Note : This article was first published on the Canada Fidèle website on 1st June 2018.

Having requested from Saint Athanasius Chapel, Virginia, United States, a short summary of Father Ronald Ringrose's life for those who do not know him, we have received the following.

Father Ronald Ringrose is aware of the publication of this debate on our web-site and has no objections.

From his earliest childhood, Father Ronald Ringrose developed a great interest in the things of God and in the Sanctuary. He remembers, at the age of 4 or 5, standing on top on the kneeler of his bench, trying to see what the priest was doing at the altar.

Father Ronald Ringrose was born in 1945 and raised in the Catholic city of Baltimore, Maryland. He studied at the elementary parish school across the street, with the nuns who taught his mother when she was little.

In 1959, at the age of 14, he entered the Minor Seminary and continued his education under the direction of the priests of Saint-Sulpice, an order dedicated to the training of priests and experts in this field.

Father Ringrose has a vivid memory of how things were then and how they should still be today. He understood from a very young age that there is an order in the universe and that the cause of this order is God. One of the priests at the Seminary taught him that order is the first law of heaven.

In 1963, he entered the Major Seminary. Changes are forcibly imposed on seminary teachers and seminarians. One of the teachers simply refuses anything new, and the young Ringrose manages to serve his daily Mass to avoid guitars and cymbals.

The New Mass was been introduced, and was such a shock to Father Ringrose that he decides to postpone his ordination until he can understand something about it. That is why he left seminary and taught in college until he could figure it out.

Despite the fact that he had not yet received the major orders and therefore despite the fact that he was not bound by them, he prayed every day the Breviary with the rubrics of Pius XII, and this, since he was in the minor seminary and also during the period when he returned to the lay state.

Towards the end of the 1970s, he decided to return to the clergy, to be ordained a priest and to find a conservative parish in which to work. After about two years of ministry, someone told him about a traditional parish called St. Athanasius (a house with a basement converted into a chapel) that a layman bought around 1968 to host Mass in Latin. The foresight of these lay people was due in large part to Father Gomar de Pauw who was arguably the first in the United States to condemn the changes.

Around 1982, therefore, Father Ringrose moved to Vienna, Virginia, to serve a group which then comprised only about twenty faithful, and has not left that place since then.

Under his leadership, the chapel grew until a church was purchased, and at the height there were as many as 650 faithful. The work of the indult and the Neo-FSSPX, however, has eaten away at this group. Today there are around 350 faithful.

Father Ringrose said he was never satisfied with R&R theology (Acknowledge the Pope's authority, but Resist him) because he found it doctrinally deficient, but did not know how else to explain the crisis of the Church. This situation lasted until about the year 2010, when he turned his attention to the attempts at alternative explanations which he said protect the doctrines from the infallibility, indefectibility and perpetuity of the apostolic hierarchy. It was around 2012 that he began to educate his followers about what he sees as the "doctrinal errors" of the R&R position.

Originally ordained for the Archdiocese of Baltimore in the dubious New Rite, Father Ringrose was conditionally re-ordained by Mgr. Marcel Lefebvre in 1982. He has not left St. Athanasius Church since that time.