No one ever said leaving was easy.

I don’t usually cross-post, but Steve quoted me talking about why Mother Angelica went wrong, and he gave a little of his own experience at WYD Denver.

The poor kid was 15…

I was confronted with the depth of the corruption of faith in laity and clergy alike. It was a constant barrage of jarring circumstances. The first night I was there, a producer from the Howard Stern Show who couldn’t find a place to stay stowed away in my room after becoming chummy with my assigned roommates, who were apparently big fans. The next morning, at breakfast, I wound up in an argument with a chaperon who thought that if we had to genuflect before the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, we should also genuflect to each other, because “Jesus is in all of us.” When I looked to a priest for backup, he balked.

After visiting the hotel pool a few nights during my stay, I later found out that the men from our group I’d seen hanging out in the hot tub with women in bikinis were actually priests from our diocese — a realization that came when they finally put their clerics on for the first time during the papal Mass. Of course, the biggest indicator was probably the pre-trip retreat at the local seminary, where the priest offering Mass for our group ordered us to stand during the consecration (I refused) and said something about “Jesus, he or she as the case may be…”

And he makes the point that we are going to keep making over and over. You have to come out of the Novusordoist funouse. There’s no other way forward.

“…when you believe something is good, but it keeps producing bad fruit, it creates an irreconcilable problem. You’re always looking to square that circle, always trying to find a way to spin straw into gold.

A year before I went to World Youth Day, I fell to my knees in my little rural parish and asked God to help me to keep my faith in a Catholicism that “doesn’t act like it believes what it says it believes.” He answered that prayer, leading me not just to Denver to see how bad things were up close and personal, but through a labyrinthine maze of experiences that ultimately led me out from the tiny stream of Catholicism I had known, and into the _ocean _of Catholic Tradition.

You have to come out.

~