The Catholic traditionalist with whom I’m most familiar is Charles Coulombe, and he has always struck me as a man with a sense of humor, far from the surly stereotype described by the author of this piece.
Yeah, I like Charles. And I agree. It is a stereotype, but there are definitely surly traditionalists, and we might well ask ourselves why.
Suppose we completely ban the Novus Ordo Mass starting today for....oh...15 years or so and then for another couple decades tolerate it extremely begrudgingly. We’ll treat people like complete freaks for asking for it, make them drive hours to find it in some unused storefront or completely inadequate space. Let’s see exactly how non-trads manage to stay sunny and optimistic after all that, and then we can complain about surly trads.
I’m not going to apologize for everything traditionalists do. But for Pete’s sake, they had their holiest and most precious possession on earth stolen from them and have been treated like garbage for decades. All completely improperly (illegally?) I might add, since Pope Benedict has now definitively established that the traditional Mass *was never abrogated*.
People find trads surly? Great. Offer it up. And maybe think about how the rest of us helped make them that way.
I have been able to attend 2 wonderful traditional parishes because of all the sacrifices and hard work the surly folks made over the years while being treated like garbage by their fellow Catholics. My old parish was started by a disaffected group and was eventually sold to the diocese and regularized. My new one is FSSP, which as you know splintered off of the SSPX.
As for this Voris/Catholic Answers blog “war”/pillowfight....meh. Whatever.