Peek, it was clear that he was not like most of the other SSPX priests. (Ironically, it was the youngest seminarian who became his best friend.) He was finally ordained in 1996 and sent into the SSPX chapels to care for a flock of faithful if unruly sheep. He befriended Bishop Richard Williamson, then rector of the seminary in Winona, Minnesota, and in spite of the fact that he was well into his thirties, was accepted as a seminarian. He had come to the SSPX by the way of a Melkite church in that city, and only after having been fed up with the cultural in-fighting within that Eastern-rite parish, finally decided to side with the Society of St. He was a Southerner, raised just outside of Atlanta, though he didn’t really wear this on his sleeve. His story was not at all conventional, and not at all as self-absorbed as most American convert tales. He was also the last to show up to chapel for office in common, the one who had the most problem chanting the Mass, and the only convert to Catholicism. He arrived at the retreat center a little before I did, and was the oldest priest there, though not in terms of seniority. When I first moved into the SSPX priory in Los Gatos over nine years ago now, he was the character that, in retrospect, I should have liked the least. While most people who encounter the SSPX do not have the ambivalent feelings toward the cause that I had (and continue to have), I have met at least one soul who seemed to feel the same restlessness, that pull between the keeping the Faith and the magnetic force of the rest of the Universal Church. Part of me still wants to be on its margins, even if on the sympathetic margins. Even though my relationship with the Catholic Church has been, and continues to be, tenuous even on good days, I have since not returned wholeheartedly to the integrist fold. In the end, I couldn’t make it work, and a perceived monastic vocation was my ticket back to the States and out of the House that Lefebvre built. All throughout this experience, I played a delicate balance between the conviction of conscience and intellectual humility, between wanting to do the “right thing” and not condemning people for doing otherwise. What began from there was a journey that would take me to another continent and back, from cabins in the woods with no hot water to humid cloisters on the South American pampa. It’s been ten years now since I, as a recovering Marxist prodigal son, first set foot in an SSPX chapel. Truth be told, I don’t know what is scarier sometimes, my occasional trips to botanicas or these kinds of visits to my so-called “co-religionists”. But that is what I was expecting I guess. In the space of five minutes, she single-handedly condemned one person to Hell, excommunicated 99.9% of the priests of the Catholic Church, and managed to give creedence to every reactionary conspiracy in the book, all before morning coffee. Spending too much time in that space exacted its price on me, for behind the counter was a rather snarky, and dare I say, bitter older woman who seemed to not have a nice thing to say about just about anyone. Dennis Fahey, books on why the New Mass is inherently evil and television rots your brain… you know, the stuff you know in your heart of hearts is true but don’t want to write about on your blog out of fear that people will think you are some sort of reactionary weirdo… Truth be told, I spent too much time in that bookstore and bought only one, very reasonably priced book which I will review of on this page in the coming weeks. The books I found there were standard fare for such establishments: lots of lives of saints, Fr.
Pius X bookstore in Kenner after I had attended Sunday Mass in the adjacent chapel. Peek, staring into the camera, as a seminarian
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