Combing the Catacombs
Jimmy Akin makes a good point: "[Jack] Chick’s material is weirdly compelling. It’s amateurish, paranoid, lurid, garish, ham-fisted, and viciously hateful at times. It’s incredibly intense, and something about that intensity makes people want to read them. They generate a kind of bizarre fascination."
I've recently fallen for a Trad blog (--and I can't get up! rimshot) for similar reasons. For beleagured culture-war'd Catholics, his blog acts as a sort of salve since you suddenly regain all the sensations of being mainstream. Finding someone more conservative than yourself is like finding a Buffalo nickel, you just look at it with a sort of wonderment.
His blog reads like a parody - and well it might be, for who knows on the 'net? But what a wonderous handle he goes by! Sulpicius Severus is so agreeably medieval, the blogname equivalent of the labyrinthal monastery in "The Name of the Rose".
His latest post is titled "Lenten Meditation -- Invalidity of the Novus Ordo Missae". I liked the marriage of "Lenten Meditation", which sets you up for something more...well...meditative, and "Invalidity of the Novus Ordo Missae", which strikes the Trad's polemical one-note note. In the end I love the self-confidence of fundamentalists, be they Trads or Protestant. Of course my affection is for the person and not the doctrine. Fundies do tremendous damage to the Church, as schisms and heresies do by definition, but the fundamentalist is like the pal in the foxhole who goes daft - one looks upon them with pity, not anger - while the liberal pro-choice Christian is the guy in the foxhole who runs to the enemy's side. (Of course, they all see me similarly.)
Mr. Severus goes on: "This Lent let us remind ourselves that fidelity to Catholic Worship -- to the Traditional Latin Mass -- is essential to our salvation. The novus ordo missae is an invalid act of blasphemy, hoisted onto the world by the protestant periti and modernist malefactors of the Vatican II robber council."
So well-written. I'm a sucker for alliteration and "protestant periti" and "modernist malefactors" please the ear and eye. I also liked use of the word "hoisted" even though I think he wanted "foisted".
He comments on why he deigns to comment on our blogs (from Jeff Miller's blog): "Corporal works of mercy can involve picking your way through the dingy back alleys of blighted urban streets to bring comfort and guidance to the homeless and the drug-addicted, so too I slog my way through the rip-roaring, joking, oh-isn't-it-so-funny-how-far-the-modernists-have-destroyed-our-religion dregs of "St. Blogs" to nudge souls towards the bread of Truth."
Good writing covers a multitude of sins and this guy's got the goods.
PS: Do I, a member of the dregs of St. Blog's, get credit for a work of mercy in passing his URL along?
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