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Of late, there has been a video making the rounds of a young lady by the name of Lizzie Reezay. Lizzie has a YouTube channel which started out as a protestant apostolate channel. What in fact happened recently, and why I am bringing this story to your attention, is that Lizzie announced that she has converted to the ONE TRUE FAITH, hence the Twitter popularity of her video.

Now conversion stories are nothing new, yet what makes this story very interesting and most enlightening is that the PROCESS that Lizzie describes leading her to Catholicism is very well thought out, systematic and rational.

When looking at the wider picture, and in terms of what can be termed as a “Good Old Proselytization”, as opposed to the new “evangelization”, it would appear that where Lizzie starts here process (LIZZIE PROCESS) is the exact place where Dr. Jordan Peterson’s proselytization process (PETERSON PROCESS) leaves off.

So what your humble blogger will do today is begin a thread of analysis of the CONTENT the of Lizzies videos in which she explains the LIZZIE PROCESS, and tie it into the wider Restoration PROCESS that this humble blogger has taken upon himself to chronicle.

The first OBSERVATION that needs to be made is that just like with Ancient Rome, all roads eventually lead to Catholicism. And I mean the real Catholicism and not the post-conciliar protestant sect or the post-Modernist, crypto-materialist FrancisChurch sect cum ideology.

In the case of young Miss Lizzie, her conversion PROCESS came via what can be called literary criticism or to be more precise, Biblical criticism, i.e. “the scholarly “study and investigation of biblical writings that seeks to make discerning judgments about these writings”. 

Pivoting back to Dr. Peterson, what we have noticed about Dr. Peterson is his very effective ability at converting individuals who have fallen into a nihilistic mindset and returning them onto a road of productivity and meaning. What has also been observed is that in many of these cases, the road back to productivity, meaning and normalcy is nothing more than the road to a religious conversion of some sorts. In the post titled The Power Of ONE WORD, we established how a search for MEANING, especially among the male population within Western Civilization, has brought fame and notoriety to Dr. Peterson. His Biblical Lecture Series is consistently sold out as are his appearances on his new book promotional tour.

What’s interesting about Dr. Peterson from the perspective of this post, is that through his clinical psychologist’s approach, he leads lost and disoriented individuals to a place where they are able to take, what Kierkegaard termed as the “leap of faith”.

In other words, these rehabilitated nihilists are brought to the point where they can believe in or accept something outside the boundaries of reason.

In turn, what Lizzie PROCESS does is that it can pick up these individuals at their point departure from NIHILISM, when they are making their “leap of faith” and bring them the rest of the way into the Catholic Church.

Without spoiling the story, it would appear that the end for Lizzie is presently the “Bishop Barron church”, but given her strong commitment to reason, logic, textual criticism and recognition that the TLM is the true form of worship, I have no doubt that she will find her way into one of the Ecclesia Dei communities or the SSPX where her journey will end.

So onto the video. I will transcribe and comment those parts that I think are important. I will begin today with only the first 5 minutes, since the video is quite long. But please watch the entire video, since it is quite informative.

As is only right and just, Lizzie begins by describing the PROCESS back to Rome. Here is how she explains the jump off point:

Lizzie Reezay: This is a process that took years and years of gradually opening my mind, reading different books, taking different classes that made me realize that I can’t accept the basic tenets of Protestantism.

The observation that I would make here is that Protestantism is a negative theology. John Lamont had a brilliant observation about one differentiating feature between Protestantism and neomodernism, in his Thomist Essay which was as follows: 

Neomodernism is not like Protestantism, which contains ideas with a positive content as well as being a rejection of Catholicism. These ideas – justification by faith, and the like – are not correct, but they say something substantial, and have an appeal that can give rise to an important movement. Neomodernism, however, on a religious level is a purely negative thesis. As a result it has no attractive force of its own, and ecclesiastical structures that fall into its grip eventually die away – a process now visible all over the world.

One way to look at the above quote from Lizzie and view it through the Lamont template is as follows:  it is not enough to have “substantial” positive content welded to a negative theology. Further, the positive content cannot be limited to “being substantial”, but it must also be “correct” in order for it to be sustainable. What Lizzie in fact is doing, is discarding the negative theology (anti-Catholic prejudice) while analyzing the “incorrect, yet substantial content” and finding that these basic Protestant tenets are… well, untenable.

Nota bene: If the “incorrect, yet substantial” content is untenable, just think what that implies for a “purely negative thesis” that is neo-Modernism and the chances for FrancisChurch or even the post-conciliar church to turn things around? I think the smarter ones among the cardinals, bishops and clerics intuitively suspect this. This could also be the basis for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Plenaria supporting the SSPX position in the post titled What Terrifies FrancisChurch, Whether They Know It Or Not… (see here).

Back to Lizzie…

So in the Church of Christ, we really emphasize being the early church and going by the bible.

So here we see the Archaeologist’s fallacy. Since no one lived in the times of the early church, no one can know with certainty how the early church looked. They had no tape recorders, remember? What we have is what is recorded, and that which is recorded rests inside the Catholic Church. This is what is known as Tradition and Lizzie figures this out. (further in the video)

Next…

But when I was in high school, I remember thinking that Church of Christ probably isn’t the right religion or the right Christian denomination just because there are 30,000 denominations, and some people argue that that number is lower. So if there’s 10,000 forms of Protestantism, whatever, just statistically it is extremely unlikely that the church that I was born into happens to be the right church. So even when I was in high school, I was open to being wrong and changing “religions” or my form of Christianity to correspond to the truth. Because they all can’t be true. There is one that is the truest form.

So here we see the most effective argument against any protestant, and especially the annoying Jehowah’s Witness who pop by from time to time. It is statistically impossible to identify the “truest form” of the false protestant sects since there are so many of them. What is important to note here is that the most compelling reason for why this is so (Lizzie did not mention this), is that the source documents for differentiating between the different protestant sects are Catholic documents.

And I will finish off with this next passage:

Honestly, history classes in school growing up made me hate Catholicism even more because we learned about how they would burn people like Juan Cuz Jan Hus* (?) , the way things were explained in history class, the Catholic Church looked like it hated science, they were really backward thinking intellectually and really violent and awful. I could make a whole video on the way our education system twists Catholicism, but that was just my perspective.

*h/t Chris Benischek

Here we see the propaganda of the Protestant sects. Since they cannot make a complete positive argument for why their sect is the correct one from the 30,000 some odd sects, what they do is “poison the well”. Yet “poisoning the well” only gets one so far, as per Lamont negative theology explanation.

And when one is an intrepid and intellectually honest individual searching for the “truest form”, i.e. the Truth, such as Lizzie, it will eventually become quite evident that this former position can’t be sustained.

In other words, Lizzie answers why FrancisChurch is a dying sect…

I will leave off here for today…

… but Lizzie’s got much more to say, so stay tuned.

PS Here is Gloria.TV’s report on Lizzie…