Hello. What brought me back from my leanings were doctrine and prayer. The doctrine that there will be perpetual successors to the Roman Pontificate can not be ignored. That, and I called every sedevacantist bishop in the world, and over a period of a few months, I was able to determine that none of them were moving towards an election. That is a dead end, and heretical.
Bishop Neville retuned my phone call, and so did a Priest from Rosary Chapel in CT. Bishop Webster also returned my phone call. None of them were pursuing an election. That is gravely schismatic in my view. In my view, if there is no Pope, then immediately, the Catholic thing to do is to rectify the situation. There should be no time for “a gap,” especially of 60 years. The Catholic need is grave, severe, and immediate, for a successor to the Holy See.
That and assiduous prayer, eventually led me back to the Ordinary Form at my local Cathedral. I also began a fresh look at everything that led me to the Extraordinary Form exclusively, and I re-examined several things. One, is that Peter has the two Keys of the Pontificate, which are the keys of Jurisdiction and Order. If he has the key of Order, than he has the keys over the prayers of the Order, which is one of the biggest points of contention between sedevacantists and ordinary form Catholics - the content of the essential forms of the Sacraments. The Pope has the Key of Order, and that is constant tradition. He can bind and loosen, and to what constitutes the essential form of the Sacraments, in my opinion, to essentially almost anything.
Also, the pictures of Saint John Paul II kissing the Koran, and things like this, they are personal sins. No one can judge the First See. From what I know about Catholic philosophy, they can kiss the koran with an internal mental reservation, drink pagan potions with an internal reservation, no one can know his mind, and with what I know about mental reservation, and Catholic philosophy, they can say almost anything they want. No one can judge the First See. No one knows their interiors, and no one can tell me that Pope Saint Paul VI did not use mental reservation during half of his ecumenical gestures.
I can not stress enough how far mental reservation and studying Sacred Philosophy from a Catholic seminary, can make you a viper of logic and wit. If I could only stress enough, how Catholic Philosophy, and the principles thereof, and mental reservation, or saying mental reservations for “pastoral reasons,” can take you so far into ecumenism, or anything really, it is Catholic genius. It leads to such strong creativity, and all of those priests of that era studied those things. They were encouraged at the Second Vatican Council, “be creative,” “these things are for pastoral purposes.”
Don’t give up on your friends. Unfortunately, within my extended family there is now a rift because some of us have left the SSPX while others are hard-liners who think we are practically apostates for going back to Rome. Sigh. At this point all I can do is pray for them.