Now we're really "snowballing" on this thread. We're going zig-zag all over the place. That has always been alright with me. But I can see why those whom I call "thread beadles" would be annoyed.

"Priest-happy" is my own term of derision. It means "preoccupied with priests to an abnormal degree." It's a kind of linguistic back formation from words such as "gun-happy."

I usually am content to use the dry and colorless term "clericalistic."

There is no reason to bring in priests all the time when the subject is keeping the Faith in our day. A day in which the world's main problem is the assault on Christ and common decency by the priestly class of the church of Rome. We need priests to provide certain Sacraments. We don't need them to keep the Faith.

Priests are the last thing we need when they get into priest-happy mode themselves. When they start pontificating on priestly prestige at the expense of the Manly Honor of the holy son of the just Joseph. Or of of the souls of little children exposed to the Filth Education of which learned priests from LA to Rome approve. Traditional priests go demonic all the time, denouncing the "sin" of lay disrespectfulness towards the worst corruption crusaders among Novus Ordo prelates.

Well, my attempt at "fisking" was not a roaring success.

TRENT: "I knew you would say something like that..."

CLETUS: Why don't you write my posts for me? ... Zane Grey... etc...

"Fisking" is line-by-line analysis (and, usually, negative criticism) of a text on-line.

I was using the term in a looser sense, since I was subjecting only one line in a text to negative criticism.

The term "fisking" is not obscure. I'm surprised that any young person who seems intelligent and uses the internet would not have heard of it.

We can't limit our knowledge of, say, SSPX priests to our own little lives and then speak of them generally. In order to do the latter with any degree of credibility we have to put in a lot of time reading many articles in THE ANGELUS and listening to many SSPX priest sermons by many different SSPX priests.

Above all we have to be familiar with the words and career of Archbishop Lefebvre, who many times denounced those with "schismatic" attitudes towards the New Pentecostal hierarchy and even said on one priest-happy occasion that Catholics are better off in the "Novus Ordo" than out there on their own. (or at "home alone".) He thought that Catholics would be likely to become atheists at home alone. (Even though the vast majority of sinful and heretical and infidel mankind remains solidly theistic. So much for the knowledge and and the judgment of "learned clerics.")

The point was not that YOU should read Zane Grey novels.

The point was that you wrote, "I thought you would say something like that..."

If what is in YOUR mind has a tendency then to appear in MY posts you may as well post for me. So I can listen to Mozart instead. So I can go hiking in the mountains. So I can read Zane Grey. Whatever.

At first I was thinking that I created a gremlin with my inept attempt at using the quote function.

Now I suspect that someone is trying to tell us that this sort of personal back-and-forth belongs in a margin.

While the cat's away the mice will play.

As a poster above noted, internet message boards are no place for the thin-skinned. On the other hand, I think that it's wrong not to protest when a fellow poster seems to be set on misrepresenting what you've said. Or on playing weird little "mind games."

I used to wonder why people think that they can get away with such tricks on message boards. I mean, the record is THERE in black and white for all to see in perpetuity. Which is not the case when lawyers play these tricks in courts of law.

But now I reckon that there is a simple explanation. Even though the record is THERE, some people shrewdly twig to the probability that people just don't reread old posts. Any more than they read old newspapers. That's how we get people writing as though they wrote things that they did not write and piously taking others to task for not having read those unwritten things.