Finding Easter Joy in a Joyless Age

 Last night, individuals of all walks of life assented to all that the Catholic Church teaches, and accepted baptism and/or confirmation, being welcomed into the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.  I love reading about these moments of great joy, and I am always taken back to the moment I returned to the faith, some 21 years ago as a 17 year old lost kid ravaged by a family divorce.

I was emotionally exhausted after my first Mass, but also had a feeling of euphoria.  If Twitter was around, I would have been tweeting about how great it was to be Catholic.  (You still wouldn't get photos, because some things never change.)  After that Mass, I stayed in the pew for an extra 15-20 minutes.  I'd like to say it was some moment of deep holiness in prayer, but that wore off after two or three minutes.  I was exhausted, and I needed to recuperate.  At this point, the priest, in his standard black clerical attire, came and sat down in the pew, looked at me and said:

"Relax Kevin.  From here on out it only gets worse."

Naturally, I looked with a bit of surprise, maybe even a bit of annoyance.  Here I am, in an emotional euphoria, and you're telling me how things are going to get worse?  Is this really the time and the place?  Sensing this, the priest responded something along these lines (look, it was two decades ago):

"I know that doesn't make any sense.  You're feeling a lot of things right now.  Yet being Catholic is not about those sentiments.  They will come and go.  Being Catholic is hard.  It is a decision to follow Christ.  You will be tried, you will find pain.  But in that pain you will also find opportunities to grow closer to God   In that tribulation you will find Christ's peace."

I blew the words off that day honestly.  I nodded, thanked the priest, but otherwise ignored it.  I didn't view it an insult, I understood what he was trying to do, or so I told myself.  Keep me grounded.  Which is nice, but I don't have to worry about that now, I have so many things I want to learn, so many battles to wage, so much joy to experience.

Then the abuse scandals exploded.  First it was just Boston, and then diocese after diocese throughout 2002-2004 was uncovered as being the equivalent of an organized crime family, who built elaborate structures to protect abusers.  The scandal made me question a lot of other things I was taught upon coming into the Church.  I also saw a lot of people angry that others were asking the same questions I was.  They viewed it a distraction when we connected the horrid environment of abuse to so many other problems in the Church and asked "what exactly did we convert to?"  I watched a lot of good people fall to the way side because of those questions, and I watched a lot of seemingly important people ridicule those who fell.

Though I found the Latin Mass and the joy it brought me, I also saw the struggles of so many parishioners, dealing with an institutional neglect spanning decades, and when attempting to process how such neglect impacted their spirituality, being told by their betters to suck it up, at least they weren't undergoing the very real martyrdom of other Catholics in the world.  I watched so many trads who came to the Latin Mass with joy wind up sedevacantists, or bitter and withdrawn.  All they wanted was someone to hear them when they talked about how messed up things were, and how they wanted a shepherd.

I watched friends who reacted to the election of Pope Francis with joy, ecstatic that someone finally understood them and their needs.  They loved me, but come on Kevin, nobody feels the love of Christ in traditionalism, but Pope Francis radiates it!  That ecstasy turned to disappointment when Francis was not the revolutionary they were promised, or that he initially advertised himself as.  I watched as so many conservatives, who used to enjoy keeping their boot on the necks of traditionalists, now feeling abandoned as we were by this Pope.  They didn't find an escape in sedevacantism, but in secular politics.

Then came Francis abuse scandal.  He attacked victims of abuse in Chile.  McCarrick occurred, and it was blatantly obvious he knew and participated in a coverup.  They watched a whistleblower demonized, until that whistleblower became the persona the Pope wanted him to become.  Yet that came at a cost, and it turned a lot of Catholics away.  They saw the Pope as moving heaven and earth to protect pedophiles, and unleash the full might of the Vatican at silencing a whistleblower, while abusers and heretics receive nothing.  At this point even a lot of grizzled veterans started feeling the weariness.

Then came COVID.  Then came lockdowns.  Then came the episcopate, seemingly worldwide, abandoning their flocks, justifying it with "we offer virtual masses!"  Francis actually performed pretty admirably here, giving a lot of Catholics hope when he scolded shepherds for abandoning the flock, and gave the famous benediction ceremony in an empty St. Peter's, drenched in rain. Yet this didn't really change the trajectory.  Many dioceses wanted to bring people back to Church, seemingly not so much for their spiritual care, as out of fear they would lose money.  At this point you started to see a slow falling away among Catholics of all stripes.  Maybe they will come back with the vaccine, but maybe not.  Some are even so distrusting of Church authority, they doubt the efficacy of the vaccines, despite the overwhelming consensus of moral theologians, the CDF, and the argument from sound traditional moral theology.

If my two decades in the faith could be described with a phrase, it would be that of managed decline.  Gone were the feelings of joy and euphoria, and in were the feelings of anger, rage, hopelessness and abandonment.  It was at this time I remember the words of that priest.  He was a clear liberal, influenced by a lot of bad ideas.  Yet for that one moment, he spoke as Alter Christus.  In that moment, he spoke as Christ, providing care for a sheep in his flock, a sheep that had no concept of its wisdom.  In all those moments of decline and failure, I learned not to place too much trust in those human leaders.  The personality cult and papal worship of John Paul II and Francis never impacted me.  I was grateful to Benedict for freeing traditionalists from the parish ghettos, for repealing the Insult of the Indult, but I always understood he was but a man, and a man whose failures were just as visible as his successes.  (All the same, I still miss him as Pope, and think his wisdom will be appreciated more in his successor abandoning it.)  Even Francis, miserable Pope I may view him, he's miserable in a lot of ways I'm miserable, so I see how the good Lord even uses the miserable in His ways.  So I feel a certain closeness and admiration of him absent in many of my traditionalist friends, and I now view a lot of sympathy as the vultures swarm around him, and he is left with no allies, mostly of his own accord.

In all of this time, I found the Latin Mass, but most importantly, I found a purpose with God.  The Latin Mass helped me understand how to build my life (at least in theory!) around honoring God, and that honoring taught me a sense of gratitude.  In my learning, I plunged deep into the theologians and the philosophers, and honestly found most of it worthless.  But the joy when I found that one paragraph, or even one sentence that was overflowing with Christ's light!  In my time of doubt and desperation, I was introduced to The Spiritual Combat, and the lessons Dom Scupoli imparted saved me from many pitfalls, chief among them, the importance of keeping your soul at peace.  On finding peace in the fact that Christ desires your salvation more than the devil desires your damnation, and how that fact changes ever aspect of your life.

Once you learn that fact, and I pray you do newcomers, that institutional failure won't go away.  Indeed, its likely to get worse.  Yet it will have no sway over you.  It will be placed by the security that is Christ's love, and that security will have profound implications for the Church, a Church which God viewed it essential that you be called into in this place and time.