I gave up shallow and angry traditionalism. You are still fighting on its behalf. If you want to cast me as something that has nothing to do with me, that's your business, but you seem just as belligerent as ever. That was probably your main problem from the beginning.
I hate mediocrity, Mike. I hate this bourgeois, bubblegum-chewing religion of suburban good cheer, with its obnoxiously entitled laity traipsing around the altar and its off-off-off-broadway showtunes, sung poorly by people in middle age.
I don't give a flying f*** about angry, shallow traditionalism, or traditionalism as an ideology.
But I was born in '77, and I've never in my life seen anything but felt banners and Lord of the Dance and glad tambourines and communion in the hand and polyester-albed EMHCs (when they're not women in skintight pants) and homilies that are straight out of Chicken Soup for the Low-IQ and all the not-very-ambiguously-gay pastors and the pastors who reprimand people for wanting to genuflect or receive communion kneeling or kneel during the concecration or the parishes that put up transparencies of their shit music on the back wall of the sanctuary with someone moving a pen tip like a bouncing ball to indicate the words. I'm sick of "presiders" not "priests," of ad-libbed liturgies, of questionable absolutions in the confessional (when you're not being told that your sins aren't sins), of dramatic preachers who have to run out into the congregation to give their lame homilies that are theologically heterodox but can scarcely elevate the host at the consecration for half a second.
Nothing, and I do mean nothing, about post-conciliar Catholicism is deserving of respect or inspiring enough to bring about significant conversions. Hell, most people who do convert are Protestants for whom the Novus Ordo is more or less just like the serviced they're used to, except the Eucharist is real.
I don't think it's possible for a red-blooded man who cares about meaning or purpose or is inspired to worship only (and by nothing less than) by awe and wonder and transcendence to ever set foot in a modern Catholic Church and think, "this seems authentic."
Historical Catholicism produced martyrs. Modern Catholicism produces lapsed Catholics and atheists.
What I loved about traditionalism was the fact that everything about it signaled a seriousness that seemed befitting of an interface between the human and the divine. It was indisputable that something special was going on up there. And you had to work a little bit not to feel alienated, which was even better when you realized you weren't important to the liturgy at all, so there was no reason to include you in everything. It was serious, noble, regal, symbolic, and conducive to prayer, contemplation, and worship.
And the older sacraments were just better. They said more words that demonstrated an understanding of and intent to effect what they signified.
What I didn't like about tradition was a certain non-negligible segment of other traditionalists. I don't like infernalism. I don't like EENS. I despise Massa Damnata. I never bought into the need to be in constant penance. I don't like apparitionism (or the rosary, if I'm being honest) even though I can appreciate both.
I can criticize tradistan because I ruled it for a time. But I'll still defend trads all day from a bully like you, who gaslights them and tells them they deserved TC because of a few loud mouths, at least some of whom are too stupid to even believe that we landed on the moon. There are a lot of good, decent, quiet, prayerful, salt-of-the earth trads. Men and women who love God and are trying to raise good families while offering both God and their children the best worship they know how to do.
Taking that from them is evil, Mike. It's hideously, horrifically, inexcusably EVIL. And you defend it and shill for it while kissing the ass of the most corrupt pope since the Borgias, a man who repeatedly protects sexual predators and pedophiles, who sold out Chinese Catholics to a brutally suppressive regime despite their fervent pleas, and who hates his own spiritual children so much that he abuses and insults them and takes away their best and most beloved means of worshiping the God he seems not to even believe in -- except maybe as an adversary -- and you do it with a straight face and an entire act where you pretend you have no idea why people have a problem with it.
I have contempt for you, Mike. You are the most contemptible, dishonest, willfully blind, disgustingly obsequious, surreptitiously nasty individual I think I have ever encountered. And that's saying a lot. I blocked you in the past because I can't resist arguing with your incomprehensibly shitty and needling takes. You are an occasion of sin. Or whatever the agnostic equivalent is.
The irony is that I don't think anyone would know who you are if not for me. WPI is basically the Anti-1P5. You're welcome for giving you the best gig of your life.
No comments:
Post a Comment