Auntie Seraphic & Vocations Victim Part 2

I don't usually post replies to my replies, but this touches on a subject that I bet is near to many of your hearts: Catholic women in ministry. There are many unmarried Catholic women doing jobs that nuns, brothers or only priests used to do, many earning a salary that barely keeps a roof over their heads and food in the larder. I remember my own official ministry placements (mostly unpaid as  it was part of my M.Div. study) with feelings ranging from joy to abject horror.

Dear Auntie Seraphic

Thank you for this very extensive and helpful reply! I appreciate it a lot. I too (as a theology student myself, missionary and parish worker) have spent a lot of time around priests and seminarians, so I am learning some of the confidence you describe. 

It is very affirming to hear that it's OK to treat priests as people -- ie. respectfully but still expressing one's own opinion and not having to feel like they always know more than you (I think they usually do -- just not necessarily about my own life/personal experience). 

Others who have not had the same experience however, continually tell me to "be more respectful" (ie. shut up). And sometimes I feel like I don't know where the line is anymore. 

I will share your comments with some very dear friends. We all experience it a lot and aren't sure what to do. 

Feel free to use any of this (without names of course! :-) for your blog if you think other readers would find it helpful. At least here in the USA it is a very common situation for those of us who are practicing Catholics/work in the Church/volunteer/go to retreats etc. 

Thank you for everything!  

God bless,

Vocations Victim

Dear Vocations Victim,

I'm sorry to read that you are being told, in so many words, to shut up , especially if you are in your mid-20s.  I wonder if anyone told St. Catherine of Siena, who wasn't even a nun and yet told the pope what to do, to shut up. I hope not, but I bet she probably was. Many people feel intimidated by young women speaking their minds. 

(And not so young, too. I just found a "thank goodness Jesus isn't as judgmental as you" comment on the internet version of the Catholic newspaper I write for--signed with a pseudonym, of course. Did I care? Yeah, for half a second.)

Anyway, don't shut up. You are a Daughter of God. The best way to respect a priest is to treat him like an intelligent human being who can handle truthful, reasonable adult conversations, and maybe make sure you aren't exposing any cleavage or too much leg when he's around. (I throw that in because sometimes I discover a priest across from me at a dinner party and I am, like, "Oooh. Could I borrow a lacy hanky to stuff in my dress?")

Grace and peace,

Seraphic

Now that I think about it, I don't know what "missionary" or "parish worker" means in VV's context. But I do know that it can be a very tough situation when your faith is also your job. 

One of my most horrible memories of parish work is standing next to the priest and the seminarian after Mass to shake hands with the People of God, and the People of God, terribly embarrassed, mostly avoided me. I was hurt  and envious of the seminarian, whom they embraced and patted and made much of, even though he was politically and socially to the right of Generalissimo Franco and possibly drank the blood of slaughtered liberation theologians.

But I now think, of course they did. The People of God dread the imposition of "lady priests" (to quote a man who ordered me away from his hospital bed), and I looked suspiciously like a "lady priest." I honestly believe the People of God draw the line at lady priests. They want real priests, young priests, even (or especially) priests like Semininarianissimo Franco.

Every time a soi-disant "womanpriest" gets ordained, life gets worse for ordinary Catholic women in the ministry trenches. I heard so much moaning about clericalism in my pre-Trid days, but thinking that only clerics are first class Catholics, and therefore women are doomed to the second class, is a pernicious form of clericalism. It just isn't true. What is true, however, is that many priests are scared of women, not so much now because they are afraid of women tempting them into sexual sin (as some women have always tried to do), but because they are afraid of women--or laypeople in general--taking over and bossing them around.  

This can leave the young woman doing what used to be nun-work or even priest-work (like chaplaincy) in the difficult position of having to prove all the time that she does not secretly harbour a desire to be a priest, or in some cases, e.g. she reports to an older woman, to pretend that she does. And of course she does not get all the perks and shortcuts that the priest's collar or the nun's habit brings when dealing with people. Collars and habits make all but the most militantly progressive churchgoing layfolk smile. 

Personally, I could not hack an official church-approved ministry career, unless the new archbishop of Edinburgh wrote to me asking that I become the Official Auntie to Singles in the diocese. That would be extremely awesome, and I would do my job rather like how I did my college chaplaincy internship: basically I hung out with Catholic undergrads and a Muslim undergrad, drank tea, listened to their problems and gossip and talked about their theological interests. I think my boss (female) wanted me to be more pro-active, whatever that means, but I know the undergrads just liked having me around to talk to.  I would turn my office into a sitting-room: an overstuffed Victorian one with comfy battered couches.

However, I know some of you girls are indeed in church careers, so please feel free to chime in about how to be you and how to be taken seriously in your ministries without frightening Father Sensitive or being ground down by Father Snarly and Wannabe Womanpriest Wanda.

Restoring the Priesthood

Part 3 of Trids, Trads and Neo-Cons


My dears, I am shaking in my blue flannel nightie (early morning writing uniform) because I once got FIRED for writing something similar to what I am going to write today. Of course, I always expected to get fired because I was writing about traditionalist Catholicism in a Spirit of Vatican 2 newspaper, and I could hear the shrieks of dismay from all the way across the ocean. I wrote my columns in an alphabetic way, starting with Asperges and Benediction and was delighted that I got as far as the Novus Ordo before the editor pulled the plug.

The Novus Ordo I was writing about was at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, and was the first one I'd been to in some time. And Mass was done beautifully--don't get me wrong. There was a great homily on Saint Edith Stein, the church interiors had been restored, the female cantor had a beautiful voice, there was an impressively huge crowd of students. What I found so startling--and what my editor found so outrageous that I found startling--were the readings read in a female voice. I forget if there were any Extraordinary Ministers of Communion or any altar girls, but I would have found them startling too, just because I have ceased to be used to them.

Now if you are a committed female EMC, cantor, reader or altar server, you may want to skip this next part because you might take it personally and get mad, and I am not interested in making anybody mad. I am interested only in delving into the mindset of Male Trids and Trads, for the solace of Female Trids and Trads who might like to marry a Male Trid or Trad if they weren't such mutants.

Okay, most of them aren't mutants. My husband isn't a mutant. Our friends aren't mutants. The mutants seem to be roaming the USA, telling ladies not to wear pants in church. (In the UK this could get them arrested for indecency.) Obviously you don't want to marry those guys. But you might be wondering why it is that Trid men are somewhat aggressive on the subject of Woman, so I'll tell you what I think.

I think one of the biggest changes to the Mass since 1962 is the erosion of the priesthood. The innovators decided that it was terrible that the priest was "up there" and should be "down here" among the people. The innovators also decided that many sacred tasks did not have to be done by priests, but by almost anybody. Not just priests, but anything sacred should not be "up there" but "down here" among the people.

The innovators were not taking into consideration human psychology, which values most those things that are "up", not "down"; sees the sacred best from a slight distance; respects that which takes effort, training and skill; finds the exclusive thrilling; and takes comfort in sameness. Any Fifth Avenue adman could have told them that.

The innovators seemed to be actively chipping away at the priesthood and the very notion of priesthood, which in Christianity is inextricably linked to maleness because to be human is to have a gender and Christ's, the High Priest's, human gender was and is male.

Therefore, there is no more visual and obvious a breach between the ancient Christian traditions of priesthood and the new than women in the sanctuary doing things that only clerics used to do--like (in the case of Catholics) read the lessons, open the Tabernacle, touch the Eucharist with our bare hands and exchange a sign of peace with the celebrant.

Altar girls--poor things, they have no idea--also symbolize the erosion of the priesthood because altar service, which was once done by clerics, has been for some centuries an early apprenticeship for the priesthood. This is why it was a male preserve and--loving male preserves--boys and young men were happy to serve. Once altar service ceased to be a male preserve--and therefore no longer an early apprenticeship for the priesthood--boys and young men became more reluctant to do it. If the girls wanted to do it, and were allowed to do it, then let them do it. So much for altar service as apprenticeship to the priesthood.

Except, of course, in communities like mine where only young men are altar servers. Two of our altar servers are now in the seminary and at least one other is thinking about it. Altar service is very "in" with the twenty-something boys of our community. They discuss server-craft over drinks, reviewing their errors with rue and discussing the minutiae of movement. Altar service is an art, being not just service, but part of the religious ritual that, like art, lifts our minds to another plane.

I am keenly interested in the importance of ritual in lifting our minds to another plane which is why I like mantillas. But if I go there, I will go off topic, so let me just say that it is a woman thing and I like to express myself as a woman at prayer. Because only women wear mantillas, and usually only during prayer, the mantilla says "I am a woman at prayer!" And, among other things, this expresses a belief that men and women are different, at very least when they are at church. And I think this has a soothing effect on men (and women) who have come to associate women-at-church with the erosion of the priesthood.

I do not know who it is who is attracted to traditional Catholic worship in the USA or Canada, but in Britain I have come across many tradition-loving Catholic men who were once Anglicans or Scottish Episcopalians. One was once an Episcopalian priest.

Anglican and Episcopalian priests have famously been crossing the Tiber in droves, some with very serious financial sacrifice, in part because of the inclusion of women as Anglican deacons, Anglican priests and even, in some places, Anglican bishops. The fact that the Anglican Church would do such a thing convinced these men that they must not be Anglican any more. The Anglican Church no longer believed what they believed about priesthood--including Christ's priesthood--and therefore the Tiber (or the Bosphorus) they must swim.

This is not about "hating women" as their smug critics suggest. It is about priesthood---and all the rituals and tasks around priesthood (including, for some, the ancient boys' and men's choirs)--which is linked to maleness, a maleness shared by the High Priest. Of course, not all men are saints, so some of them harbour resentment for the women for whom their devotional lives were so disrupted. Or if they do not resent those women, they resent the idea of women doing stuff women are not supposed to do, albeit in a much much milder way than the average Manchester United fan would, should FIFA order the inclusion of women in the starting eleven.

Men not wanting women to do men's stuff is a hallmark of traditionalism. Not all traditional men are the same, of course. There are traditionalist men who think a woman should be in any profession she likes (except men's football), remembering that the priesthood is not a profession. And then there are traditionalist men who think that a married woman should not work outside of the home if her husband can support her financially. There are traditionalist men who are charmed if women ask them to dance, and there are traditionalist men who think this a sign of the coming apocalypse.

And they are perfectly free to think this because men have freedom of speech and freedom of thought, just as we do. The only time to give Trad or Trid man a piece of your mind--or an icy glance that shrivels him down to walnut size--is when he is inexcusably rude to you or to your weaker/younger female friend. I could not care less if a Young Fogey drones on about how he thinks women ought not to work as long as he doesn't tell me I ought not to work. Then he is in trouble.

The way to fight carnaptious Fogeys is with Fogeyism. And this, my cherubs, is a technique I learned as a Neo-con when young Neo-con men tried to set little traps for people's orthodoxy. For example, they would ask how many children you wanted, and if you said anything except "As many as God sends" they would say "Heretic! Ha ha!" So you just said "As many as God sends" to put a stop to that little game.

It is so easy to fight a Fogey as a woman because all you have to do is shove another man between yourself and him. This man could be your father, your husband or, if you have neither of these, your brothers or, in a pinch, your confessor. In a quelling voice you can say, "My husband/father/eldest brother/confessor is quite happy for me to [blah, blah, blah]." This suggests that you are, in fact, a better traditionalist than the Fogey is. In fact, by speaking so personally to a woman without being her husband, father, brother or priest, this soi-disant traditionalist is really just another modernist. Tell him.

Only a madman would think he trumps the opinion of your husband/father/eldest brother, although he might think he trumps your confessor if he suspects your confessor of being a modernist. But then you can inform him, in quelling tones, that you obviously have a higher opinion of the clergy than he does. ("You modernist!")

This post is way too long. If you're still with me, have a go in the combox. Please mention what country you are writing from if you fulminate against Triddism because, believe me, it is probably different in Europe. Ladies only, please.

Update: Another good rejoinder is, "Our Lord never spoke to women like that." He didn't. Our Lord was kind to every woman he met. The Gospels detail his many kindnesses to women, including rescuing one of us from being stoned to death by men.

It's amazing how uncomfortable traditionalists and conservatives are with frank lay conversations about Our Lord. And there seems to be a rule that you can't mention the Holy Name. In the UK, you can make people, atheist and Christian alike, flinch just by saying "Jesus said..."

When "Our" Men Turn Mean

Part 2 of Trids, Trads and Neo-Cons


There's nothing like a little persecution to bond people together. In first year high school Latin, Sister W scared us girls so much that we became good friends. We bonded in the cafeteria as we complained together about the nightmare that was Sister W's class.

Religious, ethical and political movements can work the same way. For example, it is so much harder in the decades after the Sexual Revolution just to be a nice Catholic girl who wants to "keep respectable", get married and have four children that it feels that Canadian society is now actively persecuting nice Catholic girls.

That was more of a feeling than a fact in the Eighties, at least. What was an obvious fact was that thousands of unborn babies were being snuffed out by doctors. Canadian society was supposedly mostly okay with this. But devout Catholics and a number of other people, including atheists who think human life starts when it starts, thought this was so appalling that we would be morally in the wrong if we didn't say how appalling it was. So we said it was appalling, and there was a hue and cry about how nasty we were.

The principal huers and criers were, I am sorry to say, feminists. Shortly before the Sexual Revolution, mainstream feminists ceased to rail against ab*rti*nists* and began to support them. And somehow they managed to turn cultures that were utterly repulsed by surgical ab*rti*n into cultures that thought it absolutely fine as long as no-one was forced to think about it much. The sin of pr*-l*fers, as far as society was concerned, was to make people think about it much. As far as feminists were concerned, our sin was to hate ab*rti*n itself. Shriek, shriek, scream, scream.

So if you were a Canadian Catholic girl in the 1980s, who just wanted to stay respectable and get married in the Church and have four children and also not be complicit by her silence in the wholesale destruction of unborn human life, you very much wanted like-minded friends. And you were very likely to find them in the local pr*-l*fe movement.

At this point in the narrative I should interrupt myself and tell you that although I had a very strong sense of Right and Wrong and knew that human life begins at c*nception, I was otherwise not very rooted in reality. To sum up, I thought fiction, no matter when it was written, was a guidebook to real life. The fact that the boys in my elementary school were absolutely nothing like the boys in British children's literature written before 1970 was a bitter disappointment to me, and I assumed that the boys C.S. Lewis and Enid Blyton wrote about were simply elsewhere, perhaps in England or in private schools.

They were not in the pr*-l*fe movement either, of course. The young men I knew in the pr*-l*fe movement were ordinary Canadian Catholic boys who were unusual only in that the wholesale destruction of human life made them angry enough to want to do something about it. That was their primary concern, and although most of them (I believe) strove to be chaste so as to continue in friendship with God, they valued chastity primarily as a solution to the problem.

These boys resented very much the implication that they were anti-woman, and I think they were frightened when adult women screamed at them on the street. They certainly resented women behaving that way, and they were glad that their female pr*-life friends did not.

The word "feminist", however, was a curse word and a lightning rod. And I attracted unnecessary attention to myself by asserting that I was a feminist. I had not yet learned that (A) the horror some men feel for that word precludes any reasonable discussion of its positive implications, (B) I should not scandalize the "weaker brethren" in this way, and (C) public feminism is controlled and policed by people for whom ab*rti*n rights are as necessary as air and water.

I wasted a lot of time, breath, emotion and even money trying to prove that as a feminist I was just as good a pr*-lifer as anyone else. And, of course, I saw these boys at their most unpleasant, which was when their resentment of much older female strangers who screamed at them on the street, and of those complicit in ab*rti*n (to us infanticide), spilled over into resentment or bullying of female pr*-lifers their age.

At the time I would have considered it absolute treason to complain about this publicly because we were all desperate to convince society that pr*-life is not anti-w*man but pro. But it was a shock and a disappointment to discover that boys who were brave enough to stand up to society's passive-aggressive apathy, "OUR" boys, could be jerks.

Now everyone has their jerky moments and even their jerky days. If a non-jerk behaves like a jerk, he or she usually knows it, calls you up or texts and apologizes. But in every religious, political, ideological and whatever movement, there are going to be bullies and dyed-in-the-wool jerks.

There are two ways to deal with bullies and dyed-in-the-wool jerks in voluntary associations. The first is to confront them directly, most safely with back-up, perhaps during a meeting. The second is to quit the voluntary association and go elsewhere, or do whatever else to avoid contact with the bully.

It can be hard to accept that a jerk is a jerk when he is a leader in your marginalized group. You might think that his other gifts outweigh the discomfort you feel in his presence. They don't. And you can bet that there are other people in the group, especially people who think that THEY should be the leader, who think so, too. Keep an eye out for them, and don't mutter quiet "I'll be okay"s when they offer you support.

Darlingses, I wish I could tell you that I shrugged off the jerkiness of the boys who weren't really jerks and incited palace revolts against the real ones. I did not. Not understanding male psychology, I just kept on trying to prove that a feminist was as good a pro-life girl as any other. I helped with schoolwork. I paid for Dear Leader's dinners. I voted for the jerk. I put up with insults. In fact, the only time I showed anything like a spine in dealing with the bad behaviour of certain Neo-con boys (for Neo-cons we were), was to phone their dad to complain. AWESOME. I'm so glad I did that because it balances out my embarrassment for having been such a wimp.

I will say one thing about age. Some jerks are only jerks because they are young, angry and confused, or because they are are the easily-led sidekicks of jerks. Many improve greatly with age. Not all do, of course, and you might not want to take that chance and continue to associate with them for the sake of "good old days" that might not have been all that good.

One of my most painful teenage memories is of three of the boys of my movement stealing my student travel card and shrieking with mean laughter at the photo.

The first (Dear Leader) I cut out of my life by university; I wanted nothing more to do with him, and to this day reject his social network overtures.

The second I foolishly kept in my life out of a misplaced sense of affectionate loyalty until his second of two serious betrayals.

The third, always more of a jerks' sidekick than a jerk, became a priest. He is, by all reports, a good, kind man, a fine priest, and the loving uncle of many nieces and nephews.

What I hope you take away from this post is that every movement has its jerks. Every movement has its misogynists. And every movement has its good guys, too. I'm not saying you'd be compatible with a guy whose religious or political beliefs contradict your own, but don't be surprised if many such men are much better company than the few jerks and bullies of your own community. Don't let the jerks and bullies dominate your life out of your own misplaced sense of loyalty. You don't deserve to be jerked around.

Tomorrow: Men resisting Womynpriests.

*Sorry about the all the *'s. It's to avoid Googling trolls.

Trids, Trads and Neo-Cons Part I

This week I'm going to write about people who adhere to one strand of liturgical, theological and certainly anthropological thought in the Roman Catholic Church which may not be of interest to Other Singles of Good Will. So I hope the Other Singles of Good Will will forgive us Catholics as we chatter and bicker (respectfully) and fuss in the combox. Of course, some of you may be interested in how traditionalism manifests itself in social life, for you may yourselves adhere to religious tradition in the face of religious innovation.

(This reminds me that I am absolutely longing to see Calvinist Cath for a tremendous chat. Cath, can you come to supper next Tuesday?)

Part 1: How I Became a Trid

Now, only the concrete is good (as Lonergan says, paraphrasing Aquinas) and context is important, so I should explain that I have been involved in "Traditional Latin Mass Catholicism" for only four years. These four years have followed the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum which liberated the Traditional Latin Mass from its imprisonment in the margins of the Church into the mainstream.

Therefore, my experience as a "Traditional Latin Mass Catholic" is going to be very, VERY different from that of anyone who actually grew up as a "Latin Mass Catholic," caught in the sad pre-2007 culture war between those who refused to get on board with the post-Vatican II program and 99% of those Catholics who didn't just apostasize in anguish or boredom and went obediently to the New Mass.

No, your Auntie Seraphic went to an ordinary, wreckovated post-V2 parish and to ordinary Catholic schools and an ordinary Catholic college and eventually to an ordinary Catholic theological school run by Canadian Jesuits whom she adored.

However, Auntie S was made a traditional Catholic at a very early and impressionable age by accident. For, I think, my sixth birthday, my parents gave me a rosary with tiny orange beads (soon broken, but never mind), Heroines of God by Father Lovasik and Prayers for Catholic Children by Father Robert J. Fox. I loved both these books--Heroines of God being my absolute favourite book of books for YEARS--and Catholicism was to me what Fathers Lovasik and Fox said in these books, plus what Father Cryer (obedient to V2 but unfashionably Marian) said on Sundays, plus the Good News Bible (with the cartoons), plus Butler's Lives of the Saints (my parents still have the complete set).

However, something confused me. There was a divide between all the above and (A) Catholic church interiors and modern Catholic church architecture and (B) how the priests at another local Catholic Church said evening Mass--very jokey and speeding through so we could get home and watch the Toronto Argonauts football game. Oh and (C), there was the time I went to Confession at the jokey priests' church and my confessor told me he was tired of hearing sins, so I should tell him the good things I had done instead. I was probably under 12, but even then I knew this was not okay. Nothing weirds out kids like grown-ups being weird, and a priest being weird was particularly weird.

(This is not, by the way, a creepy priest story. I honestly think the priest had been pondering what a shame it is that innocent children are made to reflect on their sinfulness when really they should be shown that they are angels of light, and that he would do this noble, prophetic thing via confession. It was the Eighties, you know?)

Anglican churches frightened me because they were so beautiful, inside and out. Their very beauty was a spiritual temptation, so I tried to avoid them. Having been born after the destruction of Catholic church interiors, and of course, during the never-ending Canadian Church building project, I did not know that Catholic churches used to be just as beautiful as they. Thank heavens I never heard Anglican music--much of which used to be our music, too.

I did hear some of our old music because my brothers were in a Cathedral boys' choir school founded long before the post-Vatican 2 era made such things quaint or counter-revolutionary. And eventually I wondered why, since Mass was so beautiful (in spots) at the Cathedral, it was not so beautiful elsewhere in the diocese.

Of the Catholic traditionalist movement, I knew nothing. When I was in high school, I joined the local pro-life movement, which was shared mostly between Catholics and Evangelical Protestants. The Catholics fervently admired John Paul II, and even the Evangelical Protestants were grudgingly impressed by his emphasis on the Gospel of Life. I did not know it at the time, but we Catholic teens were mostly Neo-Cons. We were also influenced by spiritual movements centered on Fatima. We had rosary meetings in each other's homes, which were followed by lunch.

However, by the time I went to university, I noticed some of my pro-life friends from the countryside doing odd things during Mass, most notably after the Life March in Washington D.C., in that huge Cathedral. They would kneel when the rest of us stood, and just keep on kneeling. One girl, Katie, explained to me afterward it was because this Mass was not the Real Mass; although it had the Eucharist, it wasn't proper Mass. I thought this crazy talk.

But as the years went on, I got more and more impatient with the way Mass was said. I was very embarrassed when an Anglican friend made fun of Catholic priests' joking around during Mass and their awkward off-the-cuff preambles and the terrible or banal music. I would argue with this Anglican and then be furious with myself when I secretly agreed with him. My father told me that there was a heresy called "aestheticism," and I did not want to be a heretic.

Jesuit theology school just made me more impatient with the average parish Mass. It was so obvious that Aquinas and all the other saints we studied who wrote about the Eucharist and the Mass were not talking about Mass as we celebrated it. And the watered down, feel-good homilies I heard away from school were simply not in keeping with the intelligence and curiosity of the theologically literate. How unfair that to get the "real meat" and not just the "milk" of Catholic theology, the average adult Catholic seemingly had to take three years off work and do an M.Div.!

I went to Boston, tasted the bitterest fruits of "spirit of Vatican II" theology, and took off to Germany for a summer. In Germany I went to Mass every day, and absolutely loved the German Mass, even though it turns out that the seminary it was held in was (and is) super-liberal.

First, German was different. It was to me a theological and liturgical language I had to work to get and therefore didn't take for granted. Second, the Germans didn't have our lousy 1970s translation; their Novus Ordo was more of a literal translation of the Latin. Third, I couldn't understand the homilies, so my faith and reason were completely unperturbed.

In the midst of that, I went to one English-language Mass, celebrated by an American priest who was (he told me) sick of Germany, and it was one of the worst Masses I have ever been to in my life: loud, angry-rebellious, profane. I walked out, head splitting.

Back to Boston, and then home to Canada, where I was so impatient with every English-language Mass I found that I ended up at the city's German Mass. The average age of a German at that Mass was 152; they were survivors of Bismark's Kulturkampf. No, I made that up. But they were certainly old and very devout, and their attentiveness to the Mass--said very reverently in German--was an inspiration. I didn't experience anything like the devotion in that church until I went on holiday to Scotland.

In Scotland, I met B.A., and he took me along to the two-years liberated Extraordinary Form of [aka Tridentine or Trid] Mass. I fell in love with Edinburgh, and I fell in love with B.A., and I fell in love with Trid Mass. And B.A.'s Trid Mass friends were so much fun, I almost fell in love with them too.

And that brings me well up do date, happily ensconced in the little community that is Scottish traditional Catholicism. It is not under sway of the Society of Saint Pius X, although many of us have friends or family in the SSPX and pray for their eventual reconciliation with the rest of the Catholic Church.

I suspect that Traditional Latin Mass communities change drastically from country to country, from town to town. Mine is very happy and peaceful, although of course each of us has our crosses to bear and not everyone is the best chum of everyone else. Couples with children tend to gravitate towards other couples with children, and the childless with the childless, at tea-time after Mass, but there are no rivalries. There is, I thank almighty God, no aggression between the men and the women--not that I have seen, anyway--and only rarely does an elderly woman snap pettishly at a young newcomer (who, of course, is rarely or never seen again). Adults still hugely outnumber babies, but the babies are making gains.

Tomorrow: When "Our" Men Turn Mean.