January 2018
Orphans of Orthodoxy
~ Faith, Family and Friends in the Age of Apostasy ~
| If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. |
| - Luke 14:26 |
It is a difficult day to be alive.
Just a few generations ago, the Catholic touchstones of the three “F’s” (friendship, family and faith) were the three “C’s” (convergence, consistency and constancy). We lived a shared heritage in which we were born, lived, married, celebrated, mourned and died together. Catholicism provided a consistent framework for both knowledge and behaviour — for ethics and morality. The expectations of how to live and how others expected us to live was clear and constant. In other words, our relationships — with God, our kin and our friends and acquaintances — converged with an intimacy that only a shared culture can provide.
As any Catholic with eyes and ears can testify, we live in a very different time. The common culture that defined the lives of Catholics is gone; tragically so. Those souls who seek today to keep alive the vestiges of that once glorious Catholic culture have been orphaned — orphaned by the very leaders of the Catholic Church and by almost all other baptised Catholics, including, most painfully, their own families. The restoration is not without its terrible crosses.
Catholics and the Culture of Old
It was not that long ago when the Catholics understood what was expected of them. These expectations were underscored by positive and negative obligations. We were affirmatively expected, for example: to marry in Holy Mother Church; to baptise, raise, and educate our children in the Faith; to support the Church financially, socially and politically; and to take part personally in the sacramental life of the Church. In sum, we were expected to show a commitment to the teachings of Jesus Christ by being faithful to the Catholic Church. We enjoyed what was then a mutually symbiotic relationship: we supported, loved and venerated Holy Mother Church and, in turn, she jealously guarded us, her flock.
The negative obligations of this shared culture imposed duties to not offend, gratuitously anyway, the sensibilities of the faithful. Every family — and I mean all of them — had its members who rejected the faith and moral authority of Holy Mother Church. Nonetheless, fallen-away Catholics were expected to show discretion. They would not, for example, bring their concubines to family gatherings or would not invite friends and family to their invalid weddings at City Hall. They would be circumspect in their criticism of the Church.
Everyone knew that such family members existed but their lives of immorality were effectively — and collectively — shrouded in silence. The bargain struck was a version of “don’t ask, don’t tell”; the cultural expectation persisted because everyone involved understood the concept of scandal.
In any event, fallen away Catholics would not have dreamed of asking their friends and relatives to celebrate their faithlessness and immorality because, in part, they knew that their friends and relatives would not.
These positive and negative obligations reflected the twin realities that sin existed and, when presented with sin, that we exercised a moral culpability to confirm or abjure it. The demands of that bygone Catholic culture demanded that no affirmation be given to publicly sinful arrangements because all understood that such witness would make the faithful accessories to the sin, which, parenthetically, no one denied. The teachings of the Church at that time — from the catechism to the local pulpit and to the Vatican — confirmed these solemn obligations to the faithful who still believed that the wages of sin were death, and damnation was real.
Death Comes for Catholic Culture
The Catholic culture described above has all but vanished: not only do today’s Catholics not understand the pillars of positive and negative obligations that bind and sustain a viable Catholic culture, they have inverted them.
The family member who yesterday was simply a nondescript Catholic, living out the positive obligations of the Church, is today’s religious zealot.
The fallen-away in our midst are, in turn, normalised to such an extent that the family member who shuns their public sins is guilty of gross uncharity.
Today, if a Catholic refuses to attend, for example, his family member’s invalid wedding because it is invalid, he is a callous monster of sanctimonious judgment. Instead of simply refusing to be an accessory to the sins of another, he is destroying the fabric of his family with his “self-righteous opinions.” What he should now expect is for family members to shun him for merely doing something that fifty years ago all of them would have been expected to do.
The destruction of this culture didn’t happen in a vacuum. What has happened to the Catholic Church over the last fifty years will not be fully appreciated until later generations (should God afford us more time) are able to reconstruct, almost forensically, what went wrong.
No one can deny the near terminal decline of the Catholic Church as recorded and witnessed in every conceivable measure of Her health — from the precipitous drop among the percentage of faithful assisting at Holy Mass to the declining numbers of baptisms, sacramental marriages and vocations to the priesthood and religious life; from the collapse of quality Catholic education to parish “clusterings”; from the shutting of seminaries to the bankrupting of dioceses; from the open rejection among the “faithful” of dogmatic teachings to the clerical pederasty crisis; from the fact that most Catholic marriages begin with co-habitation (read: fornication) and about half of them end in divorce to the rampant use of birth control by Catholic couples during their child-bearing years; from a growing acceptance among Catholics of all manner of sexual sins to the creeping indifferentism and syncretism that infects the entirety of the Church.
Clearly, it cannot go on like this much longer. Only the most diabolically disoriented Pollyannas among us would deny the appalling reality of relentless contraction and wanton destruction over the last fifty years.
But this long tale of woe is easily distilled to its essence: most Catholics simply do not believe.
It is no more complicated than that.
For nineteen-hundred-and-fifty-years, men and women from every age, every continent and speaking every tongue were willing to lay down their lives for the propagation and defence of the Faith: for the very beliefs that are now treated by almost everyone with an admixture of indifference and contempt.
While sincere people debate the cause and effect of the current crisis in the Church, we can set down at least a few common points of agreement.
First, orthodoxy is dying. The once-immutable teachings of the Church are now openly questioned by not only ordinary Catholics but also the very highest authorities. The most rudimentary questions in the Baltimore Catechism, which once provided straight-forward answers for generations of Catholic young people, cannot be answered clearly by almost any local parish priest let alone an ordinary Catholic.
The confusion wrought by this wavering and double-talk — by this deliberate ambiguity in refusing to teach the truths of the Faith or, worse, the teaching of errors — has been ruinous. Nature abhors a vacuum and the void created by the refusal of the Church’s priests and bishops to teach the flock the whole of the blessings and obligations of the Christian life has led to our frightening day: a time in which ordinary Catholics — even those who seek to live faithfully — are all at sea in a world of ever-increasing confusion and half-truths.
Take almost any article of faith that was both known and widely understood a hundred years ago. Today, you will find a diversity of damnable heresies and misunderstandings held by the “faithful” in its stead. And now we have reached a shocking low point in the crisis in which our Holy Father himself seemingly flirts with — or at least refuses to condemn — abominable teachings that would appear to legitimate concubinage and sacrilege.
Second, orthopraxy is dying. The devotional and liturgical life of the Church has changed dramatically in the last fifty years. The all-encompassing “modernisation” of the Church in the 1960s, which coincided with the Second Vatican Council, represented a wholesale change in almost everything it meant to be a Catholic.
Never has the timeless maxim “lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi” (“as we worship, so we believe, so we live”) had as much validity and currency as it does today. Bereft of beauty and mystery, the mawkish and sterile liturgies commonplace in the contemporary Church are ground zero for the frail and fickle beliefs of so many Catholics. As a result, we worship poorly. In consequence, we no longer believe. And since we no longer believe, we live very differently from people who do.
The Second Vatican Council remains a contentious subject. Sincere Catholics continue to debate its relative blameworthiness for our current strife. There can be no denying, however, that we are we are witnessing a widespread apostasy of apocalyptical proportions in the West. While many still disagree, I submit that the Vatican II era’s changes to the liturgy (public worship) and devotions (private worship) served to desacralise the sacred and destroy the Church’s raison d’etre. What followed — inevitably — was an eventual discharge from the demands (moral or otherwise) of our doctrine. It seems to me that only the most hard-headed could wave away this inconvenient fact: that the doctrinal deformations and teaching errors of the last fifty years just happened to occur after the Church introduced the most radical changes it has ever made to its public and private worship.
One Family’s Story
If anyone has a beef with the Second Vatican Council, I do.
I was born in 1971 — probably the apogee of the manufactured “new Pentecost.” While my parents had drifted away from the Faith at almost the same time, they still understood that they were obliged to have their child baptised. That baptism marked my last visit to a Catholic Church for seventeen years. They had gone from having their oldest son (my brother, fifteen years my senior) confirmed by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen in Rochester, New York, to virtually abandoning the Church in the space of a few years.
God has given me an excellent memory — one that recalls the most obscure things — and I cannot remember the interior of a single church in my youth — except the one time my parents let me attend a Lutheran service as a six-year-old child with a neighbour’s family. Even now, I recall that church had a drab modern interior (and thinking it then).
Years later, after a tumultuous and misguided youth and circuitous path, I returned to Holy Mother Church. After traditional Catholicism took hold of me, I asked my father, God rest his soul, why he had abandoned the Church in the late 1960s. To blunt the force of what was becoming my life’s mission, he denied vigorously that the changes in the Church during the 1960s contributed to his decision (or lack thereof) to move away from practicing our Catholic faith. Interestingly, he could never give a straight answer why he left it other than saying, quite declaratively, that Vatican II had nothing to do with it. So, in a sense, our family was simply a statistic of decline without ostensible causation.
Notwithstanding my father’s denial, I don’t think it was an accident that he — and so many others — abandoned the Church almost immediately after the changes to the Mass were introduced in 1969, and not before. The “innovations” that were implemented in the Church at that time suggested all things were possible, or, at the very least, nothing was truly required any more. If the seemingly unchangeable changed, then maybe, unconsciously, many unexceptional Catholics like my parents took, tacitly or otherwise, that the obligations they had been taught, that bound them under the penalties of sin, were likewise voided. It’s as if the Church, who had treated them as spiritual children to be protected and shepherded deliberately in what amounted to a closed Catholic universe, suddenly threw up her arms and said: “you are free to go now.”
It must have appeared to many during this time — and this is the truly diabolic part — that the Church, previously an awe-inspiring institution that was synonymous with conviction, mystery and sacredness, had the curtain lifted to reveal something hokey and ridiculous.
By the radical nature of changes wrought in such a short period of time, the Church left itself open to the charge of historicism: i.e., that the Church had always been, like every other institution, a creature of time and place with no special mandate.
While my parents would not have understood the sophistication of the historicist’s critique of the Church, they would have understood it in its most simple form: the breadth and speed of the changes suggested that the Church’s claim as a divine and changeless institution existing “out of time” was seemingly proven false in the space of a decade. It was not simply that she changed, because, after all, she has always been in a state of slow and organic change; it was that she was changed by men,
much in the same way that Congress enacts a sweeping new political program.
For those who know the truth, it is even worse. The sweeping programme of change and “reforms” instituted thereafter were more the product of scheming Tammany Hall-style machinations by a number of hacks with a distinct agenda: namely, to destroy the very Catholic faith as it had been known for almost two-thousand years.
Of course, Holy Mother Church is changeless in essentials. But to her least sophisticated adherents, like my parents, she was presented by a generation of arrogant Church fathers as something getting grotesquely “hip with the times.” Put a little differently: how could the changes not have driven Catholics away — especially among those who did not understand the changes; other than knowing that you could now eat meat on Fridays and most of the fasting days, and observing that many of the saints vanished, and the Mass was now “groovy.” Whether my father knew it or not, he voted against the changes with his feet — like so many others. Indeed, he hadn’t changed; he was still the same Charlie Gawley. But the Church had changed dramatically in the ways that touched the faithful most profoundly.
While my family still bears the scars of the choices made in the 1960s, they, and countless others, do not bear the culpability alone. And of course, notwithstanding all of this, I still love and revere my parents. But they clearly got the most important part of raising a family wrong. The problems in my immediate family are proof positive that faith formation matters because our Catholic faith is corporate; we live or die in a faith that is shared.
Give me the Faith of My (Grand)Fathers
But I digress.
Twenty-five years of fumbling around for meaning in this world led me, quite miraculously, back to the Catholic Church. Ten more years of reading timeless Catholic works by the great saints and doctors of the Church eventually brought me to the old Latin Mass and “tradition.” And that, as they say, has made all the difference in the world.
To live as a traditional Catholic is a very strange existence — something that approaches existing in an alternative universe. As a traditional Catholic, I live today, without exaggeration, as if the last fifty years never happened. I worship in the pre-conciliar liturgy. I keep the pre-conciliar devotions and laws as Holy Mother Church once articulated them. And I raise my family as if it is 1950. Other than the fact I have seven children, which only means I no longer use contraception, there is nothing to indicate to the outside world my religious views or certainly nothing to set me apart as particularly holy. I am, as many struggling Catholics are, very much a work in progress and seldom pass a confessional box without dropping in.
And here is the rub, I believe and I believe all of it. It is hard for me to pinpoint when that faith grew into the conviction that it is today; it happened gradually and continues to grow. That doesn’t make me better than anyone else, it simply means that I accept the teachings of the Church as she has always taught them — without compromise or vacillation. I am not embarrassed by a single teaching because it is by and through Holy Mother Church — and only her — that I will be saved, inasmuch as she is the institution created by our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ for my salvation. A seeming lifetime of sin and failure and ten years of praying the Old Mass will do that to a soul who is willing.
The Three Faces of Catholicism
My spiritual life has been divided in even segments: twenty-five years outside of the Church as a cultural Catholic, ten years as an ordinary Catholic in the normal parish experience of any American, and ten years since as a “traditional” Catholic. While this doesn’t make me an expert, it gives me insight into how three very different types of Catholics (lapsed, ordinary and traditional) look at the world. Please excuse the generalities but there is no way to group them other than by describing my impressions of them generally.
Speaking most broadly, lapsed Catholics are cultural in nature because the religion exists, if at all, to round out holidays and life events. For these, Catholicism has very little credal currency in terms of how one ought to live and its dictates are something nostalgic — rejected or accepted based upon opinion and convenience. Lapsed Catholics tend to be the harshest critics of Catholicism as if they must continue to rationalise their decision to leave it. They are, sadly, the fastest growing group of Catholics in the United States.
For the vast majority of ordinary Catholics in typical parishes, the Faith is present in regular or semi-regular Mass attendance but set off in a compartment. Religion is given its attention in due time but still competing with a host of created things in the modern world. They identify as Catholics but aren’t very interested in the things of the Faith. The obligations, at least in the mind of many ordinary Catholics still bind. But the hard teachings, like the ban on artificial contraception or disfavour of homosexuality, are safely — and regularly — ignored. For better or worse, these are the owners of the cars parked outside of your local parish.
Parenthetically, I would be remiss to ignore that there are devout Catholics involved in their local parishes (“Devout Ordinary Catholics”). Even though they are the exception to the rule of the ordinary parish experience, these Devout Ordinary Catholics face many of the same challenges that traditional Catholics face in living out their faith with integrity. The difference between the Devout Ordinary Catholics and traditional Catholics is how they attempt to live out their faith. The former do their utmost to embrace the best of the modern Church while ignoring or belittling much of the insanity that goes on. The latter, of course, see the sifting between the good and bad in the modern Church as a fool’s errand and rejects the premise that anything good or salutary came with — or from — the modern innovations. Coincidentally, some of the most vocal critics of traditional Catholicism are Devout Ordinary Catholics.
For traditional Catholics, by comparison, the Faith is everything and all-consuming: the alpha and the omega. Since most are, essentially, ‘converts’, traditional Catholicism permeates quite literally everything they do or think. It attracts precisely those souls who want to live the faith fully and unapologetically. The books they read, the movies they watch, the conversations they have all revolve around the Faith.
What strikes anyone who wanders into a Latin Mass today is the seriousness with which the faithful approach the task of assisting at the Holy Sacrifice. It is different in kind from the normal parish experience and can be jarring and off-putting in the first instance.
Indeed, it can come off as bordering on rude. The faithful there jealously guard the sacred space that surrounds the altar and insist — through disapproving looks or deliberate silence — that the environment therein remain, in a word, different. The space inside a traditional Catholic Church is different in kind from the secular space that we otherwise inhabit. Among the great many things lost in today’s modern Church is the dividing line between the secular and sacred, and that it stops neatly at the vestibule of the Church. This loss is attributable to a great many reasons but the collective disbelief by so many Catholics in the Real Presence of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament is surely foremost among them.
Traditional Catholicism is, however, more than worshipping in an ancient tongue in silence. It is also more than idiosyncratic appreciation for an aesthetic. It is a life marked by a rich, devotional seasonality of feasts and fasts. It is likewise defined by corporate and individual prayer that punctuate its practice with our Lady’s Rosary taking pride of place.
More than all of this, however, it is a worldview; a complete and integrated way of understanding who we were, who we are and who we may yet still be. Concomitantly, it is an understanding of what the Church is and why she is here. Traditional Catholicism is undertaken by conscious choice and open eyes. Clearly it isn’t for everyone. But as much as it repels, it attracts because what it promises are the very themes that are missing everywhere today: the promises of intellectual consistency and moral heroism in this life — and salvation in the next.
The Pharisees Reborn?
Traditional Catholicism is both a life of negation and affirmation, which become, as it were, flip sides of the same coin.
The traditional Catholic affirms the totality of Holy Mother Church’s perennial teachings uncompromisingly. Where ordinary Catholics seek shelter, whether they know or not, in modern double-talk or outright rejection when confronted with unpopular teachings, the traditional Catholic embraces them. By negation, however, the traditional Catholic rejects emphatically virtually every public and private innovation and alteration that has followed the Second Vatican Council.
These two poles of existence define the bounds of existence for traditional Catholics. They are simultaneously a people of a hard “yes” — an unyielding yes to Christ and Holy Mother Church on the terms that had been established from time immemorial; and a hard “no” — no to anything or anyone that would compromise or contradict these very same teachings and obligations.
Traditional Catholics are, for the lack of a better word, a “hard” people. They have deliberately chosen a difficult path that separates them from almost all their co-religionists and the rest of society. Setting aside that no one appears to appreciate the sacrifices they make to maintain this seemingly anachronistic way of life (save the hidden Christ and a sprinkling of exceedingly holy priests), they are quite literally despised by most of the Catholic world and are orphans as a result.
First, their spiritual fathers — i.e., their bishops and priests — reject them because they are a reproach to the failure of these same religious to teach and lead properly.
Second, their spiritual brethren — i.e., Devout Ordinary Catholics — reject them because they are a reproach to their way of life in accommodating if not wholeheartedly accepting the changes of the last fifty years.
Third, regular and lapsed Catholics reject them because often they are a reproach to the immoral ways that these people live their lives.
Traditional Catholics receive no support from the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and, to a person, are generally loathed. Indeed, bishops and priests often view them as an annoyance at best and a disobedient sect at worst. The fact that traditional Catholics exist — and are growing — serves as a living contradiction to the hierarchy’s constant refrain that the Faith of old was too stringent and hard for today’s modern and pluralistic people. That traditional Catholics observe the law more assiduously than their spiritual fathers is undoubtedly a source of embarrassment. That they reject today’s ecumenism is deemed bigoted.
Devout Ordinary Catholics, in turn, feel aggrieved by the implied critique that they are somehow second-class and resent that traditional Catholics rob them of a sense of feeling good about their faith as they practice it.
Regular and lapsed Catholics have different reasons for disdaining traditional Catholics: they generally do not have theological objections to a traditional Catholic’s way of life because they typically do not care. They may view traditional Catholics as strange, neurotic or hyper-pious but since their mantra is often, “I’m OK, you’re OK,” they take no issue with how anyone chooses to live, including traditional Catholics. The animus, however, has the potential to become real when the traditional Catholic’s conscience operates censoriously. For example, this “I’m OK, you’re OK” ethic is challenged when traditional Catholics refuse to attend secular, invalid marriages of family members, which, for the modern family, is deemed a dreadful and selfish act of judgment and pride.
Almost every traditional Catholic I know has had to deal first-hand with the complaints that they are “sanctimonious,” “holier-than-thou,” “fundamentalist,” “cultish,” “rigid,” “absolutist,” “uncharitable,” and even “un-Christian.”
When their world clashes with the secular, quasi- or non-traditional Catholic world, the unyielding nature of traditional Catholics becomes an object of scorn. The insistence on observing the ancient fullness of the law of the Gospel is an implied criticism to those who have accepted or promoted the various changes that have become entrenched in the Church today, and the insistence on observing the ancient fullness of the moral law scandalises “tolerant” Catholics who resent the imposition of any moral judgment.
These groups, especially those who have willingly embraced Vatican II, lament traditional Catholics as modern-day Pharisees in their midst. We are, or so they claim, the spiritual descendants of those dour people who observed the letter of the law while ignoring the spirit of the law. We are, or so they claim, the people who care more for ceremony than people; who make justice an enemy of mercy; and who set the bar so high than no one can hope to attain the goal. We are the people who mouth love while maintaining hate in our hearts. We are a people of pride — puffed up with our sense of self-righteousness because we are not like these other Catholics. We are “faith-killers” because we make the Faith so ostentatiously difficult and severe that we drive away people who might have slowly learned the love of Christ.
It is not enough for traditional Catholics to claim that these charges are not worthy enough to be dignified. Moreover, given our frail human nature, some of this critique of traditional Catholics is correct even if it is untrue in the main. The assessment, however, misses that the failure of traditional Catholics as people is found in their personal flaws and not in their attempt to live fully and completely faithful to the entirety of the Gospel — which, taken, as a whole, is all that traditional Catholicism asks. Are there judgmental traditional Catholics? Yes. Are there dour traditional Catholics? Yes. Are there traditional Catholics lacking mercy? Yes. Are there prideful traditional Catholics? Sure. But this indictment says more about human beings than it does traditional Catholics. Indeed, every one of us is, at times, judgmental, merciless, dour and prideful. But traditional Catholicism is not responsible for our character flaws — original and actual sin are.
The ad hominem attacks on the personal foibles of traditional Catholics, a modern obsession generally, misses the thrust of assessing why Catholics are attracted to it in the first place. And here Traditional Catholicism finds its greater strength: it is a reaction against the extreme anthropocentric tendencies currently existing in both the Church and world. They sense, correctly it seems to me, that our age demands that man qua man be given pride of place in terms of the solicitude of his needs and wants. It seems further that many of the changes implemented in the Vatican II era had this theme in mind, which is why modern Catholicism has become so flabby and soft — it was designed to be easier
and comfier.
Traditional Catholics recoil at this anthropocentrism because it neither makes man happy nor honours God. The paradox of human nature as it relates to man’s happiness is that he is only contented when he gives God pride of place — when he worships and has, as much as he is able, a clear conscience. By inverting this reality — by seeking happiness for man directly and then, worse, giving him what he thinks he wants — the modern Church has consigned man to perpetual state of unhappiness and dissatisfaction.
In this regard, the modern Church is a lot like an irresponsible mother who spoils her children with cake and candy as often as the children want it. Sure, they like it. But we all know that it is a destructive form of parenting. At the same time, this anthropocentric emphasis dishonours the Author of life and Creator of all things, as an afterthought.
In my experience, and I am hardly unbiased, traditional Catholics are far from having a superiority complex. They are, as a group, a people of conviction who direct their energies to serving God first without compromise and are, in that regard, their own harshest critics. Indeed, if there is a personality trait that cuts across the swathe of traditional Catholics, it is defined by the mantra: in for a penny, in for a pound; meaning that traditional Catholics understand, instinctively or not, that we cannot be half-pregnant with the Faith — either we live all of it or we live none of it.
Have some over-corrected against the world’s anthropocentrism? Undoubtedly. But the maxim abusus non tollit usum — expressing the fundamental principle that an “abuse does not take away use” — should be our touchstone. Even if traditional Catholics “abuse,” as it were, the human obligation to put God first, that abuse is in fact no argument against putting God first. All we can say is that Traditional Catholics are flawed human beings liked the rest of us and whether others appreciate or disdain their convictions, they deserve the same respect and space to live out those very same convictions as anyone else.
Orphans of Orthodoxy
The hatred of traditional Catholicism — there is no other way to put it — is a terrible cross for most traditional Catholics. Refusing on principle to affirm conventional behaviours today causes them, eventually and inevitably, to be orphans among their co-religionists, greater families and former friends.
These rifts create something akin to a positive network loop; meaning that the more family and friends shun them for their principles, the more these same traditional Catholics seek solace among each other. Slowly but surely, the relationships between traditional Catholics take on an almost-familial intimacy: brothers and sisters are replaced; mothers and fathers are replaced. Holidays are no longer spent with family but with other traditional Catholics. It soon comes to pass that you know the children of your traditional Catholic friends better than you know your own nieces and nephews.
In short, traditional Catholicism has created a new social ecosystem that has turned blood into water and water into blood. In this case, stated more accurately, the blood of Christ trumps the blood of kin, and the true friend of Christ is now my brother while my blood brother who has scorned Christ is now the stranger.
My prayer, and that of my wife, has been that God will provide us with the family and culture we should have had when we are older and greyer. Maybe then we’ll see our own children supporting one another in the true Faith as they raise their own children. Perhaps the loneliness that we feel will simply be a generational price that we were obliged to pay: as pioneering preservationists of Tradition in the desolate wasteland of Modernism in which we find ourselves.
When I think it is too hard — when I want to cry “uncle” (literally and metaphorically), I remember that these sacrifices, which are real and painful, are the proving grounds of our faith. It is easy, as everyone knows, to be faithful when life is one consolation after another; not so much when your entire kin turns against you in unison over your faith.
My prayer in all of this is as simple as it is difficult: I simply want to persevere in faith in my roles as Catholic, father, and husband.
Our Lady of Fatima, Pray for us.