Well, that rules out the first one that popped into your head, doesn't it? (Admit it!)
Hmmm... what could it be? what would be frowned upon in most of the halls of power of American Catholicism? they're a pretty enlightened bunch, right? forgiving of human foibles, morally flexible, in that who-am-I-to-judge way.
What in the world would cause them to be getting all judgy?
Of course! you know what it is -
“So what do you think of the Tridentine Mass, Bishop?” Sweat began to form on my brow...Fr Smith is a delightful writer, (and wonderful speaker, any opportunity you have to hear him preach, or deliver and address, take it!)
It is a scene which has happened to me many a time, and which is very familiar to young priests all over the world. All of a sudden, I was no longer just one priest among others. I was a marked man. I had committed the not very original sin of being one of “those priests,” the kind who celebrated the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite. I was an enigma to the many friends I had made in the communities who enjoy exclusive use of the pre-conciliar liturgical books...
And I was a mystery to my brother priests and even some of my parishioners who couldn’t square the man they knew as their friend, who seemed so jovial, fun-loving and open-minded...
At dinner, my dear father in God, the successor to the apostles, shared with us, “I remember the Tridentine Mass when I was a boy. I served that Mass. I still remember the responses: Introibo ad altare Dei; ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam. But it was not beautiful. We had priests who said Low Mass in fifteen minutes and had no idea what they were saying. I lived through all of that. I am done with that. I like the English Mass, and I don’t want to go back.” One can hardly argue with another man’s experience: it is what it is, it is his experience, and you can’t discount that.
Then the priest who launched the cannonball turned the discussion to the contemporary adherents of the extraordinary Mass, “They’re all crazy. They’re just nostalgic for a past they have never known. And most of them are just the walking wounded."...
they would always see my penchant for the “Trad” thing as a character flaw, a foible, an inexplicable eccentricity.
"Inexplicable eccentricity" :oD
Go read the rest of the blog post, and learn how a Baptist kid discovered the glories of liturgical prayer, Catholicism and the Roman Rite and "fell in love."
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