The Devout Life

I seem to be having this discussion about the meaning of "restoration" and "traditionalism" on at least four fronts. Five if you include the dining room table. And this is all with Warren out of town for the weekend!

via email - Perhaps we will someday all find each other in the concentration camps in which we are likely to end our lives and we can finally have these discussions in person - or at least by elaborate knocking codes on the walls. I don't think it's just us who smirk about these things.  The moderns before us did as well - I can link you to an extensive discussion of "girdle flirtation" in the fifties if you want proof, but I'm sure you have better things to do - and before that, it seems to me that cleanliness and purity of speech was a class marker.  Personally I think class issues play a much larger role in the destruction of the culture than your average traditionalist wants to acknowledge.  From the beginning of the Victorian age up to the Eclipse, in the Anglosphere, sexual restraint, public decency, and improving one's station in life within a rigid class system are all practically the same thing.  So when society became  wealthy enough for people to begin chafing at any one of those restrictions, they all went over at once.  Now we are rapidly returning to a social system where there will be almost no social mobility and the poor might as well be as bawdy as they want to be because there's almost nothing for them to hope for. I know there's a lot of conspiracy theorizing about the Frankfurt School's responsibility here but no political ideologue could ever have come up with rock music, nor created the wealth that was necessary for people to be able to act so badly for so long.  I think it all would have happened without Gramsci; the Frankfurt School's real contribution to the decline is creating the structures whereby people get paid to be university lecturers in "queer studies."  They don't appear to be able to apply their beloved Foucault to themselves - they are busily creating a power structure that will justify taxing the pants off the rest of us so that they can tell us how evil we are for having the money in the first place in perpetuity.  However, eventually the results of all of this will hobble the economy so much that the importance of good behavior will once again be obvious.

and from the League Lair on the process of developing a traditional mindset -

I agree with whoever said that traditionalism should not simply be about right-wing politics.

I fear the greatest temptation for Traditionalists is to become de facto Protestants. I think we need to recognise the temptation to simply despair of the Church.  Being a Catholic is like being married, or just living one's life. Whatever the temptation - and the abundant excuses - one just should never give up - on one's life, or one's marriage, or on the Church.  I see analogies here.

I believe there are indeed abundant excuses and reasons for righteous anger at what has happened to the Church over my lifetime. But somehow we have to hang on, find a niche and look for signs of hope. If there are some real bright points, no matter how few, in the broader church let's recognise them as beacons of hope.

A question here seems to be, how do we know what is the best way to live and worship? How do we "test the spirits"? I think we rely on two things: our deeper Catholic instincts, and our capacity to develop these instincts over time.  For example, I have always tended to discount the wilder forms of ecumenism. I have always had doubts about communion-in-the-hand (and have never accepted it). I used to accept women lectors, but now recognise this as an abuse. I used to tolerate altar girls as a papal fiat. Now I roll my eyes and meditate on human folly.

 another email (from a non-Catholic but otherwise sensible friend out West) -

You shouldn't worry about all the things you love falling off the face of the earth. Much like bellbottoms they have just gone a little out of vogue, they will eventually make a grand return. The Paris' and Britney's of this world will stagger along in their self involved kinds of ways until they find (or trip over) something of meaning. There is too much meaning in this world not to bump into it eventually. I think when one grows up with the wacky childhood's we all had it is a sad side effect, that feeling that all the good things have to be paid for with horror and drama. Just try to remind yourself that all you have now was paid for a long, long time ago. If anything, it has been accumulating interest.