Traditional Catholic Priest: A Sign Of Contradiction

 

Like all uncompromising Catholics, he paraphrases St. Paul in declaring:

“I count all things - recognition, validation, modernist approval- as loss, and even dung, compared to the surpassing knowledge of the Church’s indefectibility and infallibility, that I may gain Christ.”

Preamble:

Over these few years of my priestly ministry, I have often found myself having to explain my self-introduction as a "Traditional Catholic Priest." Why so?

The term "Traditional Catholic Priest" is often misunderstood, especially in African settings where the word "traditional" commonly evokes ancestral customs, native rituals, or syncretistic practices. Many imagine a priest who pours libations before Mass, mixes Catholic prayers with incantations, distributes kola nuts during benedictions, or chants ancestral names with the names of saints. So when they hear the phrase "Traditional Catholic Priest," the image that comes to mind is someone who combines African traditional religion with Catholicism.

This article was occasioned by a recent encounter in which this misunderstanding was again voiced. A gentleman told me it was his second time hearing the phrase “Traditional Catholic Priest.” The first, he said, was in relation to a young man of the Ogoja Diocese, who had been ordained a deacon in July 2025. 

The story went that his mother, a woman of unyielding Traditional Catholic conviction, had refused to attend the ordination. Why? Because she believed her son had chosen the path of compromise by remaining in the Modernist seminary rather than pursuing formation to become a Traditional Catholic Priest as she had advised. I smiled as I listened. I know the family. Their home is a humble mission chapel, a Catacomb, where I offer the Holy Mass from time to time.

But his story struck a nerve—because it raised a larger question:

• What exactly is a Traditional Catholic Priest? 
• Why is it such a loaded term today? 
• And what does this have to do with the seminarian and his mother? 

Let us explore these questions carefully.

The Traditional Catholic Priest: Not What You Think

A Traditional Catholic Priest is not a priest of novelty or innovation. He is, quite simply, a Catholic priest formed according to the unchanging traditions—liturgical, doctrinal, and spiritual—of Holy Mother Church as she existed before the crisis of the Modernist usurpation of her structures and the robber Vatican Council (1962–1965) with its wreck-novations. 

To be a Traditional Catholic Priest is not to blend Catholic worship with tribal rites or ancestral practices. The Traditional Catholic Priest is not one who adds African drums to the Gloria or invites elders to "bless" the altar with palm wine or share Kola nuts to signal pastoral accommodation during worship. He is not one who seeks a so-called "inculturated liturgy.”

 No. A Traditional Catholic Priest is entirely, and without compromise, Catholic—holding fast to the same Faith, the same Mass, the same Sacraments, the same moral teachings, and the same devotions that were universally known and lived in the Catholic Church before the great rupture of Modernist Vatican II. He safeguards the sacred liturgy from Modernist profanations. As part of this, he rejects the so-called “new order of Mass” for what it is - an ecumenical service, not the Catholic Mass. This ecumenic service was concocted with ecumenical intent with the help of six protestant pastors. 

Uncompromising with Modernism, condemned by Pope Pius X as “the synthesis of all heresies”, a traditional Catholic Priest believes the seat of Blessed Peter untouched by any stain of heresy or the synthesis of all heresies, is vacant. For a man manifestly teaching heresy cannot, by divine law, hold authority in the Church (cf. St. Robert Bellarmine, De Romano Pontifice, Book II, Ch. 30).”

He wears his cassock because it reminds him and others that he is set apart. He offers the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass facing east, and uses the altar, not a table. He offers the Sacrifice of the Mass not “una cum” [i.e. in union or one with] modernist Papal and Episcopal impostors. He preaches the Faith with clarity, not ambiguity. He does not dialogue with error; he refutes it without mincing words, addressing himself to misled men of good will. 

Oath-bound, Faithful, Fearless, Uncompromising. 

Bound by, and in fidelity to, his Profession of Faith and the Oath Against Modernism—solemnly instituted by Pope St. Pius X—he upholds the Church’s ancient and unalterable doctrine.

He had declared in making his Oath Against Modernism:

I . . . . firmly embrace and accept each and every definition that has been set forth and declared by the unerring teaching authority of the Church, especially those principal truths which are directly opposed to the errors of this day… I promise that I shall keep all these articles faithfully, entirely, and sincerely, and guard them inviolate, in no way deviating from them in teaching or in any way in word or in writing. Thus I promise, this I swear, so help me God. . .

Also, concluding his profession of Faith he had declared: 

…At the same time I condemn and reprove all that the Church has condemned and reproved. This same Catholic faith, outside of which nobody can be saved, which I now freely profess and to which I truly adhere, the same I promise and swear to maintain and profess, with the help of God, entire, inviolate, and with firm constancy until the last breath of life; and I shall strive, as far as possible, that this same faith shall be held, taught, and publicly professed by all those who depend on me and by those of whom I shall have charge…  

 He does not preach human fraternity above the Kingship of Christ. He does not host or promote ecumenical services with heretics, nor does he teach that non-Catholics are on the same road to Heaven. He teaches the defined and well-known dogma, as Pope Pius IX puts it: Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus—outside the Church there is no salvation. 

He does not simply "celebrate Mass." He offers the Sacrifice of the Mass, re-presenting Calvary in an unbloody manner according to the approved rites of the Church so hated by modernists, Protestants within Catholic buildings, and the Protestants outside the walls. He does not allow women or laymen in the sanctuary. He guards the altar like one entrusted with the Holy of Holies.

He is a priest as Saint John Vianney was, as Saint Pius X was, as the Curés of old France, and the missionaries of old Africa were. He is a priest whose heart is pierced with zeal for souls, whose love is set ablaze by the Sacred Heart, and whose feet carry him like Saint Paul to the ends of the earth to attend to a single soul in need of his sacramental ministry.

Why Does He Believe the Seat Is Vacant?

Because he sees that the Modernist revolution—unleashed at Vatican II—has corrupted the very essence of what the Catholic Church has always taught. The new religion, among other things:

• Teaches that the Church of Christ is not identical with the Catholic Church, but is a larger reality than it, contrary to the consistent doctrine of the Church reaffirmed by Pope Pius XII in his “Mystici corporis Christi”.
• Teaches false religious liberty, contrary to Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors.
• Embraces ecumenism and interreligious prayer, fruits of religious indifferentism, condemned by Popes Leo XIII, Pius XI, and others.
• Permits sacrilegious Communion and redefines mortal sin and grace.
• Offers a fabricated liturgy in the Novus Ordo Missae, stripped of the sacrificial character, resembling Protestant services.

Formed by perennial principles of doctrinal integrity, he believes that if one in Rome claimed to be the pope attempts to lead the Church into embracing and promoting Modernism, the synthesis of all heresies —which cannot happen according to Catholic dogma—then that man in Rome cannot be the true pope. Hence “the seat is vacant”. While controversial to some, this conclusion is not a rebellion against the Church, but a defense of her indefectibility. A little patience in informing one's Catholic common sense would make this obvious to anyone of good will seeking the truth of the matter. 

His Struggles

In a time when the Catholic Mass has been deconstructed by Modernist wrecknovators on the altar of ecumenism into a “celebration of the community,” when the Altar has been replaced by a table, the sanctuary a stage where women prance around, when homilies are laced with Modernist poison of Indifferentism and relativism, and when the Sacred is treated as profane—the Traditional Catholic Priest stands as a sign of contradiction. His very presence proclaims: the faith has not changed—though the agents of Modernist revolution continue their campaign, grinding away in silence and subtlety.

He is mocked, marginalized, and maligned. He is accused of being “rigid,” “divisive,” or “outdated.” He walks alone. He is often misunderstood, even hated. Accused of pride, disobedience, or extremism by those who either no longer remember what the Church taught before 1960 or does not even know it at all. He has no Vatican support, for Rome is under Modernist occupation. He has no diocesan shelter, no pension or prestige. He may offer Mass in rented halls, in a hotel room, in garages, or barns turned into chapels—wherever the Faith survives, the ‘’Catacombs”. 

 But he is not without consolation. His strength lies in his loyalty to Christ and the Church of all ages. He clings to the old ways because they are not his—they are the Church’s. And the Church, being the Mystical Body of Christ, cannot contradict her own soul.

He stands, like Elijah on Mount Carmel, faithful amidst the prophets of Baal. He carries within him the peace of conscience that comes from fidelity. He knows, like St. Athanasius who once said that the Modernists “have the buildings, but we” -uncompromising Catholics; “have the Faith.”

Like all uncompromising Catholics, he paraphrases St. Paul in declaring:

“I count all things - recognition, validation, modernist approval- as loss, and even dung, compared to the surpassing knowledge of the Church’s indefectibility and infallibility, that I may gain Christ.” (Paraphrasing Philippians 3:8)

When a Mother’s Tears Speak Louder Than Applause

Let us return to the sorrow of that Seminarian's Mother. Her refusal to attend her son's ordination was not rebellion, nor cultural drama, nor maternal stubbornness. It was Faith. It was suffering from love. For she knew her son, if ordained in the Conciliar, synodal Church, would not be a priest as the Church has always known.

His training prepares him to "dialogue," not to preach repentance. He is immersed in Modernist theology that mocks dogma and prefers novelty. He is to learn to say the ecumenic service falsely called New Order of Mass, -a rite that Protestants outside the walls helped to write. Based on Modernist theology, he is to promote interfaith ceremonies, and ecumenism. He would be ordained into a system that calls Pachamama ceremonies "Catholic," where rainbow flags fly near altars, and apostate Luther is praised as a man of faith. 

Moreover, she knew he was heading toward an invalid ordination, for the so-called “bishop” who would perform it was himself merely a product of the Modernist 1968 rite of episcopal consecration—an ordinal that is absolutely null and utterly void.

She could not in conscience pretend to support that. Her maternal heart longed for her son to be a true priest—a priest of the old ways, the sure paths, the tried and tested roads of sanctity. She knew there are still seminaries, though hidden, they endure, where young men are formed in the spirit of Trent, of Fatima, of the Martyrs. Where Latin chants echo, silence is kept, penance is daily, and Modernism is anathema.

She saw the forked road and wept. One led to the cross; the other to compromise. Like the mother of the Maccabees, she prefers her son to die rather than betray the Law of God and God's Holy Church by chosing the path to compromise. 

The Verdict: Fidelity or Falsity?

In these confusing times, the phrase "Traditional Catholic Priest" is no mere adjective. It is a badge of fidelity. It is a defiance of Militant Modernism. It is a stance for what the saints lived and what the Church taught always and everywhere.

To become a Traditional Catholic Priest today is to choose exile. One may lose recognition, funding, comfort, even the support of loved ones. But one gains Christ. And His grace. And the joy of offering the Mass of the Ages. The pitiful seminarian of our story is, for the moment, and sadly so, unable to see beyond the prospect of self-exile, loss of recognition, funding, comfort, and support from loved ones. 

It is no surprise that a traditional Catholic Priest appears to many as a "mysterious figure". Yes, he is strange to the world. But Heaven knows him well.

So next time you hear "Traditional Catholic Priest," do not think of pagan ancestral rites. Think of Saint Athanasius. Think of St. John Mary Vianney. Think of Pope St. Pius X. Think of all those priests who refused to betray the Bride of Christ—even if it meant suffering, rejection, or exile.

Though misunderstood by many, and scorned by the world, his path is not one of pride, but fidelity. Because fidelity is always the narrow path.

"A Traditional Catholic Priest?" He is not one who blends cultures. He is one who keeps the Faith knowing that times change, but Christ does not. By the merits of the Sacred Humanity of Christ, he is a child of Mary Immaculate and full of the fire of the Holy Ghost by whose strength he guards the house of God and renews the face of the earth by his humble ministry, saving those souls which have cost the Divine Saviour His Precious Blood.

Seek such a priest. Receive his apostolate. Support him. Pray for him. Defend him. For in his priesthood shines the Faith of the Ages. 

Finally, promote vocations to uncompromising Catholic priesthood for the greater glory of God, the exaltation of His Holy Church, the confusion of her enemies and the sanctification of souls.