Most Holy Family Monastery is a non-profit corporation based in New York. A sedevacantist organization run by Michael Dimond, according to a spokesperson for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Buffalo, the monastery is neither part of the diocese nor the Catholic Church. Due to its publication of a pamphlet entitled "101 Heresies of Anti-Pope John Paul II" it was declared "a dissident organization that challenges the papal authority" by The Catholic League in January, 1999. The group has also been condemned by the Catholic diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska.
History
Most Holy Family Monastery was founded in 1967, in Berlin, New Jersey, by a self-proclaimed Benedictine monk named Joseph Natale, originally as a community for handicapped men. Natale entered the Saint Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in 1960 as a laypostulant, but left less than a year later to start his own Holy Family Monastery. According to an archivist of the Saint Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, Natale left before taking vows; he never actually became a Benedictine monk. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Natale denounced the Second Vatican Council and the post-Vatican II Mass, and by the mid-1970s the community had separated from the Vatican. By mid-1980s, there were ten monks in it, but by 1994 the number declined to three. Shortly after a conference in 1994, John Vennari left to work for Fr. Nicholas Gruner. Initially incorporated in 1993 as the Queen of Angels Corp, Most Holy Family Monastery is a New York Domestic Not-For-Profit Corporation under the business type “religious organization”. Natale died in 1995, whereupon Michael Dimond, who joined in 1992 at the age of 19 after converting to Catholicism four years earlier, was elected the Superior. Soon after, he relocated to Granger, New York, where Natale owned more than of donated land. Michael and Peter Dimond's position condemning the Vatican's promotion of Natural Family Planning was noted in the 2010 book Twentieth-Century Global Christianity by Fortress Press, as "an admittedly rare example of contemporary opposition".
Sacraments
As none of their members were ordained into the priesthood, and as they believe that the post-Vatican Mass is invalid and that even the form of Tridentine Masspermitted by Benedict XVI in 2007 is compromised because the 1962 Roman Missal that he approved includes changes made by Pope John XXIII, they receive the sacraments from a Byzantine rite Catholic Church that is in communion with the Vatican, in Rochester, New York. During these occasions they wear layman's clothes in lieu of their Benedictine habits. Peter Dimond wrote: "In receiving the sacraments from certain Byzantine priests for over the last decade – i.e. from priests who are not notorious or imposing about their heresies – I've received what I consider to be tremendous spiritual graces."
Claims of miraculous experience
According to Michael Cuneo, who researched the various traditional movements in the USA, Natale claimed that he had the gift of prophecy in these words: A former member claimed that he heard angels singing when he joined the monastery.
Views
Dimond and his associates consider the Holocaust "The 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." Frederick Dimond is the author of UFOs: Demonic Activity & Elaborate Hoaxes Meant to Deceive Mankind, published in 2008 by Most Holy Family Monastery.
Criticisms
Griff Ruby wrote against Peter Dimond regarding baptism of desire. Richard Ibranyi wrote against the Dimonds regarding several topics.
The Southern Poverty Law Center listed MHFM as a hate group by placing them in the category of adherents of "radical traditional Catholicism, or 'integrism'." This category is said to "routinely pillory Jews as 'the perpetual enemy of Christ' and worse, reject the ecumenical efforts of the Vatican, and sometimes even assert that recent popes have all been illegitimate. They are incensed by the liberalizing reforms of the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council, which condemned hatred for the Jews and rejected the accusation that Jews are collectively responsible for deicide in the form of the crucifixion of Christ."
