-Traditional Catholic (Sedevacantist) Priest-
Fr. Vili Lehtoranta
BLESSINGS AND CROSSES
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My latest book, published in November 2025, is my autobiography titled Blessings and Crosses: My Path from Finland to Becoming a Sedevacantist Priest. In the book I recount my life story, how I went from a nominally Protestant family background to convert to the Catholic Faith, and later moved to live in the USA working as a Traditional Catholic priest.
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In my memoirs I tell about my home country Finland and my early years living there. And I recount the many joys I have encountered in my years of priesthood: the true faith and teaching it to the faithful, among other things. But I also speak about the sorrows and crosses the priesthood has brought: separation from my family, splits and fall-outs, the deaths of Father Cekada and Bishop Dolan, and so on.
Our children, then, are not the children of the State. The State has no children, and never had, nor will. The State does not own them, nor their fathers nor mothers, nor anybody else in this country, thank God! We have not got that far yet on the road to civil slavery, and I hope we never shall. We are not Pagans, nor Mahometans, nor Russians. We have not sold out, and don’t intend to! It is not on the State, but on parents, that God imposed the duty to educate their children, a duty from which no State can dispense, nor can fathers and mothers relieve themselves of this duty by the vicarious assumption of the State. They have to give a severe account of their children on the Day of Judgment, and they cannot allow any power to disturb them in insisting upon their rights and making free use of them.
- Fr. Michael Muller: Public School Education (1872)
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Only under the shadow of the Cross, watered by our Lord’s tears and his precious blood, with his adorable Face for its sun, that Face overcast with sorrow. Till then, I’d never realized the depth of meaning there was in devotion to the Holy Face; it’s to you, Mother, that I owe my fuller knowledge of it. Just as you were the first of us to join Carmel, so you were the first of us to sound the mystery of that love which the face of Jesus Christ conceals and reveals; and now you called me to your side, and I understood it all. I understood the true object of human ambition; our Lord hadn’t wanted any kingdom in this world, and he shewed me that “if you want to learn an art worth knowing, you must set out to be unknown, and to count for nothing;” you must find your satisfaction in self-contempt. If only my face could be hidden away, like his, pass unrecognized by the world; to suffer and to remain unnoticed, that was all I longed for.
- From Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (The Story of a Soul)
