I think the whole mindset of Catholics moving away to some kind of Catholic oasis is the utopain dream with a Catholic twist.
Yeah, it'd be great if three quarters of the town or city in which you lived was traditional Catholic. Problem is, a lot of Catholics seem to think that moving to such a place is going to make them, and their families, into pious Catholics. In reality, though, some people who do so then get to feeling all safe and secure about their salvation, and before they know it, they're living not too differently from the pagans in the next city.
I would love to be near a large traditional Catholic church, but what about the rest of the world that we are supposed to be the light of? Hiding together somewhere until the big, bad world passes, strikes me as being suspiciously close to hiding that "light of the world" under the proverbial bushel. The same things that, in principal, people hope will protect their faith, become the same things that keep them from sharing it with anyone else by example.
One traditional priest once gave a very good sermon about something along those lines. In so many words, he said that getting to heaven was NOT an "each man for himself proposition".
People once thought Catholic schools would accomplish this miracle, too. Just look at the "Catholic" schools today! Now picture your Catholic oasis as pretty much a very large Catholic school, where everybody can attend. It really isn't much different. SOUNDS good. But then there's humanity, which always slides downward unless people actually fight the good fight... which is ironically what most of them move to such places to AVOID doing.
If we hide from the conflicts of the world, how are we doing more than simply hiding from the cross, or hiding from the scorn and the fight we'll face if we do our "gettin' holy" in a secular city somewhere else?
We all have a yellow streak running through us (thanks to original sin). Nobody wants to fight if they can take it easy. But there's nothing in the Bible about taking it easy, hiding from the conflict caused by our Faith, or all running off together and waiting for the rest of the world to just go up in smoke. That's no part of Catholicism I know of.
:nunchaku: