Sunday, August 14, 2016

Being a miserable wretch is not a good evangelization tactic.

Where did all these miserable-and-loving-it people come from? I had that thought while reading the comments on a Catholic site yesterday. The moderator said how wonderful it was that Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles didn't end up like a typical foster child but was adopted, and is Catholic. Nice. A guy who who must be a lot of fun at parties wrote in to say that she's not a real Catholic because she goes to the Novus Ordo Mass. Really? How does he know? Look, Novus Ordo  is the only option for most American Catholics. Most don't even know the traditional Mass of all ages still exists. If, like me you have access to multiple Tridentine Masses you are blessed but don't get cocky because you could lose it all at any moment depending on the whims of your bishop.

 I am a traditional minded Catholic because I read a lot and realized that what I was reading had nothing to do with the crap I was seeing at my local parish. I decided to go to the Mass that made the saints and so I got up early one Sunday took a train and a bus and walked through a rough neighborhood and found St. Mary Mother of God Church in Chinatown, DC. That Mass was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. There was no kindergarten music, there was no hugging and kissing and back rubs and there were no jokes.  The priest in his homily talked about the gospel he'd just read and said things like "sin" and "Hell". It was astonishing. The more I went, the more I read, the more I discovered that Catholicism is deeper than what I'd been taught in high school. I wanted and hungered for that Faith. I was also in my early 30s. I was completely unaware of Traditionalism when I was 19. I went through quite a bit before I walked into St. Mary's and I probably never would've gotten there if I hadn't first walked into the Catholic Information Center in DC with it's marvelous pre Vatican II library.

 Simone Biles  takes her rosary with her everyday and does not miss Sunday Mass. That's better than what I was doing at 19. I felt like registering with the site and telling Mr. Miserable to go soak his head but to my delight several other people wrote in and  told him about himself instead. Being miserable and a downright nasty is not an evangelization technique.
I once worked with a positively evil tempered devout Baptist. One day it dawned on me that if I were a savage pagan and this awful woman was the only person professing to be a Christian that I had ever met I would have gone back to my savage lands and continued being a pagan. Mr. Miserable and my evil former co-worker probably drive more people from finding God than they've ever attracted.