My former editor at the National Catholic Register, Tom Hoopes, has done me a courtesy rarely afforded tradition-minded Catholics: He has stooped to address my arguments, instead of airily dismissing them as the sad obsessions of half-wits, bag ladies, and yellow-eyed anti-Semites with dirty fingernails. Sure, he did so in a blog post which referred to the traditional Mass -- the one said by almost every priest who has ever been canonized -- as a "freak flag." But as a true-blue Traddy, I will take what I can get. Give me a Mass at 6 a.m. at a chapel in a lunatic asylum . . . a muttered liturgy with a mandatory sign-in sheet at an abandoned Armenian parish . . . and I'll show up, clutching a missal -- despite the alarming (if not surprising) percentage of eccentrics. Come to think of it, those of us who accept Humanae Vitae are already a vanishingly tiny segment of practicing Catholics, so it seems a bit rich for one sliver of this infinitesimal subculture to throw donut holes across the bingo hall at the other. (Okay, I'll toss a few: At least we Trads aren't scarfing down lame Catholic knock-offs of already-pitiful Christian "rock," or training our daughters to be altar servers for the next World Urban Youth Day . . . bless their hearts!)
That man has a way of writing!
Enjoy
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