I enjoyed reading your analysis of the trad movement. On X, and my own extended family the trad mentality has taken hold - some marrying trad girls they met at an FSSP parish. Very nice girls and faithful families but they hold to a trad Catholicism that never existed in the past but one rooted in the present state of the Church.
I am old enough to have been an altar boy in the late 50's and 60's. I remember being on the altar and seeing women and men dressed in their Sunday best attending the old Mass. However, except for having more children than our non-Catholic neighbors and scrupulously going to Mass on Sundays, Catholics conformed to the rest of society and socialized with neighbors and friends irrespective of their religion - nobody cared if a fellow Yankee fan was of the same religion!
I see the trad movement as a socio-religious movement of "Going back to the 50's." One without Elvis, rock n' roll, segregation, or hiding beneath our school desks in simulation of a nuclear attack. Sure, life was simpler back then - television was clean for the most part, high school graduates could get a good job and buy a home, pornography was sold under the counter, etc. - but that whole way of life is in the past, gone forever as the culture/society moves on into the future. I'm sure my Irish grandparents born in the 1880's in Ireland on farms without electricity and using an outhouse were not trads when they were middle-aged adults in NYC living in a warm home in the 1930's.
The new trad movement is a social construct of the mind - an imaginary past where women wore long dresses and never pants, forgoing lipstick and makeup and socializing only with fellow trads or the likeminded. This was not the past but an imaginary utopia of the mind adapted to a life with cell phones, advanced medical procedures, electric cars, on-line learning/shopping and social communication with the like-minded on social media.
Unconsciously, they will become the new Amish or Mennonites as the modern society of the 21st century advances and the world becomes smaller and even more cosmopolitan. Already several trad families I know have retreated to rural enclaves near a Latin Mass parish to raise their families in a more pure and healthy environment away from the evil environment of the world, flesh and devil. But doesn't our Lord counsel us to be the leaven in the world or in the Church - “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough” (Matthew 13:33).
Once again, I enjoyed your analysis. Keep up the good work.
Just coming back to express my gratitude for your well-thought comment, here. I plan on sharing it with some especially trad friends of mine to see their reaction. They always seem to identify me as one of their own, and I think getting the POV from a man who remembers these days is quite eye-opening. I sometimes wonder when the metaphorical vail will lift and they will be once against foisted into the real world just as Catholics were at the turn of the first and second industrial revolutions. Times change, Tradition doesn't, but tradition /does/.
Thank you very much for your response, sir. Did not go without appreciation.
I enjoyed reading your analysis of the trad movement. On X, and my own extended family the trad mentality has taken hold - some marrying trad girls they met at an FSSP parish. Very nice girls and faithful families but they hold to a trad Catholicism that never existed in the past but one rooted in the present state of the Church.
I am old enough to have been an altar boy in the late 50's and 60's. I remember being on the altar and seeing women and men dressed in their Sunday best attending the old Mass. However, except for having more children than our non-Catholic neighbors and scrupulously going to Mass on Sundays, Catholics conformed to the rest of society and socialized with neighbors and friends irrespective of their religion - nobody cared if a fellow Yankee fan was of the same religion!
I see the trad movement as a socio-religious movement of "Going back to the 50's." One without Elvis, rock n' roll, segregation, or hiding beneath our school desks in simulation of a nuclear attack. Sure, life was simpler back then - television was clean for the most part, high school graduates could get a good job and buy a home, pornography was sold under the counter, etc. - but that whole way of life is in the past, gone forever as the culture/society moves on into the future. I'm sure my Irish grandparents born in the 1880's in Ireland on farms without electricity and using an outhouse were not trads when they were middle-aged adults in NYC living in a warm home in the 1930's.
The new trad movement is a social construct of the mind - an imaginary past where women wore long dresses and never pants, forgoing lipstick and makeup and socializing only with fellow trads or the likeminded. This was not the past but an imaginary utopia of the mind adapted to a life with cell phones, advanced medical procedures, electric cars, on-line learning/shopping and social communication with the like-minded on social media.
Unconsciously, they will become the new Amish or Mennonites as the modern society of the 21st century advances and the world becomes smaller and even more cosmopolitan. Already several trad families I know have retreated to rural enclaves near a Latin Mass parish to raise their families in a more pure and healthy environment away from the evil environment of the world, flesh and devil. But doesn't our Lord counsel us to be the leaven in the world or in the Church - “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough” (Matthew 13:33).
Once again, I enjoyed your analysis. Keep up the good work.
Blessings,
Patrick
Just coming back to express my gratitude for your well-thought comment, here. I plan on sharing it with some especially trad friends of mine to see their reaction. They always seem to identify me as one of their own, and I think getting the POV from a man who remembers these days is quite eye-opening. I sometimes wonder when the metaphorical vail will lift and they will be once against foisted into the real world just as Catholics were at the turn of the first and second industrial revolutions. Times change, Tradition doesn't, but tradition /does/.
Thank you very much for your response, sir. Did not go without appreciation.