This book sits next to my Douay Rheims and my catechism, and has found itself just as dog-eared. If you are Sedevacantist or thinking about becoming one, it’s a must have.
I’ve been Protestant all my life, with a brief stint in atheism (some would call Protestantism the gateway drug to atheism, and I would agree). I found my way to Catholicism by starting to see the holes in my logic, encouraged by books like the Devil’s Delusion by David Berlinski, all of GK Chesterton’s work, and a little book called Believe, also by Filotto.
I knew Catholicism was the right track, but didn’t know what had occurred in the 50’s and 60’s. I attended a Novus Ordo mass for a while, but there was just something off, made really apparent when the government started ordering the church around on a certain thing (and it meekly complied). Things the priests said that made you go “huh?” There was all the sex stuff too. I knew I was on the right track but didn’t know where to go from there.
Then I read this book, and it’s difficult to overstate how much everything clicked. Everything. It all just made such sense. Logical, clear, simple, razor sharp sense. No nuance. No complicated convolutions. No gray areas. With that I became officially baptized about a year ago.
You know it’s the one true faith just by how much your life immediately becomes very difficult once you’ve converted. The world will let you live a life of comfort being Protestant or atheist. Not so if you’re Catholic.
I’ve only been officially Catholic for a year, but I’ve had to defend my faith against friends, family members, concerned “pastors”, and in laws. I have literally had to sit in the defendant’s seat in a courtroom defending my Catholicism to a sleazeball lawyer calling it a “toxic sect”. If you think the world will allow you to practice your faith in peace and privacy, you’re going to find out. The attacks will come, and they won’t give up.
This book has been indispensable in armoring me up against that. You can almost think of it as an index. It briefly covers every (and I mean every) argument against Sedevecantism. Fortunately there aren’t many, and I have yet to find myself taken by surprise by something not covered in the book. It moves quickly from one point to the next, referencing a lot of outside material if you want to look deeper. If I need to look something up, I’ll go to this book and it will point me in the direction of where to look further. It’s like having a cheat code. If you are practicing Catholicism without this book you are playing on hard mode. Google is almost useless because it doesn’t distinguish Novus Ordo from Catholic. Fr Anthony Cekada’s extensive online work is great, but difficult to find the articles you want. Of course, your priest is a great resource if you can get a hold of him. For convenience, this book is my first go-to, and it never lets me down.