"... —the same beliefs that were now everywhere under attack."
We [conservative Catholics] could no longer simply reject these [Modernist/anti-continuity] arguments, when they came from the Sovereign Pontiff. We had to take them seriously, and ask: Was there really a radical discontinuity between pre-conciliar and post-conciliar Catholicism? Because if there was, then we would be forced to ask a second serious question: Had the Church veered off the authentic Catholic tradition? Or to put it differently, were there some aspects of the Council’s teachings that required at least clarification, if not outright correction?
So we asked these questions—which our traditionalist friends had been asking for years already. The answers drove us still further toward the Trads. We could not ignore that, whatever our past differences, the Trads held the same fundamental beliefs that we cherished—the same beliefs that were now everywhere under attack. We could not ignore that traditionalist communities were growing, at a time when parishes were shrinking and dioceses were “restructuring” by closing the doors of vacated churches. Above all we could not ignore that the Traditional Latin Mass was celebrated with reverence, and conveyed the rich heritage of our faith.
Within the past week I have spoken with a half-dozen other Catholics who, like me, have begun regularly attending the Traditional Latin Mass. In every case, their movement toward the TLM began during the current pontificate. We did not move toward traditionalism because the Trads attacked the Pope; it would be far more accurate to say that we moved in that direction because the Pope attacked us.
- A microcosm mirror-image of this is the break-up of the Reformed Church in America, a 400-year-old Calvinist tradition that has gutted itself after surrendering to the homosexuals and feminists. Read the details here. The conservative Reform congregations have the membership and the money, and they've packed up and left, leaving the "official" Reformed broke, bankrupt economically and morally. It's a perfect example of the saying, "Go woke, go broke," and a mirror to the troubles and maybe the end of the Vat 2 Church.