’t think that heretical “Catholic” churches don’t have legs. Arianism survived the Council of Nicaea and the fall of Rome. It flourished as the state religion, with its own churches and bishops, across Germanic kingdoms, including the Vandals in North Africa, the Visigoths in Spain, the Ostrogoths and Lombards in Italy, and the Burgundians, who lived in the Rhineland as well as what is now southern France, until the 9th century. The photo is the mosaic ceiling from the ruins of an Arian Church baptistery in Ravenna, Italy, where Gore Vidal and his partner, Howard Austin, lived most of their lives together and entertained Nureyev. Gore, Howard, and Rudolf were not Arians but believers numbered in the hundreds of thousands to millions; these churches died out by the 9th century without Roman pushback; five or six hundred years is a good run.

Today, Arians might accost you in Bart stations and bus stops; some might even knock on your door. The Jehovah’s Witnesses teach that Jesus is a created being subordinate to God rather than part of a coequal Trinity. There are approximately 9.2 million active "publishers" across more than 240 countries and territories. The denomination defines membership based strictly on active participation in its formal preaching work, rather than self-identification or simple.

Photograph by Henry Lithgow

Supporters of Smiling Cardinal Raymond Burke include the 13,500-member Sovereign Military Order of Malta, but attendance at his “faithful apostolates” such as Michigan’s Call to Holiness Conference fluctuates wildly. Apparently, he thinks he can handle a bigger crowd. He rarely smiles. Did Lithgow use some secret formula?

The Seventh-day Adventist Church has a worldwide baptised membership of more than 23.6 million people. I included the Seventh-day Adventists because they were founded on William Miller’s prediction that Jesus Christ would return to Earth on October 22, 1844, the biblical Day of Atonement for that year. When that didn’t happen, they called it the "Great Disappointment," and turned their attention to the prophecy of Ellen Gould White, became teetotaling vegetarians, and started to keep the Sabbath. That became a formula for success. 

Another American startup, Mary Baker Eddy’s Church of Christ, Scientist, does not publish its membership numbers. The church's Manual specifically instructs members not to divulge these figures. However, demographic surveys estimate worldwide membership to range from 100,000 to 420,000. 

I totally support praying in whatever language a church, a nation, or an individual prefers. The Roman Church seems to concur and would probably support Latin if SSPX didn’t carry so much doctrinal baggage. The Esperanto Eucharistic liturgy (Meso in Esperanto) has been officially approved by the Vatican for use in Catholic churches and has been available since the mid-1990s. Good luck finding a church or a linguistically able priest. 

To summarise my research:

SSPX: 500,000 to 1 million

The Old Catholic Church of Utrecht: 58,800 to 115,000

The Palmarian Catholic Church: 500 to 1,500

The Arian Churches between 325 and cc 800 C.E.: several hundred thousand to millions

Jehovah’s Witnesses: 9.2 million 

The Sovereign Military Order of Malta: 13,500

The Seventh-day Adventist Church: 23.6 million

The Church of Christ, Scientist: 100,000 to 420,000

Conclusion: for strength in numbers and longevity, have a full Ecumenical Council declare your founder anathema, avoid large real estate investments in Andalucia, and Pope Leo is wasting a lot of time on the SSPX bishop ordination. 

But take heart, the seminaries of the SSPX might preserve the correct use of the gerundive (as in quod erat demonstrandum) for several more generations, but as a serious faith movement, they’re toast, a curious anachronism that will die out for lack of fashion sense as long as no one feeds their publicity addiction. That’s what they crave, confusing words with faith, devotion, and prayer. 

I know, I can hear someone out there whispering, “Then why did you waste your time writing two pages against SSPX if they’ll be as out of fashion as blue suede shoes in a few years?” Because it was fun.

_____________