Crossroads

Before I pick up where I left off, I feel compelled to mention that not everyone I encountered in the TLM community was a misogynist and/or hypocrite.  My closest friends were just like me: lapsed Catholics who reverted with a vengeance, as if by immersing ourselves in the Extraordinary Form we could somehow make appropriate reparations for our prior negligences.  I also remind the reader, as well as myself, that I am sinner who takes responsibility for every word I've said or written in criticism or judgment of how others live their lives and their faith.  I'm not ashamed to admit I was wrong, and I've been wrong many times, about a lot.  Faith that is not a journey from one place of understanding to another is not faith, it's opinion.  

One of the most vile exchanges I had with one of the misogynists happened on Facebook.  I had reluctantly accepted this person's friend request.  I would soon come to regret it.  It was shortly after George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin and I expressed my disgust with the number of so-called Catholics jumping to Zimmerman's defense.   I was informed by this TLM altar server that he hoped I would get raped so I could gain an appreciation for the need for more guns, not less.  I blocked him faster than I could say his name and he sent me an email begging for my forgiveness.  I extended it, but I didn't reverse the block.  

Soon, the favor was returned by other gun zealots who labeled me a liberal, all of them fellow altar servers.  I decided it was time to move on, so I started to attend another TLM where no one knew me.  I recognized some of the congregation from the Carmelite Monastery, but I had no real interaction  with anyone before or after Mass.   The priests who offered Mass would stand on the steps of the church and greet the people afterward, but I was always ignored.  No matter, I wasn't there to make friends.  

The straw that broke the camel's back came one Sunday when,  instead of a homily, the priest pleaded for everyone to contact their representatives about a bill that would extend the statute of limitations for victims of abuse.  He insisted his opposition was rooted in concern for the victims, but I wasn't buying it.  I didn't hear a single word of sympathy for the young Catholics who had their faith and their innocence  destroyed by priests. What I did hear was a lot of demagoguery about the financial ramifications should this bill go through.  In fairness, I'm sure he would have given that same sermon to a Novus Ordo congregation, but I don't know that it would have netted him the same nodding in approval.

I was always a little suspicious of the political leanings of some of the TLM community and of some Catholics in general.  To me their faith was just an extension of their political conservatism, which seemed to inform their conscience at times more than their faith did.  The sin that mattered most was abortion, and what happened to children after birth was not their concern.  If one of the assault weapons they advocated for happened to wipe out a first grade classroom, that was not the fault of the gun.  Blame it on video games, lack of God in schools, anything.  Just don't blame it on the gun.  For the 6 years or so that I attended the TLM, I didn't want to believe that their opposition to abortion was not really about concern for the unborn.  But I couldn't reconcile how you could oppose banning  or at least controlling weapons that could blow a six-year-old's head off and yet stand in front of a clinic on Saturdays claiming to care about babies.

I went to a TLM here and there for special feast days, but I was no longer part of any congregation.  I still lacked the confidence to see that not fitting in didn't mean I was any less Catholic.  That wouldn't come until a bit later.