On Obsolete Institutions, Immoral behavior, Old Standards. Mehr Mensch Sein. Cornell Rape and Other Matters.

Sanctify yourself and you will sanctify society.

St. Francis of Assisi

Chi Phi (ΧΦ) house at Cornell.

Every once and a while I publish something here which I know, if anyone reads it, will offer offense.

This will offer massive offense.  It can't help but do so.¹

It's also one of those posts which involves a lot of synchronicity.

The details.

I felt like bait.

Cornell rape victim.

Caption to lawsuit, entire suit visible here:  Suit.

Recently the news of a gang rape of a young woman at Cornell University has been much in the news.  I actually didn't pay a lot of attention to it at first as, oddly enough, I'd just read an article in the New York Times magazine supplement of a young woman who was gang raped at a university and the details, to the minor extent I was aware of them, were much the same. Turns out that it was actually a different event, and frankly the one I read about first was significantly more horrific in some fashions.  After that, I looked on the net a bit, and as I'll explain below, I read of a young woman who had, almost successfully, but apparently not quite, achieved the removal of her self posted nude images from the net, and then following that, due my Twitter feed, saw a Catholic young woman commenting in horror to the comments by one of a contemporary comedian regarding sexual conduct.

Eh?  Are these all related?

Yes, they are.

Let's start with Cornell.

The way the story is more or less reported is that the young woman. age 20, went to the fraternity room of a male friend she was interested in, after having become heavily intoxicated earlier in the evening. At the fraternity, she drank more and consumed at least ketamine and then was gang raped by members of the Chi Phi (ΧΦ).  In a 50,000 foot sort of way, all that's correct.  But when you did into the details the story is quite a bit different.

Rather, what happened, is the young woman in a sorority had an interest, both romantic and sexual, in a young man in a fraternity.  Now, frankly, in any romantic interest there's always a sexual element, which will explore below, so the two are not necessarily completely separated.  But what picks up from there grossly departs from what standards had been only fairly recently.  She spoke to him on the phone and was invited out for the evening, starting off at a bar. They adjourned to the frat house, and when she got there, he included a friend and proposed a sexual threesom, i.e., that she consent to being screwed by him and by his buddy, and she agreed.  The complaint alleges she was too drunk to say no, but frankly that seems incorrect.  She also agreed to take ketamine, and consumed more alcohol.  This didn't render her unconscious, but it did render her sexually pliable and various frat members came in to screw her and the word got around that you could have sex just by stopping in.  At least at some point in this horrific series of events, one male member of the fraternity stopped in just out of concern, and found the first two men there and the woman under the covers.  Satisfied, I guess, that things were okay, he left. Ultimately, several men penetrated her, including the first two.

The next day the one guy she liked and the girl started exchanging texts and she wanted, at first, to develop a romantic relationship with him still. She confessed awkwardice at what hat happened, but admitted at least some of the actions were consensual.  And as gross as it was, she was an underaged drinker, the first gross act was.  As time went on she convinced herself she'd been raped, and indeed she had been, and reported it, which at the same time was coincident with news of the event getting around campus and the girl feeling her reputation was ruined.²   It was not prosecuted in part as the Cornell police did not report the full details to the prosecutor.  Apparently New York retains a very antiquated view of the law in this area, although it's not historically unique, that if a person starts consenting and passes out (which she didn't) they've consented.   

Again, that view of this topic is antiquated, but it's not unique.  The concept that if a girl starts down the road to sex, even if she didn't get very far down the road, which this girl clearly did, and passes out due to alcohol, has still consented, used to be a cultural norm and that tended to reflect itself in the law.

The cultural view is still there to a significant degree.

Which takes us there to the next horror.

In the second instance, a young woman went away to college.  She was an adoptee raised by loving parents but it's pretty clear that when she got there she used it as an opportunity to "party".  Indeed, she was drinking like crazy.  She had some male friends she trusted, and went to a bar with them. While there, she drank very heavily and passed out. They raped her and used their phones to video themselves raping her. They then posted it on social media, which is how she learned she'd been raped.

This story is frankly more horrific. The young woman's error here was in getting drunk. She thought the men were her friends.  When she was vulnerable, they flat out raped her. But they were so debased they shared the images of the rape on social media.  The event was too much for her, and she dropped out of school.

Which takes us to social media.

While looking into this I ran across a story of another young woman.  Looking at it, she appears to be a fairly nice if highly naive young woman who graduated with a fairly common but somewhat difficult four year degree.  While in school, she participated in activities of a collegic nature, being a cheerleader.

She is also massively endowed, which even her "clean" photos make plain.  She apparently picked up on that being a real attractant and started posting images of herself on social media, showing offer her clothed assets, which then linked to an "Only Fans" account where she could be seen nude.  At some point the danger or stupidity of this must have occurred to someone (she graduated and I wonder if it was employment related) and she mounted a vigorous campaign to wipe out all the nude images.  Apparently she was mostly successful, which is impressive, and which also suggest that she probably had to resort to legal help. In spite of all this, she still posts TikTok streams, clothed, which are clearly designed to show off her boobs and which frequently involve heavy drinking.  She's trying to be an "influencer".

Well, it's sure not a good influence.

And finally to our last item.

 A comedy clip, which appears to have started off as a "reel", showed up on my Twitter feeds as a comment by a horrified Catholic young woman.  In it, the comedian is doing the engagement with the audience routine.

There are piles of such reels around by female comedians right now, and quite a few (but not all) like to engage in sex as a topic.  I'm not sure, but I think it has to do with sort of the Lenny Bruce Effect, which is basically that to say something shocking when its not expected draws attention.  It also expand the boundaries of what's considered shocking in a culture.  Bruce was crude and vulgar and used the topic of sex in his routine.  His personality trod close to his topics, he married a stripper.  He died at age 40 of a drug overdose.

He also opened up the door to acts like Richard Pryor's.  Today vulgarity is common.  

Anyhow, the comedienne called out a couple and asked them if they were married, which they were, and how old she was when they met.  16.  She then asked how many men she had engaged in sex with, something that in an earlier era would have resulted in immediate rebuke. That's become a big female edgy topic recently, with women boasting of their "body counts", as if it's all that hard for any woman who wants to have sex, to have it (more on that in a moment).  She'd only had sex with her husband, which was then lampooned.

That's worthy of praise, not lampooning, and that was the American, and the European, norm up until the Sexual Revolution.  Multiple sex partners were not admired in anyone, and for women that resulted in their being regarded as a "slut", which we'll discuss in more depth below.

Okay, where do we go with all of this?  There is a lot to consider, and a lot of it isn't being considered.

Let's take the low hanging fruit first.

Chi Phi (ΧΦ) badge.

Fraternities, and sororities, need to be abolished.

A student movement at Cornell realized this before this assault.  It wasn't the first assault alleged to have occurred in this frat house, and they tried to ban fraternities, unsuccessfully.

There is really no reason for fraternities any longer. They reflect the nature of education that existed before World War Two, and really well before World War Two.  In the US, at least, they have their start in the late 18th Century.

While there are exceptions, for the most part university dormitories, "the dorms", did not become common in university settings until after World War Two at which point there was a massive expansion in the student population due to the GI Bill.  The first purpose built drom at the University of Wyoming, which is of course a land grant institution, was considerably older than that, however, being Merica Hall, which opened as a women's dorm in 1908.  It was originally called "Women's Hall."  There was early housing for male students at UW before that, but in what is now called "Old Main", which also held all of the classrooms.  It was built in 1886.  This shows, perhaps, some of the awkward nature of the original housing arrangements.  Combined classrooms and living quarters in buildings was a common early solution to student's residential needs.  Hoyt Hall, which was a drom and a education building, was started in 1915.  Knight Hall and the the Student Union were built as a part of a late 1940s Depression era construction project.    Wyoming Hall was completed in 1951.

The first fraternity at UW, Sigma Beta Phi, opened in 1903.  The oldest sorority in 1905.

That might seem to cut against my argument here, but it really does not.  Upper education was mostly for the well to do.  Land grant universities were not.  There were some early school housing buildings in various locations, but they tended to be in buildings that were otherwise used for classes.  Early dormitories at coeducational institutions tended to be built for women first.  There were no such things as "coed" dorms.

Casper College, in Casper Wyoming, opened as Casper Junior College on September 17, 1945, a date we failed to note on this site.  It was originally in the upper floor of hte high school, but moved onto its own campus in 1955.  It did not have a dormitory until 1965.

So, then, what did a student do if there wasn't a dormitory, or wasn't room in one?

A person might think this is an easy question to answer, "rent an apartment", but it's not as easy as it sounds.  As we've already discussed, lodging was more complicated for single people before refrigerators and modern stoves came into existence.  Sure, you could rent an apartment, but it wasn't until the mid 20th Century that it was really relatively easy to live on your own in one.  Students tend not to have a lot of money, and therefore its not like eating out every day was an option for a lot of them.  "Starving student" had a meaning then that it doesn't now.

An option therefore was living in a boarding or "rooming" house, which a lot of single people did in general. We've already discussed that.  Privately owned, they provided room and board but often under fairly strict supervision.  A good example of this is given in the movie Brooklyn, which depicts a boarding house in the 1950s for young single women.

Student apartments did exist in some areas where the student population was fairly high.  For large private schools, like Harvard, these tended to be multiple room, say with bedrooms for about four students, and a small room for a servant.  That person took care of the cooking and cleaning for the students.  Clearly this is long gone.

Cornell, we'll note, is a private university.

And then there were fraternities and ultimately sororities.

Housing and food was the main advantage of fraternities.  A person needed a place to live, and like student apartments, fraternities had and still have a person who cooks and cleans.  Indeed, I recall some students claiming they were joining fraternities just as the food was better than at the dorms.

Early on, with upper education being very exclusive, fraternities tended to function as literary societies.  In the 19th Century, however, they were part of the large Protestant fraternal organization movement, and they began to incorporate secret rituals, some of them which were outright bizarre.  I don't know about Chi Phi, but it does have an initiation ritual, which interestingly enough emphasizes integrity and honesty.  This is interesting in that at the same time clubs that focused on dinner with dinging halls also started to exist, giving another food option to students, but also functioning sort of like fraternal organizations do today.  Having said that, dining clubs never became enormously common in the US.

The GI Bill flooded universities after World War Two and they responded by creating dorms.  Fraternities and Sororities also expanded, but by the 1960s their real purpose had passed. There was no longer a real need to join one as there was no real living advantage to doing so. Given that, their main purpose became social.

Social clubs with significant numbers of people who range from 18 to 22  years of age are a bad idea in general, unless they have massive supervision.  A lot of returning World War Two veterans were, of course, over that age, and the real impact of things didn't begin to settle in until the 1950s and 1960s.

In the 50s and 60s the US was hit with the combined impact of a massive demographic influx, the Baby Boomers, a huge boost in the wealth of the country, and an assault on morals and image of women in the form of the views espoused by Playboy magazine.  The impact was society wide but it had a particular impact on college and university campuses.  Nowhere was that more felt than in fraternities.

The classic depiction of this is, of course, National Lampoon's Animal House. That's an exaggeration, like most comedy, but National Lampoon, an expression of Harvard Lampoon, was depicting what it knew, including really vulgar and immoral treatment of women.  A central depiction in the plot of the film is a fraternity member wheeling a  drunk underaged girl home in a shopping cart, after she passes out while they're about to have sex, from a "toga party" . Raping her was a bridge too far for the Lampoon, but it's depicted in such a fashion that it's implied that the chivalrous character, if you will, could have legitimately done that if he wanted to.

When I was at UW in the early 1980s, fraternities actually had "toga parties", although my guess is that they were inspired in that by the film.  One fraternity that was familiar with, as a friend was in it, annually had the "Baby Ball" in which the members and invited sorority girls dressed in sheets, like babies, and slid down the stairs, which were supposed to be fallopian tubes.  They also drank really heavily at this event.

By the time I was in law school, which would be the late 80s, fraternities were on the decline.  That probably reflected a generational change, and a technological one.  You could just as easily live on your own, and if you didn't want to, you could get a really nice dorm room.  They've been declining ever since.

But, as we can see, they are still around.

They ought to be extinguished, as the Cornell student movement tried to do.

Let's start off with a statement that states the obvious, but apparently it isn't.

College students in the 18th Century are not the same as college students in the 21st.

This isn't to suggest that they were perfectly behaved.  The 19th Century US was awash in alcohol all the time and there were some huge alcohol fueled student riots in the 19th Century, including one at West Point (the Eggnog Riot).  And all sorts of weird harassment of underclassmen was common.  In some ways, the abuse of younger students which remains common in some fraternities, occured on a wide scale.  That wide scale abuse of younger students has pretty much stopped in the general student body (not in all fraternities, however), but that came with a broader student body.

What was not as common was the outright abuse of women in this fashion, save for one odd but instructive instance.  Prior to 1865, some university students had enslaved women as servants, and they were subject to sexual abuse, not surprisingly.³ 

And up until the 1970s, seemingly, society appreciated that young men without supervision and young women without the same would get into all sorts of trouble.    Kipling noted that "single men in barracks don't grow into plaster saints", a line he wrote about the peacetime British Army, but which applies equally to any group of warehoused young men.  Along the lines of our topic, sexual abuse of female service members has become widespread and nearly incapable of being eradicated.  Given the atmosphere of fraternities, which has been libertine at least in the popular imagination since the 70s, rapes are going to be a feature of them.

Whatever function fraternities, and sororities, served, is pretty much over.  Any benefit they provided, can be provided in other ways.  There are going to be campus rapes no matter what, but keeping fraternities around is encouraging them.⁴

Which takes us to the next thing.

Failing young men and women.  The battlefield casualties of the sexual revolution.

When this topic broke the week before last, it ended up on the weekend news programs, not too surprisingly.  One of the people who commented on it was Republican 2028 Presidential hopeful, Chris Christie, in his role as a This Week commentator.  Christe noted, albeit only briefly, that young men needed to be better educated that such conduct as was exhibited here is appalling.

That's a given, but how did we even get here, and what do we need to do?

And, frankly, young women need to be better educated in these areas.

And so do adults.

One thing that society in general needs to be better educated on is that university isn't for partying.  As noted above, this sort of view has been around forever, I think you can even find Medieval examples, but starting in the 70s it became pretty bad in some quarters.    In my view, this was part of the post war largess of the Baby Boom era.

Students going to university in the 60s and 70s that if they got through university they were getting a white collar job. That frankly, in many disciplines, built in a  real slack attitude.  Set from from home with parents that held real values but who had been damaged by the horror of the Second World War and the Great Depression, college was a chance to live it up, often on somebody else's money.  Much of this has passed as the economy has changed from what it formerly was to one in which its much more difficult to get by in, but some of that attitude still exists, good examples of which, or perhaps more accurately bad ones, above.  All of the examples except for the last one feature examples of this sort of behavior, and the "influences" example may actually be the worst.

This needs to end.  

How to end it is another matter, although as noted the economy is ending some of it.  Something that impacted it a bit when I was in university was raising the drinking age from 19 to 21, but that's already been done.  In the Cornell example the problem of admitting teenagers to bars legally is highlighted That should end.  If it were me, I'd just make counties that feature educational institutions dry.  That's a severe approach, of course, but I'd take it.  Studies show, fwiw, that almost all rapes of this type and of the service member type are accompanied by overconsumption of alcohol.

Beyond that, however, putting the bullet in the Sexual Revolution needs to happen, and frankly it's starting to. This helps explain the Trad Movement, in part, in the Catholic and Lutheran laity.  When I go to Mass on Sunday and find a young married woman, often not much over 20 years old, in a matilla with her husband and a baby, I'm looking at the foot soldiers of the counter revolution.  Same thing when I go to work and see the young men and women of Luther Classical College walking to school.

This We'll Defend.⁵ 

This emphasizes that the reaction ot the the Sexual Revolution has to be all inclusive and organic.  You can't have a "Me Too" movement that doesn't recognize that. Adopting and teaching a standard, has to adopt it and that's adopting the entire smash.  As Yeoman's laws of human behavior note:

Yeoman's Thirty-Fourth Law of Behavior:  All things are synthesized.

Ultimately, all things are synthesized.  Everything is a whole.  A person may not grasp parts of it, as we are imperfect, but it all goes together. A person may not act immorally in one area and be perfectly moral in another.  The more immoral a person is in one thing, the more immoral they are overall.  A person may not willingly believe little lies without coming to believe great ones, and to be a liar, and so on.

It's interesting how often people try to evade this principal. All people fail in it, as we're fallen and we don't grasp the correctness of various things, but there are those who make a dedicated effort to avoid it.  In a minor way I'm reminded of a couple I know that lived without the benefit of marriage for years, even having a child, who have gone hardcore into the MAGA world, and who are sending their child to Hillsdale school.  They can't quite make it sync as while their instincts are good, they really have to work around to the origin of things to make what they're doing, make sense.

Indeed, while this goes off topic, this particularly American trait is one of hte fundamental flaws of MAGA.  Many of the MAGA faithful, or former faithful, are in it as they have a sense that American society has gone off the rails.  But what they're doing is leaning out of the wreckage of the train car they are in looking back at other toppled cars not realizing that theirs tipped over too.  I.e., they're holding the Car Transgender and Car Homosexual in contempt while wanting to get back to the party in the Car Cheating On Spouse or the Car Divorce which tipped the train over in the first place.

Drilling down on this, what this means is that American society, if it doesn't want college age boys raping college girls, needs to dump the pornographic lifestyle its living in.  Put a bit more bluntly, you can't have a naked Sydney Sweeney advertising a sports website and not expect rape to result.

Also drilling down, the old standard here, which was never perfectly applied, needs to be reapplied.  Young men living in groups didn't generally rape young women as it had been emphasized that it was indescribably wrong.  Moreover, they were taught, and again things happened, that sex was for marriage, not just their own selfish entertainment.⁶   They were taught was decency was.  Decent people don't post "free pussy in alum pu".

A lot of work needs to be done in this area, but it can start right now by holding those men in this in contempt.  Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris, Scott Kretzschmar. Yes, they're innocent until proven guilty, but unless proven to be disconnected with these events, and to have acted to prevent them.  Ingalls and Newell not only deserve contempt, they deserve to be branded as perverts, which is what they are.⁷ 

And assuming, which we are taught not to do, that this meets the New York definition of rape at some point, they shoudl be convicted and sentenced.

But what about Jane Doe?  Indeed, what about all the Jane Does mentioned in this thread?

One of the really disturbing aspects of this is that we now have a society where a 20 year old girl at a prestigious university not only agrees to sex on a sort of first date, she agreed to group sex.  That's perverse. Granted, there are people who are perverse, but now we have been taught not to say such things.

A girl who would have engaged in this conduct when I was young would flat out have been branded a "slut".  That's not to be done now, and is termed "slut shaming", and perhaps the collapse in moral standards make the shaming obsolete.  And it's worth noting that Jane Doe's conviction that everything was morally tainted here grew as the news of what she'd done was spread around.  She was specifically taking heat from two sorority sisters over her role in the whole matter.  That doesn't mean she wasn't raped. So much was going on in terms of drugs and alcohol in this story that if she wasn't impaired at the onset, at some point she most likely was, and she took the position right from the onset that most of it wasn't consensual.  But what we have here is a really gross sex act with two young men she did consent to becoming a sort of orgy in a way, which she didn't consent to.  This isn't the same at all as the Red Army showing up to a village in eastern Germany in 1945.

We need to avoid making this worse that it already is, but frankly we need to get back to a point at which that sort of conduct is shameful.  Which brings me to the last two young women mentioned in this post.  The influencer and couple mocked by the comedienne.

Regarding the influencer, somebody in her orbit, and may she herself, woke up to the fact that posting naked photographs of yourself was shameful, and they were yanked after quite an effort.  Good for whomever woke up that fact.

But bad that her "influencing" is depicing the same sort of conduct that got the second young woman in this story in trouble.  Her failure, if we are to deem it that, was not being sexually immoral, but in allowing herself to get into a drunken stupor in the presence of young men.  

Which leads me to a comment that was made on the Facebook feed for the author of the article mentioned above.  A commenter noted as the asnwer to the article entitled;  Caitlin Flanagan: What Was Jane Doe Looking For?:

So basically… it’s dangerous to be around men? 

I understand the argument about risk, judgment, alcohol, and putting yourself in vulnerable situations. Those are conversations worth having. 

But there’s something deeply unsettling about telling young women: You know what men are like. You know these places are dangerous. Why did you go? 

Women go to fraternity parties because they want to socialize. They want to flirt. They want to meet men. They may even want to have consensual sex. 

None of those things should require accepting sexual assault as a foreseeable consequence of being around men. 

At some point, “women need to make better choices” becomes an extraordinarily damning statement about men. 

So the feminist position is “not all men,” but the anti-feminist position is apparently, “Ladies, you knew there would be men there”?

Well, she's correct in everything she said, the commenter, but she's wrong.   Large groups of young men have fallen off the rails in this way since we have been a species. So, yes, "it's dangerous to be around men".

It is.

Not all men all the time, but this gets back to standards of the past.  It's not that dangerous to be around a bunch of young men. . . who are near older men. . .and better yet if some of them are relatives.  I've seen young men begin to act improperly towards young women where older men were present and intervened, sometimes forcibly.⁸    In other words, being at the Sheepherders' Fair is one thing, being at Moonies, apparently, quite another.

And, influencer, having a wardrobe made entirely of overly tight halter tops is dangerous. That does, in the real world, one thing.  It advertises your boobs, and advertises that your boobs are available for the taking, along with things located elsewhere on your female body.

We'll loop back around here to the Flanagan article, which is drawing flak.  Flanagan condemns franternitis solidly in the article.  She notes that fraternities were dangerous when she was in college, and that a boyfriend she was breaking up with warned her never to go upstairs in one, which she never did. 

Then she asked this question:

That’s the saddest thing about these old rituals. What attracts women to those parties—late at night, like Jane Doe—to walk alone to a fraternity house and take her chances? 

She answers:

What she’s really looking for is a man. And she has no idea how to find a good one.

Footnotes:

1.  On offering offense, Caitlin Flanagan, a journalist, has already written two articles on this and the second one, which will be noted above, has really drawn criticism.

2. We've left out a lot of details in our first summation of this, but her concern for her reputation isn't surprising.  She consented to getting screwed by one man while performing oral sex on another, and then was screwed by multiple other men.  One of the two original men actually texted her not to worry as things like this were becoming more a societal norm, which is complete bullshit.

3.  Having said that, the practice of "wenching" was common amongst certain men, which involved picking up young women in bars of a certain class, that being the desperate underclass.  This pretty clearly crosses over towards the topic of prostitution pretty quickly.  Having said that, this definitely occurred.

4.  On another note, not one of the very few men I knew who were in fraternities at the University of Wyoming graduated with a degree.  This caused me to be surprised when I learned that a long time partner of mine had been a member of the same fraternity that two individuals I knew, who did not graduate, hate been.

I should note that one of those two fellows, while he did not graduate, didn't live in the frat house the entire four years either, and later went on to become a millionaire.

5.  Motto of the U.S. Army, first adopted in 1778.

6.  The topic of birth control has not come up here.

7.  Ingalls actually has claimed that Jane Does sodomized him, and he's a sexual assault survivor.  Oh please.  At any rate, their joint actions on the girl were perverted, but frankly, her acceptance of being engaged in sex with both at the same time is also perverted.

Kretzschmar maintains that he was not part of the rape at all, and what he did was to go into the room and check on things. This seems to be more or less correct.  His sin, here, is one of omission.  He knew that something was going on and did nothing.

8. Contrary to what people might expect, middle aged men are often way stronger and more adopt in a fight than young men are.

On Obsolete Institutions, Immoral behavior, Old Standards. Mehr Mensch Sein. More additional labels.

On Obsolete Institutions, Immoral behavior, Old Standards. Mehr Mensch Sein. Additional links.

On Obsolete Institutions, Immoral behavior, Old Standards. Mehr Mensch Sein. Yeoman's Laws of Behavior Links.

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A gentle moment. The old rural Catholics. A bit much. The old age refuses to yieldeth. The stubborn German.

A gentle moment

I was standing in the confession line behind her.  A young man came up behind me.  I realized, as I'd come in and went straight into line (I'm now 62, and well aware of my sins) I'd cut him off, as he came up from praying in the back of the church.

I immediately said "I cut you off, you can go in front of me", but he smiled and said "It doesn't matter".

She was nicely dressed, wearing a full length skirt and a nice one.

He reached around me and handed her something, which I thought was a handkerchief (she did in fact have a cold).  It wasn't, it was her mantilla She put it on.

I thought they were likely brother and sister.  He was very nicely dressed and they were both young, in their early 20s.

When I left, they were in different quarters of the church praying.  I recognized her now that I could see her face.  She's one of the "Mantilla Girls", but one I see rarely.  I didn't recognize him.  They were in fact, not together.  He just noticed she'd dropped her mantilla.

The old rural Catholics

I was wearing, on the day of confession, Carhartt trousers and my very old Carhartt jacket.  I hadn't shaved.  

It was Saturday.

I don't like shaving.  I started shaving when I was 13, and by that, I mean at some point when I was 13 I was shaving every day.  Next year I will have been shaving for 50 years.

When I was 13, I learned to save with a "safety razor".  I, in fact, owned a safety razor at age 13.  I first shaved with disposable head razors in basic training.  It was only a few years later, but there's a lifetime between 13 and 18.

I've recently received, in one fashion or another, a couple of reminders to Catholics in general that they ought to dress appropriately at Mass.  It is, I'd note, sort of a Catholic thing in a way, in some areas, kind of not to.  Not that we're intentionally dressing down, but for a lot of us going to Mass is so common that we in fact dress down, as its Sunday.  In some regions, we don't dress up and indeed, as we're used to going to Mass with college students, blue collar workers, sheepherders, ranchers, lawyers, doctors, businessmen, well, we don't.

The local Priest suggested we ought to dress nicely.  He's from a farm and had a conversation with me regarding sheep on the way into Mass recently.  Fr. Joseph Krupp, who himself often looks a little like a guy who might ride a Harley, and I think at one time did, suggested the same.

They're right of course.

Well, it was Sunday today.  I went to Mass wearing Carhartt trousers and my very old Carhartt coat.

The coat is warm.

A bit much

I sometimes see comments about yoga pants.

I don't pay much attention to such comments.

I ran into the very nice, and quite Catholic, son of a person I know very well the other day.  He's a nice young man.  He was with his girlfriend, who is probably a nice young woman. She is the daughter of an Assemblies of God minister.

She was wearing yoga pants.

They were so tight that, frankly, they left nothing to the imagination.  Absent wearing bikini bottoms, there would have been nothing less appropriate to wear in mixed company than I could imagine. 

And its January.

Makes me appreciate the Mantilla Girls all the more.

The old age refuses to yieldeth

At Mass, to my massive discredit, I ran into somebody, but only remotely, who generally irritates me.

That's probably sinful on my part.

I've known said person my entire professional life.  I knew his sister when we were in high school by which time I'll note he was already a lawyer.  She was a great person and I still lament her tragic death as a passenger in an automobile when it wrecked.  I knew, but less well, one of her sisters who died in the same wreck.

Horrible.

Anyhow, the person in question must have graduated high school nearly a decade in advance of me, which means that he must be over 70 years old now.  He's still actively practicing law.

I've concluded that this is toxic, if you are doing it full time, to your personality.

I also don't like that he holds his hands in the air when certain prayers are said, and he's huge so its hard to ignore.  That's the orans position, and in actuality there's good reason to do that.  That's what the early Christian faithful, who were all Catholics, did when the Lord's Prayer was said.

Well, I don't like it.

And that means I need to work on this.

I'd note that his fellow doesn't particularly acknowledge me at Mass, but then I don't go out of the way to acknowledge him either.  If we run into each other in Court, well. . . we're old pals.

The Mantilla girl and the young man, and the cowboy couple I noted several weeks ago, are better than either of us.

The stubborn German

Germans, it appear, have a reputation for being stubborn.

I have what people perceive as being a very German last name.

I have a very Irish first name.

I've never thought this odd, but then, who thinks their own names odd. For one reason or another, I've always considered myself an Irish American.  

My father didn't like anyone considering himself this or that.  No Hyphenated Americans.  He thought we were all Americans. He'd grown up, I'd note, while World War Two was on, when nobody considered themselves German Americans.

Some people are really proud of that now.

Well, by decent today, I'd be 1/4 German. But genetically, due to the weird way that works, I'm more Irish than a lot of people who live in Ireland.  And for that matter, I'd further note, my father's mother was of 100% Irish extraction, and in Irish American household even when my father was young, the mother's ruled the abhaile.

Father's sacrificed for their families, particularly in Catholic families.

The last name, fwiw, is Westphalian.  A person with it is just as likely to be Dutch, as German.  I was once asked by an Albertan if my ancestors were Dutch, for that reason.  Westphalia became a Prussian possession in 1807, much to the discontent of Catholic Westphalians, who weren't keen in being ruled by a Lutheran emperor. After the revolutions of 1848 a lot of Westphalians departed for the United States, sick of being rules by an undemocratic Prussian.

My Westphalian ancestors left about that time.  I don't know why, they didn't write it down.

Anyhow, genetically, I'm Irish.  

And in my ancestor there were those Irish who, given the choice between converting to Protestantism and keeping their occupation, ro being exiled, chose exile.

Stubborn?

I don't think I am, but I guess people perceive me that way.  I've been told that more than once.

German?

Not really.

i nolunt

Radical refusal to consent.

More specifically, radical refusal to consent to the spirit of the times.  It's part of what I admire in them, but it didn't strike me until recently.

John Pondoro Taylor, in his memoirs, recalled having seen Maasai walking through Nairobi as if it simply wasn't there, as they had always done, dressed in their traditional fashion, and carrying spears.  On their way from one place to another, refusing to consent that the development of the city meant anything in real terms.

I was recently waiting in the Church for the confession line to form.  One of the Mantilla Girls walked in.  I've seen this one once or twice before, but not at this Church.  She not only wears the mantilla, and is very pretty, but she carries herself with pride.

They don't all do that.  Some of the younger women who wear chapel veils do so very naturally.  Some sort of timidly, or uncomfortably.  With at least one, and I could be massively off the mark, it's almost sort of an affectation.  But here, you see something quite different.

Or so it seems.

I don't know her.  I could be wrong.  But it's clear she isn't timid and it's not an affectation.  

It is, it seems to me, a radical rejection of the modern secular world in favor of existential nature.

For those who believe in the modern world, in modernism, or the spirit of the times, or who are hostile to religion, that may seem like a shocking statement.  But the essence of our modern lives (or post-modern, if you insist) is a radical rejection of nature, most particularly our own natures.  Wearing a chapel veil indicates that the person deeply believes in a set of beliefs that are enormously grounded in nature.  The wearer is a woman, in radical alignment with biology in every sense, and accepting everything that means, including what the modern world, left and right, detest.  I nolunt.  She's accepting of the derision, and ironically, or in actuality not ironically, probably vastly happier than those who have accommodated modernity.

Moreover, those who think they're reaching out for a radical inclusion of the natural, who don't take the same approach, never can quite reach authenticity.  There can always be a slight feeling that something isn't authentic, and there isn't.  Reserving an element of modernity defeats it.

Related Thread:

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.

Labels: Agrarianism, Agriculture, An hoc pertinet ad naturam?, Commentary, Daily Living, Food, Friday Farming, Medicine, Men, nature, The roles of men and women, transgenderism, trends, Women

What the Young Want.* The Visual Testimony of the Trad Girls. The Authenticity Crisis, Part One.

Or maybe they're not.

At any one time, I have a bunch of posts in the works, some of which are on concurrent themes. This is one, basically, as it touches on a larger topic.

Something is going on.

A couple of years ago I started to see some women, by which I mean, let's say, women 40 years or older, resuming the wearing of chapel veils (mantillas).  They were clearly on the traditional end of things.

Recently, however, I'm seeing young women do this.

I shouldn't, probably, have used the term "girls" in the caption, but for whatever reason, culturally, we tend to use the term "girls" for young women well into their 20s.  Maybe somewhat beyond.  It seems to encompass women in their late teens on up to that point.

And that's what I'm referring to here.

I noticed it first the year before last, and at an early morning Mass on a Holy Day (All Saints Day, I think).  Two young women, probably very late teens or very early twenties, sat right in front of me.  One was dressed conservatively but contemporarily. She was wearing a leather skirt. . . and a chapel veil (mantilla).

Now, there was a young woman from a very trad family in the parish who dressed almost as if in a Medieval costume for young women every Mass. That's not what I'm talking about here.  This young woman was wearing a nice wool sweater, and a leather skirt, and a chapel veil.

It caught me off guard.

I'm seeing stuff like that all the time now.  Young women, often early twenties, dressed conservatively, but not in costume, who have adopted the mantilla.  Indeed, just yesterday, at the early morning Mass Sunday, the Church did the Ritual for the Elect for those who were coming into the Church.  They all have a sponsor.  One young woman coming in had, as her sponsor, another young women.  

Frankly, the sponsor was stunning.  And she was wearing a chapel veil.  Last Sunday across town there was another young woman dressed in that fashion who was eye catching as well, and the week before that there was another so dressed who was a head turner.**

I note that, as it was easy, when the only women who did this were let's say older, and otherwise dressed in a fashion that was old-fashioned, perhaps, or dour.  These young women aren't.   They're hard not to notice.

Indeed, yesterday, the young woman mentioned went from the front of the Church to the back with a very proud carriage, which is not to suggest sinful pride. Rather, she carried herself the way that people who are very self-assured, for very good reasons, do.

Something is going on.

And It's not just here.  A friend of mine in Oklahoma noticed the same thing at his local parish.  And it's crossed into other regions, or perhaps hit there first.  For example, notable Korean figure skater Yuna Kim is Catholic, and people like to snap photos of her at Mass wearing a chapel veil.

And it's interesting that this is going on at the same time that some members of the leadership of the Church, which tends to be up in years, seems to be trying to insert the liberal.  

I've often noticed that people who come up in particularly devise or stressed eras, and maybe more of us do than not, tend to form our view of the world in those times.  A lot of people in their upper 60s, 70s, and 80s assume that "what the young want" is what they wanted when they were young.  

The evidence for this is to the contrary.

There's a lot more to this.  It's interesting.

Footnotes

*It's important to note that categorizing what an entire generation, or generations, want is hazardous.  For example, at least superficially, here I'm noting a return to Catholic tradition among the same generation that is exhibiting such things as a belief that you can change your gender.

Well, a couple of things.

At any one time you can have an overall trend in a generation while individual members of it hold an opposite view.  There were, for example, more volunteers who served in Vietnam than there were conscripts, contrary to popular imagination, meaning that quite a few young men sought to serve in the war at the same time history informs us their generation had turned against it.  By the same token, you can find a few examples of Americans who were adamantly opposed to the country entering World War One or Two, and continued to hold that view after the country declared war.  Beatniks were a feature of the supposedly superconservative 1950s. 

Secondly, people are more complex than categorists and political parties may suppose, and as a result they can often hold contrary views, or views that seem to be contrary, or views contrary to the ones they themselves exhibit.  Indeed, I've heard some of the stoutest denouncements of tobacco from smokers.  They smoked, but wished they didn't. 

You get the point.

**For some reason, you're not supposed to say this. Well, noticing that a woman is attractive is not the same thing as engaging in Hefnereque behavior, and the fact that creeps have co-opted this entire aspect of communication is just evidence of how weird and pornified our culture is.

The Trads, Rad Trads, and Fellow Travelers.

Not Trads. . . or are they?  Or models for trads? Trad fellow travelers?

As our frequent readers (if there are any) know, I'm Catholic.

I'm a very orthodox Catholic as well, but I don't fit into that group of Catholics which Catholic's call "Trads", let alone "Rad Trads".  The "trad" in that moniker stands for "traditionalist" and the "rad", when its applied, stands for "radical".

The photograph above, unfortunately not entirely in focus and in black and white, dates from November 1958.  It depicts St. Anthony's of Padua Church in Casper Wyoming on the occasion of my parents wedding.  the alter rail is clearly visable in this photograph.

Christianity is the largest religion in the world, and the largest Christian religion is Catholicism, which was also the first Christian religion.¹  Nonetheless, in the US, which is such a Protestant country that it doesn't realize it's a Protestant country, probably only Catholics know of the existence of Trads and Rad Trads.² Lots of people are aware that there's a split in the Catholic Church between liberals and conservatives, and that with the aged in control of the upper reaches of the Church right now there's a seeming push towards liberalism, but few outside the Church are aware of Catholic Traditionalist, who are conservative, and then some.

I should note that by using the term "orthodox", I'm in the conservative camp, which is by far the largest part of the loyal Catholic body in the US, and probably globally. Use of the term "orthodox" here is probably confusing to non-Catholics, and even to some Catholics, as it naturally recalls the Orthodox Churches, by which most Americans mean the Eastern Orthodox.  There are also the Oriental Orthodox, being that body of Apostolic Christians who were separated from the rest of the Church and who didn't make it to the later councils.  All three larger bodies, the Catholic, the Eastern Orthodox, and the Oriental Orthodox, are highly similar in most ways but have endured separations due to various reasons.  The schism between Catholics and the Easter Orthodox was the most serious, although but for political reason within Orthodoxy, it'd be over now.  It will end at some point, hopefully soon.

Anyhow, when the schism came about, both Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox referred to themselves as being "orthodox", which for the most part, they actually are.  Orthodox Catholics hold to the magisterium of the Church, and the Eastern Orthodox hold to the tenants of Eastern Orthodoxy, both of which overlap to an enormous degree.  By being "orthodox", members were declaring they did not hold heretical views.  The Church was already known as the Universal Church, and in Latin "universal' is catholic, so when the Eastern Orthodox separated, they had to call themselves something, and they came to be called the Orthodox Church as a symbol that they held orthodox theology, although there was somewhat of a split in views on some things between the East and West.

Anyhow, Catholics who call themselves "orthodox" mean that they hold the full magisterium in their beliefs, and do not agree with innovations that some liberal Catholics would interject.  True orthodox Catholics make absolutely everyone uncomfortable on the religious left and right, and on the political left and right.

And then there's the Trads.

Orthodox beliefs are one thing, but traditionalism is another.  I say that to note it, not to condemn it.

Traditionalist of any kind have a strong attraction to tradition.  I know that's kind of a "d'uh" statement, but it's one we have to start with.   Chesterton, who admired tradition, defined it as follows, with this quote ironically often being used in part to condemn tradition, failing to note the second part about the "arrogant oligarchy":

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.

Chesterton, of course, also gave us Chesterton's Fence, which holds:

Chesterton's Fence:

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

So who and what are Catholic Traditionalists?

That's a really interesting question.

Wikipedia, which frankly isn't the font of knowledge so commonly believed, defines them as follows:

Traditionalist Catholicism is a movement encompassing members of the Catholic Church and offshoot groups of the Catholic Church, which emphasizes beliefs, practices, customs, traditions, liturgical forms, devotions and presentations of teaching associated with the Church before the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965).Of particular emphasis among Traditionalist Catholics is the Tridentine Mass, a form of the Roman Rite largely replaced in general use by the post-Second Vatican Council Mass of Paul VI.

Wikipedia, footnotes omitted.

I guess that's right, but it's more than that, as I'll eventually get to in this long boring entry.

Born in 1963, like most Catholics alive today, I don't remember the Tridentine Mass.  And I'm a very Western Catholic.  The Ordinary Form of the Mass is the only one I've ever seen in a Latin Rite Church.  I've heard Latin interjected into the Mass, which has become increasingly common in recent years, but I've never heard a Latin Mass.³ Indeed, due to the controversy surrounding the Pope's recent reduction in the allowance of the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, as It's now called, I had to look it up and found that it didn't match at all what my expectations were.  I frankly thought, naively, that for the most part the Latin Mass was the current Ordinary Form, pretty much, in Latin.  No, not at all.

Indeed, the current Ordinary From is not only in the "vernacular", i.e., the language of the culture it is said in, but it reformed the presentation in other very useful and profound ways, greatly expanding liturgical readings in both the Old and New Testaments.⁴ The improvements were good ones.

This isn't to fault the Tridentine Mass, which was the form of the Mass said between 1570 and 1962.  It's interesting to note, as is so often missed, that the Tridentine Mass was not "the original form of the Mass" but rather one that came in after the Reformation was already underway.  The Tridentine Mass came in with Pope Pius V's bull Quo Primum which made his revised Roman Missal obligatory throughout the Latin Church, except for those places and congregations whose distinct rites could demonstrate an antiquity of two hundred years or more.  Indeed, some of those other Rites still survive, although they are fairly rare.  It should additionally be noted, this didn't impact the Eastern Rite at all.

This made a lot of sense, and it explains a lot about the Latin Rite.  Prior to Quo Primum there were a lot of local forms of the Mass.  This isn't to say that you couldn't go from one place to another and recognize the Mass, but rather that there were a lot of local variations in it. While I don't know it to be the motivator, faced with the Protestant Rebellion, making things more uniform made a lot of sense.

Also making a lot of sense, in an era in which language differences were even more profound than they are today, was having the Latin Rite in Latin.  Latin remained the language of the educated well into the Renaissance, when French began to replace it, but even up into the early 20th Century many very well-educated people learned Latin and some Greek.  To some extent, it's a shame this didn't continue on, and frankly Latin education's decline was a victim of the Church going to the vernacular after 1962.

Anyhow, what made sense in 1570 didn't by 1962, and the Church was now all over the globe and celebrating the Mass in a lot of places that had no cultural or historical connection to Latin at all. Vietnam, for example, which has a notable Catholic population, wouldn't have a group of people who'd have a historical connection with Latin.  That Latin went was not only to be expected, but a good thing.

Latin didn't go because of Vatican II.  Indeed, the Tidentine Mass did not fade because of Vatican II either. The Ordinary Form was brought in by the Pope separately.  That's commonly misunderstood.  But Vatican II brought in a lot of changes, and with the changes Vatican II brought in, came a lot of local changes that were done in it's "spirit".

Alter rails came out, local Priests made all sorts of changes inside churches, and some made some pretty big departures from orthodoxy as things got, frankly a bit out of hand in some places.5 Architecturally, St. Anthony's in Casper Wyoming is a good example of this.  St. Anthony's endured a lot of architectural insult as a result of this era. The marble altar rail came out, heavy brass lanterns disappeared, one of the confessionals was moved for a stand for musicians, and the pews were cocked at an odd angle.  None of them helped the appearance of the church, and since that time additional violence has been done to it for cooling systems and PA systems.  If I were the pastor of the Church, which of course I am not and will never be, I'd reverse them all.

I recall some parishioners expressing discontent about all of this, but then middle-aged Catholics of the 70s and early 80s had grown up in an era in which Priests commanded a lot of respect culturally and by tradition. They might grouse, but just a little, and in muted form.  Younger Catholics of the 60s through the 80s were part of the overall culturally destructive Baby Boom generation, so they couldn't be expected to complain, and probably for that matter a lot of them supported what they were seeing, which fit right in with their Weltanschauung.  They still, in many instances, but not in all, feel that way.  Indeed, some never felt that way.

In our Third Law of History, we observed that "Culture is sticky, but plastic." By this we meant that cultures retain a cultural memory, even if it changes.  It's not always accurate, but the degree to which things are retained, particularly things of value, is often stunning, even if a person didn't always experience it, themselves.

Which takes us to Wounded Knee.

Recently we had an entire series of posts on the 1973 Siege at Wounded Knee.  If you look that up, you'll find that it ostensibly was about discontent over a trial election, but everyone knows it was about a lot more than that, and that it happened at the same general location where the 1891 "final" battle of the Plains Indians Wars, which is to say the final battle of the Indian Wars in general, occured.

Eh? What's this have to do with Catholic Trads?

We'll get to that.

This may simply seem to be a byproduct of the 1960s, by which we mean that decade that really began in the early 60s and ran roughly to 1973, but it isn't, completely.  It is partially.  Beyond that, however, what it reflects is a long smoldering recollection by Native Americans of what was lost. There's a reason that the Native resistors at that event appeared the way they did, with clothing of the American West, a style that had been affected to some degree by Natives in the late 19th Century.  The protest was over their condition, and what they had lost, and a strong indicator that they knew just what that was.

The shock to Native cultures in what would become the United States had begun in 1607 when the first English settlers attempted to establish a colony, and it continued through, well, to this very day.  The Battle of Wounded Knee in 1891 made it plain, however, that their cause was lost with finality.  But their days of true sovereignty and independence were not forgotten. They just smoldered.  The American Indian Movement, Wounded Knee, and the occupation of Alcatraz all occured when whatever was smoldering burst into flame. The fire didn't create what was hoped, but it's never really gone out.

Cultural reactions are often like that.

The flood of change and modernity that came in post Vatican II worked that way as well.

Parishioners, accustomed to acceptance, by and large accepted what occured reactions ranging from joy to mute acceptance to smoldering discontent.  Even from the onset, however, there were some who just wouldn't go along.

By and large, a lot of those people seemed, well, weird.  Observing the 1917 Code of Cannon Law on dress, in the case of women, you could tell who they were, if they were not old, by their retention of the wearing of mantilla's, a sort of lace head covering, by the fact that they would not take communion from an extraordinary minister, and by the fact that they kneeled to receive communion and took it on the tongue⁶ , all of which were very visible symbols that they weren't going along with changes. The 1917 Code of Canon Law had required head coverings for women, based on the writings of St. Paul on that topic, although it had fallen largely out of use by the mid 70s.  Communion had been on the tongue for an extremely long time, if not originally, and it had been received kneeling, at the now absent alter rail.⁷ Most Catholics simply adjusted, but they did not.  There were not many of them, however.

In some quarters, resistance went further.  In France, Cardinal Lefebvre formed the Society of Saint Pius X, which rejected the changes wholesale and nearly went into schism, although careful actions by the Papacy prevented that from occurring.  As the SSPX spread, which is not to say that it became large, Traditionalist, or more appropriately Radical Traditionalist, sometimes now had a place to attend Mass that met their outlook.

Catholic (SSPX) Chapel of the Annunciation, Ft. Collins Colorado.

I've passed by this church many times but this was the first time I stopped.  I knew it was a Catholic church of some sort, but I didn't know that it was a Society of St. Pius X Chapel.

The Society of St. Pius X is a controversial Catholic organization that at one time teetered on the brink of being declared irregular.  Under the last three Popes a dedicated effort to keep that from occurring was undertaken and now the SSPX has a somewhat more regular status with the Church but it is still somewhat on the outside, rather than fully on the inside.  When I last checked, which is awhile back, they had been granted the right to perform sacraments, but a person really ought to check if they're a Catholic and planning on going to a SSPX service.

This church isn't really in Ft. Collins (at least not yet), but on a less and less rural road between Ft. Collins and Windsor Colorado.  Technically its a chapel because, I think, canonically the SSPX are outside of the regular diocese for a region and their churches do not, therefore, have full church status in the eyes of the Catholic Church.  Again, I'm not an expert on this by any means.

This chapel appears to be an offshoot of St. Isadore the Farmer church in Denver, and served by it.

Chances are good that the Church would have slowly corrected the bigger abuses that came about after Vatican II without much fanfare or notably controversy but for one thing, the Long Lent of 2002. For Catholics in the United States, and to some degree elsewhere in the Western World, that event fanned the smoldering embers, and they burst into flames.

The Long Lent of 2002 was the year that the homosexual priest abuse scandal broke out.  This was later studied in depth by the Church, resulting in the well known and heavily debated John Jay Report, which concluded among other things that the majority of offenders had been in seminaries in the 40s and 50s, and the acts had peaked in the 60s and 70s.  A lot of things, we'd note, peaked in the 60s and 70s.  While heavily criticized, the Church reacted significantly, with one of hte most notable reactions being a struggle to make sure that seminaries were free of abuse and orthodox.

Indeed, the reaction to the crisis has been much different than often publically portrayed.  While some Catholics of weak faith left the Church, by and large the Church maintained steady numbers throughout the crisis and into the present day.  Departures were offset by entries, as Protestants began to more actively abandon their denominations and enter the Church.  Moreover, as the Internet made resources freely available, young Catholics took advantage of them and self-educated in their faith, turning them towards orthodoxy.  As time went on, the demographic evolution meant that from Generation Jones on down, average Catholics were increasingly more orthodox, and this was true of new Priests as well.  Of course, many rank and file Priest and Parishioners had remained orthodox all along.  Having said that, due to the operation of age, changes came slowly as Priests who had come of age or graduated seminary in the 60s and 70s hung on to the changes that been made in that time period.  This is still the case, with it additionally being the case that older Bishops are often of that era, although some of them are actually conservative firebrands.

That latter fact perhaps demonstrates that once things caught on fire, they really started burning.  Catholics who had more or less put up with things being dissatisfactory to them, suddenly quite begin that way, all the way from issues large to small.  Topics ranged from getting rid of the guitar mass (thankfully) to bringing back the Latin Mass.  Indeed, the Extraordinary Form of the Mass came back, due to Papal authorization, and spread fairly significantly.

As this occured, the ranks of the Trads increased, jointed by near Trads. Rad Trads increases as well.  All of these groups were heavily represented by those in Gen X through Gen Z.  Where available, Trad gravitated towards the Latin Mass, and Rad Trads certainly did.  That leads to observations such as this:

Jeremy Wayne Tate

@JeremyTate41

I do not typically attend the Traditional Latin Mass (I can hardly get the eight of us to the local parish five minutes away on time). But this is where you will find young Catholic families. The younger generation is rebelling against modernity.

Last edited6:31 AM · Jul 8, 2023

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There's a lot to be said by that observation.

I myself made a Mass attendance change recently, which is what brings this up, sort of.

I was baptized at the downtown parish and basically grew up attending it, although my parents would occasionally go to the nearby, smaller neighborhood parish.  It's closer, but not much, so we were equidistant, basically, to downtown.  When my son was first born, we went there, but we soon switched to the large across town parish, which had a better cry room.  When the kids were older, we started going downtown again.  I became really comfortable with that parish, and served as a lector and in other ways.  All in all, over about a 20-year span, it really became my home parish.

After our most recent Bishop came in, it became clear that a determination had been made to make that the Hispanic Parish.  That's fine, and that evolution has happened all over, but it also meant that there was really no place left for a guy like me.  This was particularly so as I always attend early morning Mass.  So I went to the big across town parish. 

The priest there was an excellent one, whom I first encountered when I lived in Laramie.  He as the priest at the Newman Center, and was one of the priests that baptized our children across town (they were both baptized at that parish).  My wife, who is not Catholic, really likes him, although she's not a frequent Mass goer.  When Masses resumed post COVID, the early morning Mass there was at 7:30 a.m., in order to allow time to clean the Church between Masses.  I really liked that.

That Priest has now retired.  Indeed, the Priest who was longest at the downtown parish while I was there is soon to retire.  The priest who was a the neighborhood church went back to his native India, all in short order.

The new priest downtown is an excellent Wyoming homegrown priest who was born in Puerto Rico, probably prefect for his assignment.  At the big across town parish, a solid priest who had the oddity of being in one town for most of his priesthood has come in.  He's a good confessor, but not a great homilist by any measure. At the neighborhood church, however, a new, quite young, and highly orthodox Priest, is now there.  I've started going there.

That he's quite young is interesting in and of itself. Extremely articulate and with acute observations, I've never encountered a homilist quite like him.  Others must have thought the same as, on Sunday mornings, the early morning Mass, I'm seeing a lot of the old orthodox Catholics that I knew from downtown, whom I'd note are not Trads.  I'm also seeing, however, a fair number of Trads.

Indeed, I've never encountered so many Trads routinely at Mass before, mostly identifiable, I should note, due to the appearance of the women. They are very conservatively dressed, but not necessarily "plain" dressed, particularly for younger women.  They wear the mantilla. At least one of the young women who affects this appearance is with an older couple (not as old as me) who must be her parents, but who are not dressed in that fashion, which raises another point. They may not be Trads, but they're likely conservative orthodox or perhaps near Trads. That would likely describe the young couple who sat in front of me last Sunday, who were dressed in contemporary fashion, but with very nice clothing.  The young man was wearing dress slacks, shirt and tie, something that is unusual for young men in this region to wear anywhere. When going to Communion, they crossed lines so that they'd receive from the Priest and not the Deacon, a very Trad thing to do, but they didn't drop to their knees when receiving (and in fairness, the young woman was holding a baby and could hardly do that).

One family of Trads that goes to that Mass I know, and like me, the family has migrated from the downtown Parish, to the across town one, to here.  Clearly the conservative and orthodox of all stripes are coming here, packing at least two of the Masses, to hear from the orthodox young Priest.

And his homilies aren't necessarily of the type that would make a person feel all warm and fuzzy. One of the first ones I heard, or perhaps the very first one I heard, was one I've written about earlier, that being the "Uncomfortable Homily":

The Uncomfortable Homily.

The young pastor of one of the church's of the triparish gives homilies that are really hard to ignore.  Impossible, in fact.  They're very orthodox, but also almost guaranteed, quite frequently, to make every one in the parish squirm.  Indeed, so much so that I had decided not to post this at all, and then I started watching legislators who would raise a Christian flag make some, well morally debatable decisions, so I decided to revive it.

The four sins were:

1. Murder.

2. Failing to pay the servant his just wage.

3.  Sodomy 

4. Abusing immigrants.

He had these as the four sins "that really tick God off".

Probably the only one of these that doesn't make somebody upset is the first one.   It's pretty obvious that you shouldn't kill other people.

I'm going to dive into these a bit, save for murder, which probably causes people who stop in here to wonder, "when is he every going to get back to the point of this blog?";

That's not something that fits into the Protestant Health and Wealth Gospel at all.  It's also not one that fits very well into the world outlook of my Republican Catholic friends either, who would no doubt agree with topics 1 and 3, but who might squirm at 2 and 4.  For that matter, Catholic liberals might rejoice at 2 and 4, but balk in a major way at 3.

A homily that makes everyone uncomfortable is probably what everyone needs to hear.

The Trads might need to hear it less than the others, however.  They're not killing anyone, most of them probably not only are paying their servants their just wages, they likely don't have any, they're not practicing homosexuality, and they likely aren't abusing immigrants.

Pope Francis seems to think that some of them were acting without due respect for his office, and that is a danger of setting yourself apart.  You can get arrogant.  That provided his stated basis for clamping down on the Extraordinary Form of the Mass.  When the Pope greatly restricted the celebration of the Extraordinary Form in 2021, I thought the controversy it caused would rapidly fade, but it hasn't.

That's in part because Traditionalist have kept it alive, but the Pope, while certainly not intending to, helped keep it alive by convening the Synod on Synodality, which hasn't yet taken place, but which will this Fall.  The process of convening and gathering the Synod has made a lot of Western orthodox Catholics uncomfortable, and it certainly has the Trads.  While Pope Francis' style may very well contain an element of gathering opposition to things in order to expose it to light, and thereby bring an end to it, the inclusion of people like Fr. James Martin, S.J. can't help but make the orthodox, conservative, and the traditionalist suspicious.  The entire process has pushed people who already were opposed to the Pope further in that direction, and made cautious orthodox, such as myself, come over to the "not keen on Pope Francis" camp.  So, perhaps not too surprisingly, where the Trads have a Tridentine Mass available, they'll travel some distance to go it. Where they don't, as here, they're gathering where the Priest is clearly orthodox.

But they aren't the only ones.

I see the Mass packed with people that I know went to another Parish.  Some went downtown and now feel homeless, something I warned might happen as the focus of that Church was directed towards a specific group. Attendees at the across town Parish who went there, as I did, probably grew weary of the non-challenging homilies that didn't really focus on the crisis of daily living.

And it is a crisis.

That is, living in our times is a crisis.  Or our times are in crisis.  It's pretty clear.

And modernity brought that crisis about.

The post World War Two evolution of Americans from human beings into "consumers", and the surrendering of economic life of all types to capitalism brought it about.  Nothing matters other than corporate profits.  Even biology is now bought and sold to serve the corporate masters.  The fences were taken down, and the metaphorical bulldozers came in.

Millions are sick of it, but millions don't know where to go.  Quite a few have gone into drugs and alcohol, which the corporate masters are only too happy to provide.

Which brings us to this.

Can authentic religious traditionalism truly make it in a non-traditional world?  Indeed, can traditionalism at all, in any authentic sense, make it in a non-traditional world which, by its very nature, is set against tradition.

We have to be careful here, of course.  Critics would note that the world never really stops moving, and therefore all traditions are subject to change, but that's simply incorrect.  Indeed, the very long retention of some traditions in many cultures proves the opposite of that, and the preservation of the existential certainly does.  Indeed, Catholicism shows the long retention of things in and of itself, although this falls outside the category of tradition, as writings on the early Mass show it to be, well, the Mass, as Protestants are often shocked to learn. I.e., Christians were celebrating on Sundays a gathering recognizable as the Christian Mass.

But is this true, overall:

The younger generation is rebelling against modernity.

Clearly not all of them all.  A trip anywhere there are people of thirty, not traditionally regarded as young" and younger will reveal plenty of heavily tattooed, pink hair, sporting people, gender bending, and any number of things which can not be regarded as traditional.  Oddly enough, however, they're lashing out against the real world of modernity as well.  But what is deeply authentic traditionalism in this context?

Clearly, some of the Trads have applied it in their family lives.  But to really be traditional overall, it'd have to go some distance beyond that, it seems to me.  One young woman I was somewhat familiar with, for example, was clearly a Trad from a Trad family, but it was also one in which policing was an occupation. All the children became very Trad, one I somewhat knew being in the seminary briefly, and one that I didn't entered an Eastern Rite seminary.  One seems to have entered agriculture, a very traditional occupation, but the young woman entered the Sherriff's Office, not a traditional occupation for a woman at all, although certainly one that women do today.

That's just an illustration, of course, but the larger argument would be here that traditionalism more or less has to be agrarianism to really buck full societal traditionalism in this day and age.

Or so it seems to me.

Footnotes.

1. I know some American Protestants will dispute that, but it's completely counterfactual to maintain otherwise.

2. Indeed, the US is such an English Reformation contrary that to be a knowledgeable Catholic is to constantly be presented with the myths of the English Reformation by people who have only those myths to go by, even if they're non-religious. Even some Catholics believe these myths, in no small part because existing in a sea of Protestantism means that quite a few Catholics are heavily Protestantized.

3.  When I was a kid, probably in grade school I remember being at a Mass at Our Lady of Fatima in Casper when I turned around at the Sign of Peace and a friend of my father's, sitting behind me, greeted me with Pax vorbiscum, Latin for "Peace be with you".  I had to ask my father

4.  Protestants who aren't familiar with the Catholic Church are often shocked to learn that the Church includes a lot of the Old Testament into its liturgy.

5.  There are no surviving altar rails that I've seen in Wyoming.  Indeed, I can't immediately recall having been in a Catholic Church that had an altar rail in recent years, although I well remember the one that was in St. Anthony's in Casper.

6.  Extraordinary minsters are those Catholics appointed within their parish to administer communion.  They do not conscecrate the hosts, but merely administer communion.

The practice is really supposed to be limited to situations in which the number of people strain the ability of the Priests and a Deacons to administer communion, but it's unfortunately become routine for Mass and those so appointed will actually step up and volunteer if there do not appear to be any at the Mass.  Only very recently have I seen a Priest actually raise a hand to turn one back when not needed, and frankly, they're very rarely ever needed.

Rad Trads, and a lot of Trads, will not receive from an Extraordinary Minister for some reason, perhaps they feel the practice is abused. Some will not receive from a Deacon, and I suspect that some object as many Extraordinary Ministers are women.

7.  Unfortunately, people don't accurately remember that people filed up to the altar rail, kneeled, and the Priest went down the rail to the waiting parishoners.

Now, a lot of Trads and Rad Trads drop to kneel in front of the Priest which, as we know file in lines up to the Priests, is a surprise if you are not ready for it.  Generally, I've grown used to it so I expect it, but this was not always so, and given the nature of line psychology, I'm amazed that I haven't seen somebody trip over a suddenly kneeling person.

FWIW, Communion was originally in the hand, but many people regard the on the tongue administration of Communion, which was long common in the Latin Rite, to be more reverant.  Communion is administered differently in the Eastern Rite.  It is on the tongue, but with a host that has been dipped in the Precious Blood.