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Christopher Hunt's avatar

Howdy compadre. I have been noticing your change in tone over the last few months, and it was making me almost glad, except that I was skeptical. This post has taken away my skepticism. God bless you!

I grew up in traditional Catholicism, and I am still a traditional Catholic... or, rather, I am now a traditional Catholic. As you said, the traditionalist crowd is often very ideological. It was only by the grace of God that I did not become an ideologue. I have made it a point over the last 5 years to get anyone insulting me on social media to buy or recommend a book that will make their arguments rather than insult me. That, along with simply “reading the enemy” in general, has really widened my mind, and helped me to understand so much. That can be very dangerous for those that are not solidly grounded in Truth, though.

Anyway, now you and I are definitely fellow travelers. I started reading in earnest about 5 years ago, and every year I read more. The more I read, the more I transform. I hit 80 books last year, and am over 20 this year. Some short.

This post makes me glad. I am so happy for you. I hope we can visit one day. I think we have at least one mutual real life friend, Fr. Shannon. Anyway, God bless you and your family.

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Anna F's avatar

Back before Vatican II and all, there was a sense of an Objective and Real to which we were all beholden and under which we all fell short. I say this, not because I lived then, but because I've tried to understand it through studying history, and mostly, through studying literary Catholics who all led wildly different sorts of lives, who all considered themselves Catholics, but didn't seem to feel the need to excommunicate others who lived differently.

Now, We Are The Church. So what's paramount is each person's Personal Journey. So when another person's Journey doesn't match our Journey, we feel it is in within our rights to challenge it. It doesn't matter if we are "left" or "right" - it's the spiritual landscape in which all of us under 70 have been formed. The objective is *gone* - so we are all operating within our own infallible cosmos, and we are all gatekeepers.

Sorry if this makes no sense. I started Holy Week off by drinking beer at a wildly violent Bob Odenkirk movie.

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