Mario Derksen

          Mario Derksen was born in Germany on April 16, 1979. He was baptized and raised Catholic. Despite his relatively young age, he ran the gamut of experiences as a teen-ager. Having been raised in the New Church, around 1994, due to a lack of real Catholic catechesis and the "evangelizing" efforts of Protestants, he bought into many Protestant heresies. An early pioneer of the internet (1996), Mario challenged many Catholic beliefs, embracing "non-denominational Christianity" and preaching the same on the PRODIGY bulletin boards in the spirit of a Protestant fundamentalist. When he himself was challenged by Catholics who knew how to defend their Faith, he ended up reading Karl Keating's "Catholicism and Fundamentalism," which helped bring him back to Catholicism, albeit, as he admits, a "Neo-Catholic sort," since Mr. Keating is a Novus Ordo (and an anti-traditionalist). Nevertheless it was a step in the right direction. By February/March of 1997, frustrated with so much anti-Catholic garbage on the net, he relates, "I decided to do my own responses since someone needed to do it and nobody was doing it." Thus "Catholic Insight" was created. After graduating from High School in May 1997, he attended St. John Vianney College, the archdiocesan seminary in Miami.

          About autumn of 1998 he became convinced that the only way to keep the Faith was as a traditional Catholic after realizing the conflicts between the Traditional Catholic Mass and the Novus Ordo "Mass," and how much had been compromised for the sake of modernism, ecumenism, and humanism. The more he read about the differences between the Catholic (pre-Vatican II) Faith and what passes as "contemporary Catholicism," the more he realized continuing on the Novus Ordo course was not the right path. After two years in the seminary, he finished his studies at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton with a B.A. in Philosophy. He enrolled at the University of Miami to begin his studies for a Master's Degree, but the non-Catholic secular atmosphere and emphasis on analytical philosophy was displeasing to him and so he enrolled in a distance-learning graduate program for Thomistic philosophy. He began contributing articles to The DailyCatholic early in 2002, and in May of 2004, he received his fully-accredited Master of Arts degree in Thomistic Philosophy from the (Novus Ordo) Holy Apostles College & Seminary in Cromwell, CT in which he took to task some of the most fundamental erros in modern philosophy and Modernism with his master’s thesis “Against the Skeptics: How Thomist Realism Refutes Radical Skepticism.”

          In 2007, Mario began doing in-depth research on the theological issues surrounding the Thuc bishops. His Open Letter to Bishop Clarence Kelly on the Thuc Bishops and the Errors in “The Sacred and the Profane” is the fruit of this work and was published on January 18, 2011. To date, the Society of St. Pius V has not offered a response to this challenge. He was chosen to be a featured speaker at the 2011 Annual Fatima Conference in Spokane, speaking on the consecrations of the Thuc bishops.