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In the SSPX boarding school of St. Mary’s, Kansas, students bound and shaved the heads of peers for dozing in church or lingering after Mass, all with the explicit sanction of Father Ramón Angles. From 1987 to 1992 the rector of the academy told upperclassmen they were encouraged to carry out these blanket parties against any who failed to conform.
The Clerical Automaton who wielded institutional power turned minor infractions into occasions for ritual humiliation, training one generation to police the next under the guise of preserving order. What began as an attempt to maintain a separated community devolved into the very tyranny the faithful remnant has always resisted.
Christian authority has never been license for the strong to dominate the weak. The Patristics and the undivided creeds placed every office under the same Lord who warned that leaders must serve rather than lord it over others. When that hierarchy is inverted, the resulting cruelty is not tradition but its parody.
From the days when medieval bishops enforced discipline through canonical courts rather than mob shaving, Western Christendom distinguished lawful correction from personal vengeance. The SSPX rector’s regime abandoned that distinction and replaced it with the logic of the boarding-school gang.
Scripture and the doctrines of grace alike condemn the abuse of the conscience and the body in the name of piety. Households and schools exist to form souls for heaven, not to break them for the sake of uniformity. The moment an institution demands participation in cruelty as proof of loyalty, it has ceased to serve the City of God.
The faithful remnant must now withdraw support from any clergy or school that tolerates or conceals such practices. Parents who once sent sons to St. Mary’s must instead build and defend truly ordered households where authority is exercised under the law of Christ rather than the caprice of a rector.
No amount of doctrinal rhetoric can sanctify the shaving of boys for talking to girls after Mass. The judgment is already written in the creeds: those who turn pastoral office into instrument of fear have placed themselves outside the communion of the saints until they repent.
