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Chapter 6: Fallen Away

After the wedding, we moved to a new town, and joined a new church: another ultramodern one, a big flat gray building from the ‘70s, no kneelers in the sanctuary, the tabernacle off to the side somewhere, a time for “personal testimonies” after each Mass, and a big emphasis on social activism. I threw myself into parish involvement – but, somehow, it all felt very fake and flat. I had a hard time relating. Something about it felt… unimportant, shallow, uninspiring, watery – and I felt that that must be my fault, that I felt that way. This was a Catholic church, after all – who was I to demand beautiful architecture and such? Shouldn’t I be able to feel inspired even in a bland environment?

Around this time, I’d gone back to drinking. Things got really bad really fast. At some point I just gave up going to Mass. I got really into reading secular philosophy, for a good part of that year; I read Sartre and Camus and stuff like that, as well as some more contemporary works like “The View from Nowhere.” I kept trying and failing to stop drinking – sober for a day, three days, five days or so at a time, then right back to it. Life was not what I wanted it to be.

Needless to say, I became incredibly depressed. I almost ruined my marriage. Pretty soon I was reading “The Final Exit” and basically ready to call it quits.

Chapter 7: Coming Back

I wish I could say that prayer, or relying on God, pulled me back from the brink; but in reality, it was my husband. He gave me an ultimatum about my drinking. I decided that, fine, I would dry up for a year – one year – and see what happened. If life still sucked after a year I’d go back to drinking and self-destruct.

Not even three months later, I found out I was finally expecting our first child.

As a new mom, my interest in the faith was renewed. We moved again, and I found a new church, and started attending again. I knew that I wanted my child to grow up in the faith, and that meant being a good role model.

But I was so preoccupied. And still, at this new church, I had a hard time getting my feet on the ground. It didn’t really inspire me or motivate me; we were, once again, pretty much the only people under 50. And then COVID happened, and we took a break from Mass because we were exempt; then I had another pregnancy, a more complicated one. We didn’t start attending regularly again until after #2 was a few months old.

I guess it was around this time that I was starting to get more passionate about the faith, to look into it on my own.

Chapter 8: Interest In Tradition

The more you learn about Catholicism, the more you are drawn to the old Church, the Tradition of the Church. Because that’s where the real Catholicism is.

Through my own idle research, I began to become aware of the dichotomy between “trads” and “modernists” in the faith. I hadn’t been aware of this before. I learned that Trads did things like: wear a veil in church, pray in Latin, and actually follow all the rules and social teachings, whereas modernists were, basically, more loosey-goosey, more likely to be liberal or to pick and choose which parts of Catholicism they liked (as I had been doing previously). For the first time, I developed an interest in living like a Catholic. I started to think about things like modesty and chastity, purgatory and hell and the importance of guarding my tongue – things I had never been taught about, in my formation in the modern Church. I had to teach myself! And I tried, because I wanted to pass on the true faith to my kids.

(Also, around this time was when I gradually became extremely pro-life. Having opened my mind to the Church social teachings, and begun to see the logic and reasoning, plus, having now been through two pregnancies and one miscarriage, I was positively heated about the abortion issue, and remain so to this day.)

Maybe I’d fit in better at a more traditional church? But there was no trad community around me that I was aware of. So I felt kind of isolated at my modern parish, as I began to question things like: is it really okay to stand and receive Communion in my hand? Why was I taught to do that, if centuries of Catholic teaching pre-1968 forbade it? I at last began to develop a sense of what was traditional and what was modern, and began to understand why I’d always felt so ungrounded and uninspired by the modern Church. It wasn’t my fault, after all! I felt validated. My intuition had been right all along. The solemnity, sanity, structure, and seriousness that I craved were still out there, enjoyed by some trads who were lucky enough to live near a TLM.

But, there was no TLM around me; or so I thought.

Chapter 9: Fence-Sitting

And then I met a friend. I met her online, and we became pen-pals. I related to her a lot, plus she was Catholic like me – except, better. She spoke about spiritual things with an insight and wisdom, a clear-headedness, that I’d never encountered before. It seemed to be really working for her. I’d mention all kinds of spiritual questions and concerns that nagged at me, and she always had the most commonsense, realistic, quietly brilliant responses to all of them. I got such a sense of peace, reading her angle on religious matters, and felt eager to hear much, much more. Where on earth was she learning these things! I had to know.

Turned out, she attends a Mass of the SSPX.

I was only vaguely familiar with the Society. Weren’t they schismatic, or canonically irregular, or whatever? Weren’t we not supposed to go there? Yet, out of curiosity, I looked it up to see if they had a chapel near me – and they did! A fairly large one! Not even an hour away! So now, I was torn.

For about nine months, I waffled. I scoured the internet. I grilled my friend about her reasoning, her rationale for “disobeying” the Church and attending outside of “full communion with Rome.” I reconnected with an old friend from the Campus Ministry Group, a very smart and devout person who was also trad-leaning, and bounced a million ideas off of him, too. I agonized over this the same way I’d agonized over the gay marriage issue. I lost a lot of sleep. I prayed for clarity.

It was a hugely important decision: my family’s eternal salvation was on the line. The SSPX was certainly more serious, from what I’d seen, about helping people get to heaven. They actually talked about things like hell and sin! But, on the other hand, wouldn’t joining them constitute breaking from the One True Church, outside of which there can be no salvation? Was I, after all, being a cafeteria Catholic by trying to decide what I thought the Church ought to look like? Or, was the Society correct about what was going on in the world? Was I being emotional, or was my intuition drawing me towards the truth?

There were strong arguments in both directions. I didn’t know what to do.

At a standstill, logically, I finally realized I needed some new, empirical evidence to work with in making my decision. I decided to just give it a try. I bought a mantilla and a Missal and went to their chapel and attended my first TLM.

It was beautiful and moving – but, honestly, more confusing and stressful than anything else. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like an idiot, like everyone was staring at me and judging me. My AvPD really flared up. It was quite unpleasant.

So, I was torn. Mass at my local neighborhood NO was easier, I was comfortable there…

But, chasing comfort will get you nowhere but rock bottom, as I’d learned. Comfort should not be the deciding factor in choosing a church.

Throughout my life, I’ve always been too afraid to go for things that I thought were cool. Passivity has always been my defining characteristic. If I liked someone, or thought they were cool, I’d just admire them from afar and daydream about being the kind of person they’d like. Every friend and boyfriend I ever had approached me first. I always dodge, take the easier way, stay in my comfort zone to avoid humiliation. Here, I saw, was an opportunity to finally be brave and go for the thing that I sure as hell did not deserve to be a part of, but wanted really badly to be a part of.

So, I persisted in trying the TLM, and continued to embarrass myself doing so. Maybe God thought I needed to be humbled? All I knew was, I saw that there was something really special and holy going on there.

But still I waffled. I went back and forth: I’d go to my local NO for a few weeks, then back to the SSPX, then back to NO (which annoyed me more and more each time I went back to it, with its drivelly music, altar girls, feel-good homilies, college kids with leggings and Starbucks cups, noisy irreverent chit-chat before the Sacrament, and people wearing jeans and spaghetti straps), and I began to realize some things.

Chapter 10: Committed Radtrad

It finally began to sink in that:

1, the warmth and kindness at the SSPX chapel was much more real and genuine. People there were less in-your-face about it – at the NO, you’d always encounter this overly familiar, “Hiiii, welcome!!! 🥰🤗” flavor of Committee-enforced kindness, peppered in amongst a crowd of blank-faced strangers who were just there to do their thing, did not care a whit about you and did not even look your way once: an awkward contrast, a very fakey feeling. Whereas at SSPX, every person there would look me in the eye and wish me good morning, or initiate a polite conversation, and remember my name the next time. (Part of why it is so much more socially uncomfortable, for someone like me: no more just disappearing into the crowd.) I got a sense of a very real goodness, a very sincere desire to welcome the newcomer. It felt like an actual community.

2, There was real faith, at the SSPX. No one there was just there because it was part of their routine, it was what they’d always done. You can see in their every gesture that they mean it with all their heart, that this is life or death for them. It’s not just a social outing. This was deathly serious! This was real religion, the real thing I’d always wanted, not just a watered down modern rendition of it.

3, The priests there really cared about us. A couple of times, I reached out to priests via email or in person, and each time, these very busy, very holy men would positively bend over backwards to listen to me, to help me, to make time for whatever I needed. In the NO, I met plenty of very holy and very good priests, but I could just tell that this was a different breed of priest from the way they attended to my every question and concern with seriousness and devotion. I could 100% tell that he was not just being social and polite; he felt deeply called to help my soul attain salvation, and it came through in every interaction. He even spoke like a different breed of person – like someone not of this world. I experienced this fatherly love and holiness in Confession, too, to an even greater degree. These priests are not like other people; you can really tell that they are not just ordinary guys wearing cassocks; they truly have a supernatural vocation. I’ve found that I trust their advice completely, whereas in the NO I almost always left confession feeling like I wasn’t really heard, I wasn’t really recognized, or they didn’t really care.

4, The “not in full communion with Rome” thing is a myth, perpetuated by tradition-haters to try and keep people from experiencing the fullness of the faith. The SSPX is not disobedient to the Pope, nor are they outside of the Roman Church. It’s absurd to think otherwise, and I’m not going to bother enumerating all the reasons why; there are plenty of books and websites on this topic if you’re interested. Don’t fall for the slander and lies.

5, the NO world is completely wrong about the SSPX, and Lefebvre was completely right and will surely be canonized one day for singlehandedly saving Tradition; the fullness of the Church is found in the SSPX. It didn’t take long for me to see the light, and after just a few weeks of commitment, I began to realize how pathetically laughable it was that I spent so much time waffling. If you are on the fence, like I was, I urge you to just try it – just visit a SSPX Mass a few times, and see this difference for yourself. I now see how absolutely tragic it is that the modern Church makes the Society into these outcasts, pariahs, like they’re some kind of weird taboo cult, not even to be mentioned in polite company – when in reality, they have the fullness of the Catholic Faith.

I’m still the village idiot, at the TLM. I’m still trying to figure out my way around it. I still embarrass myself on the regular. And as you can see if you read my blog, I’m far from a model Catholic, lol. But, it’s worth it; it’s better to be awkward at the TLM than to be too comfortable at the NO.

Things are falling into place. I can’t even begin to list all the things that have started to make more sense, since finding Tradition – both in my personal life and liturgical life. I at last have found it: the real religion that my soul was always hungry for. Here, there is sanity, and stability, and safety.

Perhaps the most personally life-changing thing (aside from more perfect Sacraments, obviously) that I’ve realized since switching to Tradition is that – and this is gonna sound extremely cheesy – it’s actually okay for me to be my weird misfit self. Which is part of the reason I even started this stupid blog in the first place. In the modern Church, which is so preoccupied by liberation theology and social work and thinks everyone is basically the same as a priest, I felt like I could never actually be a good Catholic, unless I found a way to completely change my personality. Unless I miraculously transformed into someone else, some extrovert who could go around like a missionary, confidently teaching the faith to others, I wasn’t fulfilling my calling. In Tradition, I realized that lay people are not priests. It’s okay to be a lay person concerned with lay things. God made me an introvert, and weird, and it’s okay to be that way. There is much more humility in this take.

That, and learning that I can trust my intuition as much as my faculty of reason. I felt lost and confused in the modern Church not because I was doing a bad job, but because the modern Church is lost and confused herself! Several experiences along this path showed me that my “gut” was actually right, and I should have learned to trust it earlier.

I’m so grateful that I met that friend and that, after 10+ years as a Catholic, I finally found real Catholicism – the true religion, the kind of religion I always craved and needed in my life. So yes, go ahead and call me a radical traditionalist and an extremist; if that is what the priests of the SSPX are, then I am honored to be in that company.