The SSPX used to tell the faithful to throw out their TVs. The SSPX used to tell the faithful to read a book! Now the new-SSPX hopes the faithful have a TV so that the new-SSPX’s movie reviewer can recommend renting movies and seeing them at home. See, e.g., this recent movie review.

Here is a small sampling of what the “old” SSPX used to say against television:

• [T]elevisions should not even be present in the home.
• The television set must go.
• No, you can’t compromise by having even one TV in your house.
• You need to be prepared to be reviled, discounted, and attacked when you say ... to get rid of the TV.

A person might wrongly assume that the “old” SSPX did not promote abstaining from “religious videos”. But that assumption is false. For example, the “old” SSPX used to advise:

• Look, Ricardo Montalban starring with the children of Fatima! Do you think you can use movies to edify? You can’t.
• [Objection:] I always think that Archbishop Lefebvre comes across great on TV! [Response:] if you can’t be present at the Bishop’s Mass, then it is God’s will. But if you want to be there, then you will get your priorities straight and make some room in your activities so as to be able to go and see him. TV is not a channel of God’s grace. It stultifies the sacred and belittles good, while enhancing evil.

Clearly, the “old” SSPX used to set as the ideal and model that Catholic homes should have no TV and Catholics should not watch movies. The “old” SSPX required that its priests, sisters, brothers, and third order members abstain from all television (including movies, DVDs, even “religious” videos.).

Even those faithful too weak to throw out their own TVs, knew that this was the aspiration which the “old” SSPX held before them. All that is different now!

The new-SSPX now publishes movie reviews.

In the current SSPX movie review, the reviewer recommends the movie he is reviewing, noting that the movie is aesthetically well done, and makes use of its historically interesting standpoint with believability and restraint.

In this movie that the new-SSPX recommends, even the reviewer admits that:

• The Blessed Mother ... is shown nearly on the edge of hysteria and collapse.
• After Mary Magdalene has become a disciple of Our Lord, she is depicted as being in a tavern (a place she frequented in her old, sinful life).
• St. Bartholomew is depicted almost as a fool who is literally giddy when he learns Our Lord rose from the dead.
• The movie depicts Our Risen Lord as sort of a happy uncle or pastor with his arms around his congregation’s shoulders.

• The movie depicts the Romans sealing the tomb and guarding it.

  But the movie’s depiction is contrary to the Gospel because the Jews, not the Romans, guarded the tomb. As St. Matthew tells us in his Gospel:

  [T]he chief priests and the Pharisees came together to Pilate, saying: Sir, we have remembered, that that seducer said, while he was yet alive: After three days I will rise again. Command therefore the sepulcher to be guarded until the third day: lest perhaps his disciples come and steal him away, and say to the people: He is risen from the dead; and the last error shall be worse than the first. Pilate saith to them: You have a guard; go, guard it as you know. And they departing, made the sepulcher sure, sealing the stone, and setting guards.

  St. Matt. 28: 62-66.

The reviewer shortens his interview because he says he wants to avoid the risk of spoiling any enjoyment of our readers who are going to see the movie.