Traditional (Latin Mass) Catholic Life

Traditional Catholic Life is not lived on the internet, let alone the-platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter. 

In fact, Traditional Catholic Life is too enormous a subject for any mere blogpost, so I will talk only about Catholics whose lives revolve around the Traditional Latin Mass. 

Happy Feast Day, by the way. Today is the Feast of the Assumption, which is a holy day of obligation in Scotland (as in the USA), so to Mass I will shortly go. But I will not be going to the TLM because I work afternoons and evenings, and thus cannot get to the Edinburgh TLMs today. 

And this illustrates two things about TLM Catholic Life as it is not lived on Twitter: some (many/most) TLM Catholics go to the N.O. at least occasionally out of necessity, and some (many/most) married TLM Catholic women have jobs-outside-the-home. 

Of course, if we had been blessed with children, I might not be working-outside-the-home. That said, Catholic boarding schools in France do not pay for themselves. Or, as one fellow parishioner of unbridled optimism and prestigious education once told us, "Don't discount Eton." (We were living at the time at the Historical House, which fact may have hidden from our friend from the realities of our finances.) Traditional Latin Mass Catholics do not necessarily homeschool; it all depends on what we think is the best option for our children and/or what we can afford. 

Another illustration: the TLM Catholic Life as it is not lived on Twitter is also not always lived in the United States. It is lived in Canada, Scotland, and England, in Poland, Italy,  Germany, and--especially-France. TLM Catholic Life is, in fact, catholic, and I mention only those seven countries simply because that is where I have seen it, or met Traditional Latin Mass Catholics. It never ceases to irk me when one (now former) TLM Catholic (still current) internet personality writes that Americans are the leaders of the TLM world. He might not think so if he could read French. 

But of course there are many TLM Catholics in the USA, of whose 331.9 million population about 25% are at least nominally Catholic. Thanks to my work, I am in contact with at least one or two every day. They seem to have the same concerns TLM Catholics have in Britain: where to go to Mass if they can't get to the TLM,  how to save their local TLM from episcopal machinations, how to educate their children, how to ignore ersatz leaders of TLM Catholicism. 

Offline, TLM Catholic leadership is actually very simple. The official leaders are the Pope (the current one is not ideal) and the local ordinary (every diocese a crapshoot) and then bishops and priests who say the TLM. Practically speaking, our day-to-day leader is a TLM priest, and not--for example--Dr. Taylor Marshall.  

There are, of course, official groups of TLM Catholics who have lay leaders, like England-and-Wales' Latin Mass Society and Una Voce Scotland, but these leaders don't have the standing of clergy. Members of the groups vote for them. They may or may not be household names. Ordered suddenly to name the leading TLM Catholic in Britain, I would probably forget the clergy's superior claims and just stammer out "Dr. Joseph Shaw." 

But certain online Catholic personalities are definitely household names in Scotland. (I suspect they are largely unknown in France.) I have heard Dr. Taylor Marshall and John-Henry Westen mentioned in the parish hall, and I'm pretty sure most adults there have at least heard of Michael Voris. Popular among the prelates are Cardinal Burke and Bishop Athanasius Schneider, as well as less internationally known tradition-friendly bishops, whose names it would not be politic to record online. 

So it would be wrong to claim that the internet plays no role in TLM Catholic Life. It most definitely does--on the level of info-tainment, education, and the dissemination of news. What I do claim is that Twitter spats, never mind such lame pronouncements that a man having ever changed diapers suggests there is something wrong in the order of his household yadda yadda, have little to do with the daily realities of TLM Catholic life, let alone our religious faith. A presumptuous lady on Twitter/X is just some dame; it is our flesh-and-blood neighbours beside us in the pews who count. 

That said, some unhelpful ideas creep in by way of plausible self-taught theologians, just as not all households are proof against being machine-gunned by Hollywood and its accomplices, the government schools. The ones I am thinking of play to some men's fears about being abandoned, robbed or otherwise mistreated by their wives. Happily, these ideas get short shrift in my house, for my husband learned the excellent philosophy "Anything for a quiet life, laddie" at his grandfather's knee. Meanwhile, he is a peaceable and loveable chap, so I do my best not to disgrace him in public.  

I am now tempted to ask my manager if I can take 4 hours out from work to go to the Feast of the Assumption TLM with my excellent husband, assist at this Mass, and then come home again. Herein lies another reality of TLM Catholic life, which is that TLMs are often far from where we live and it takes a lot of time and planning (and in my case £4 round-trip) to get to them. It is a matter of grief to me that I can't just walk to the very pretty stone church across my neighbourhood and attend morning Mass there. 

Of course, I could, but it will be teeming with the baptized pagan barbarians from the nearest "Catholic" school, and whereas I can resign myself to attending the Novus Ordo with devout Catholic barbarians or baptized pagan gentlefolk, small baptized pagan barbarians all chattering or looking at their phones during Mass are too much for me. So off I go to prepare for the 10 o'clock at the Cathedral--after noting that, yes, there is a certain level of intolerance in my minority-in-a-minority community. We are deeply intolerant of Catholic schools that don't teach the Catholic faith, and we find impious behaviour distasteful in anyone who has attained the age of reason.  

More on the subject of TLM Catholic Life anon.