The following essay was unsuccessfully submitted to a Catholic website in January 2017.
I was raised Catholic, and beginning with parochial school in the late 1960s, I have encountered a very unpleasant phenomenon. Some cleric or religious has stood before me and told me something which, if accepted, would lead me right out of the Church. Other clerics and religious have of course supported my faith, but there were always those sowing doubts.
I have been told to disregard the Bible in one way or another, usually its miracles or moral teachings. I have been told to disregard the Creed, even though we recite it on Sundays. I have been told to disregard the Sacraments, at least in their transcendent dimension. Baptism, for example, was taught as necessary for initiation, but not as necessary for salvation. I have been told to disregard the Catholic tradition, in other words.
The phenomenon continued during my high school and college years in the 1970s and 1980s. It even continued in the seminary, where I next spent a few years. The difference was that the doubts were now sown by chancellery officials and seminary faculty, not just associate pastors and school teachers.
It is no small thing to sit in a seminary classroom while the professor mocks a teaching found in the Creed, e.g., “born of the Virgin Mary” or “the resurrection of the dead.” You are sitting there because a bishop has sent you there. The professor was ordained by a bishop and likewise sent there. Bishops of all sorts regularly visit the seminary. And yet here is this professor, doing what he does in class, and has been doing for years. Everyone knows it.
An awful choice has thus confronted me from boyhood. I have been forced to select among statements regarding the faith offered by those in religious authority. Statements consistent with the Catholic tradition provide reason to remain in the Church, and those contrary to it provide reason to leave. The only other option is to reject truth as a category, but then despair would automatically follow. Given the exigency of the situation, and under the influence of grace, I decided to accept the Catholic tradition and to reject anything contrary.
The seminary did provide one major upgrade to my Catholic survival mechanism. I learned an important sacramental principle, ex opere operato. This means the validity of a sacrament does not depend on the holiness of its minister. I could hope to receive the graces of a sacrament despite the poor faith of any cleric I might encounter. My sins were truly the only substantive barrier to grace.
Ex opere operato became for me during the 1990s the “three little words that will keep you Catholic.” I had by now left the seminary, and the parish Masses I attended were growing increasingly effeminate. The people who forced these changes on the Mass might not know the sufferings they have caused. If so, I could relate some of mine.
I was by now in my late-twenties to early-thirties, and the cloying sentimentality was nearly unbearable. Casual dress, talking, turning to greet your neighbors, altar girls, emotional engagement by clerics, intrusive lay ministers, communion in the hand. I prayed all week for the grace just to go, forcing myself to walk past the “Greeters” — as if the Church were not a place I already belonged. I would sometimes look around in distress, hoping for a sign of support from other men my age. But there were almost no other men my age. There were boys, old men, and a few dutiful family men in various degrees of resignation. When Mass was over and I was driving away, I would begin praying for the grace to make it back next week.
The first decade of the 2000s brought outrage when the continued abuse of children by clerical and religious predators came to light. Ex opere operato. Pope Benedict XVI forthrightly addressed this issue, and he then did something I could not have expected. He formally approved the traditional Mass, saying it was a good thing and had never been abrogated.
This teaching was entirely contrary to what some clerics and religious had told me in the 1970s. We were subjected in parochial school to prepared materials detailing the supposed evils (the word does not exaggerate the gravity of the allegations) they had found in the traditional Mass. Unfortunately, I was not sophisticated enough to understand that people who reject the Catholic tradition could not be trusted regarding the traditional Mass.
Supported by Pope Benedict’s teachings, and educated with materials found on the internet and in several books, I started attending the traditional Mass in 2011. The traditional Mass is not a guarantee of all things holy. Many heretics have had the benefit of it. But the traditional Mass came from the Apostolic Age, like the Bible, the Creed, and the Sacraments. It is part of the tradition, and I am not surprised that they are rejected together.
So this is my Catholic survival mechanism. A selective attention to statements by clerics and religious based on conformity to the Catholic tradition. An understanding that the evil inside the Church cannot keep me from Christ, only the evil inside me can do that. And the simplicity and purity of the traditional Mass, which allow me to participate actively in the Sacrifice offered by the priest at the altar of God.