Allow Me to Reintroduce Myself

 So, after a six year descent into madness, I return to see that I'm actually sane compared to everyone else.  Being serious, hello sports fans, its me, your not so friendly neighborhood traditionalist.  Okay, your very young and bitter traditionalist.  When we last met, I was signing off of blogging.  I stand by most of what I said in those days.  The Catholic blogging community was a wasteland of sin and scandal.  So why am I going back to it?

I'm not.

You see, I'm not returning back to the Catholic blogging community because there is nothing to return to.  It imploded.  Several of its most prominent writers clowned themselves.  Others moved onto podcasting.  Others took their grifting from a few corners of the internet and infilitrated the conspiracy theory market.  When I left, I asked the last blogger to turn out the lights.  Little did I know nobody survived.

Sadly, what we got in its place was even worse.  Catholic Twitter makes La Bloga Nostra look like a sanctum of holiness.  Catholic Twitter is what would happen if the devil saw Mark Shea and said "get on my level son, let me show you how its really done."  (Ironically, Shea, after being fired from his previous job for his inability to play well with others, now screams into the void on twitter, even more detached from reality than he once was.  He saw the devil's taunt and said CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.)

What, you thought I'd come back all nice and pious?  I've been away six years, I got a stockpile of ammo!  Though being real, I'm going to try and avoid that as much as possible.  I'm not here to troll washed up Catholic personalities, (this goes out to you) or to mock overly ambitious former colleagues who sold their soul to their ambition (this goes out to you), or to look askew at people who view the most important things in the world as tools to use in their quest for clicks and recognition. (and you, and you, and you)

I'm here because now that the old order has imploded, I'm comfortable trying to do something different.  I want to write about matters of consequence and conscience.  I want to do so without making my editor friends sweat bullets (this goes out to you) in scaring off donors, but I also don't want to be associated with other places that quite frankly just aren't my thing.  (This goes out to you.)

Some of you remember me, and I'm sure we'll enjoy the journey along the way.  For those that don't know me, I'm a 37 year old who is way too bitter for 37, due to 18 years of traditionalism.  I've seen the landscape change dramatically in those 18 years, in ways entirely predictable and unpredictable.  We'll chart some of that later.  I'm a mix of the Latin Mass, Lorenzo Scupoli, and Public Enemy.  I'm a recovering apologist, and my marriage of seven years with two children has been the medication I use to overcome that spiritually wasteful addiction.  I fight the battle for traditionalism in the Church by refusing to align with any "traditionalist" ideology.  They come and go, and I'm somehow still here.   They will leave, and I will remain.

What are we gonna talk about?  Honestly, whatever I feel like.  I got some raw and uncensored thoughts about the state of Catholic media nowadays, and about a Church that has increasingly lost the plot.  We'll talk about those things, and we'll try to talk common sense about them.  The Catholic Faith is true because it speaks to what is common in all our souls.  It speaks to us where we are at, yet refuses to leave us there abandoned.  Mother Church, hapless and feckless as it may be, is still founded by Christ, and occasionally reminds us of that fact in her acts and authority.  We still have a share in her through our baptism, so let's use the time we have to remind the world and other Catholics of that fact, shall we?

And if you understood the references with the parenthesis, this one absolutely goes out to you.