Most Holy Family Monastery
Most Holy Family Monastery is an American sedevacantist traditionalist Catholic organisation, based in Fillmore, New York. The monastery was founded by Joseph Natale in the late 1960s, a Benedictine Catholic lay postulant who had attended the Saint Vincent Archabbey in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. Instead of taking vows with them, Natale left and set up his own monastery with a focus on the disabled with himself as Superior, living according to the Rule of St. Benedict. In the mid-1980s it had 10 monks, but by 1994 its numbers had dwindled to 3.
The monastery is not approved by the local Roman Catholic Diocese of Buffalo, and opposes the Second Vatican Council and the New Order of Mass. The monastery explicitly adopted sedevacantism in the 1990s when it came under the leadership of two brothers, Michael and Peter Dimond. Under their leadership, the monastery gained a significant online presence promoting conspiracy theories through its website VaticanCatholic.com and social media.
History
The monastery's founder was Joseph Natale, who needed crutches to walk after contracting tuberculosis of the bone at the age of four. Natale entered the Saint Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in 1960 as a lay postulant, but left less than a year later to start his own religious community. According to an archivist of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Natale left before taking vows; he never actually became a Benedictine monk.In 1967, a benefactor helped Natale purchase a property in Berlin, New Jersey to found a community there together with seven other men with disabilities. However, as there was only a small house there at the time and these men were unable to assist with the construction, Natale sent them away until the monastery could be finished. In subsequent years, Natale's vision for the institution changed. Natale started focusing more on what he perceived as guarding the Catholic religion against acts of the Church's hierarchy which Natale regarded as destructive of "the light of true Catholicism", such as the suppression of the Tridentine Mass and permission for use of natural family planning. By the mid-1970s, the monastery had broken off entirely from the institutional Church.
The monastery's chapel, named the St. Jude Shrine in honor of the "patron saint of hopeless causes," was blessed and dedicated on June 8, 1980. By 1987, the weekly service celebrated in this chapel was drawing about 150 worshipers each Sunday, and Michael Cuneo reported at the time of his visit in mid-1994 that the Sunday service was attended by "between two and three hundred people".
Initially incorporated in 1993 as the Queen of Angels Corp, the monastery is a New York Domestic Not-For-Profit Corporation under the business type "religious organization".
Natale died in 1995, whereupon Michael Dimond, was elected his successor as Superior. Michael Dimond had joined in 1992 at the age of 19, after converting to Catholicism four years earlier.
As of 2020, the monastery maintains a website which states that no one should receive communion or attend mass at any Catholic parish, since they all preach heresies such as the doctrine of baptism of desire. However, they advise their followers to receive the sacrament of confession from Eastern Catholic priests, or from Latin Church priests ordained before 1968, when the Second Vatican Council changed the rite of ordination for the Latin Church.
Claims of miraculous experience
According to Michael Cuneo, who researched various traditionalist movements in the USA, Natale claimed he had a gift of prophecy:Cuneo also reported that Natale told him that: "Five years is about all the time the world has left."
Views
The monastery's website refers to the Catholic Church as "the Vatican II sect," and heretical. All popes since, as manifest heretics, and are therefore incapable of being pope.The monastery's website condemns natural family planning. The website regards statements from the Catholic Church condoning natural family planning from before Pius XII as "not infallible or binding" and in conflict with other Catholic teaching that they do consider infallible. The monastery's position is noted by Mary Farrell Bednarowski as "an admittedly rare example of contemporary opposition".
The monastery's website opposes the doctrines of baptism of desire and baptism of blood, and affirms that "outside the Catholic Church there is absolutely no salvation".
The monastery's website embraces Holocaust denial, calling the Holocaust "he propaganda hoax which has been so effectively used to cement Jewish power and influence in the world, and to silence any questioning of Jewish activities, support for Israel or a Jewish agenda we work to expose Jewish domination and evil Jewish enterprises in the world, which constitute the main power of the secular conspiracy."
In 2008 the monastery published a book by Frederick Dimond called UFOs: Demonic Activity & Elaborate Hoaxes Meant to Deceive Mankind.