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The happiest catholics I have met are liberals. Some of the others seem bogged down.

I suppose it's easy to be happy when you don't believe you are capable of committing a sin and believe in a 'loving' God who will forgive you even though you transgress his law and are completely unrepentent. Plus, they've been winning for a long time now.

Are conservatism and optism mutually exclusive?

What? I'm very conservative and very optimistic! Even though we've been on the losing side for so long, I see how poorly catechized liberal Catholics and how moribund their theology is and I know that they can not possible continue to win for much longer. Change is coming. There will be progress, but not anything like the kind of progress the liberal dissenters have been promulgating for the past 40 years...

I think there are two kinds of liberals, liberals by willful disobedience and liberals by default. It is the latter I refer to. I don't believe most of them are involved in very serious sin. They didn't seem to know that the masses they were attending were irregular; i.e., many deviations from the rubrics. They subscribed to the liberal diocesan newspaper and listened to their priests.

I didn't know there was anything amiss until I started reading the Wanderer and found out there were "rubrics" governing the mass. Then I purchased a the CCC which no one around here seemed to have or recommend. It was only then that I realized a lot of things we were doing were different .

Many of them had adult children who weren't practicing the faith. Some had serious problems. I think adults with catholic children who are into serious sin try to rationalize that all is well or will be well.

For awhile, we had rock masses, charismatic masses, ring around the altar masses, altar girls before Rome acquiesced, charismatic masses, and polka masses. They did do away with the rock masses finally. What you were going to deal with at any given mass was up to the priest who presided at that mass. You could have a perfect mass at 9:00 and a totally different one at 10:30, even at the more conservative parish I transferred to.

I didn't care what kind of mass it was so long as they presented it with reasonable conformity to the rules. Mistakes I overlooked like the time the priest lost his place in the book and did a double consecration.

Some of the other sacraments were administered irregularly like reconciliation and anointing. Most catholics don't know they are victims of priests who don't follow the rules.