So, my parents stopped practicing the faith (going to Mass, etc.) when the New Mass was introduced. I was born in 1968, so this meant that I was growing up without the faith, although I was baptized with the Traditional Rite of Baptism before it was replaced. When I was about 10, my mother finally decided that she wanted us in the Church, and so went to the Novus Ordo priest, and I received some catechesis and received my First "Sacraments" after Baptism when I was about 10. I was so taken aback by how empty and meaningless my life had been until I learned about God, so I became a very devout 10 year old, going to daily Novus Ordo Mass, etc. for many years. We had all kinds of dislikes about the Novus Ordo, but the priests in my parish were relatively conservative so it was nothing too serious. I thought for a few years that I would like to be a priest, but over time I decided it wasn't for me. I was more of an introverted person, and I didn't relish the role of the Novus Ordo presider who had to be part comedian, part social worker, and part socialite. That didn't appeal to me and I felt that I did not have the aptitude for it. In any case, I continued server Mass probably about 250 times per year, since often I was the only boy (or kid in general) at the weekday Mass, etc.
By the time I got to High School, however, our older priests were transferred out and we were greeted with two flaming-at-the-mouth Modernists to replace them, who did not appear to believed in the Real Presence. I could go into a lot of detail about the conflicts we had with them. But we just battled with them, and carried on.
At one point during High School, a Modernist-heretical Jesuit High School, one "theology" teacher showed us a film that was basically deriding the Tridentine Mass, about how the priest babbled in a language no one understood and had his back turned to the people, etc. Well, the video made the mistake of showing actual video from Tridentine Mass, and instead of agreeing with the derision of the Mass, I was blown away by it and wanted to attend one of those Masses.
I asked my dad about Tridentine Masses, and we found out from someone that there was an Indult Mass in Cleveland (about an hour drive) at a nursing home chapel in the afternoons, once a month, on the 3rd Sunday of each month. So my dad, who had grown up with the Tridentine Mass, decided we should go there, while for the other weeks of the month we stayed at our NO parish. We had a great old priest there offering the Tridentine Mass. He told us once after Mass that the bishop had asked him whether there were any young people there, since the rules said it should only be attended by people who were 30 and older (again, showing their intention just to appease older Catholics who had been grandfathered in ... it was no accident that it was at a nursing home), and he told us, smiling, that he answered the bishop, "I don't know, since I have my back turned toward the people." So my dad, who stopped practicing because of the New Mass, felt at home again.
So I went to college eventually out of state. During my first year, when I was about to come home for Thanksgiving break, I figured I'd bring my parents a small gift. So I went to a Catholic bookstore. Unsure of what to get, I saw a copy of St. Alphonsus' Glories of Mary. I figured that if it was by a saint, it had to be good. By this time, I wasn't always sure of what one might find in a "Catholic" bookstore. I also picked up an extra copy for myself, since they were pretty inexpensive.
So I went back to college, leaving one copy of the book with my parents and then reading one myself. Upon reading the book, I was blown away by this, realizing very quickly that the faith this man (St. Alphonsus) expressed in the book was completely alien to the Novus Ordo, basically that we were dealing with two different religions. Inspired by the book, even though this practice was not explicitly mentioned in the book, I began kneeling for Communion in the Novus Ordo ... occasionally being yelled at by some Modernist to stand up. Unbeknownst to myself, my mother had started doing the EXACT SAME THING as a result of reading the same book. We only realized that we had both been doing it after I came back for Christmas break and we "compared notes", so to speak. So our entire family started kneeling for what we thought was Holy Communion. After a few weeks, one of these Modernists took one of my brothers aside and interrogated him about what this "kneeling business" was all about. He reported this incident back to my dad, and my dad said, "That's it. I've had enough of them." While we had been attending the Indult, an elderly gentleman told us that we didn't have to go just once a week because there was a Tridentine Mass in Akron at an Independent Chapel (Father Leo Carley). We had shied away because we were told that it was not really part of the Catholic Church. But the "kneeling business" episode finally got my dad to pull the trigger, and we started going to Mass there and left our NO parish.
Now, this priest there, a flaming Modernist who refused to genuflect when passing in front of the tabernacle, and who also refused to do the ablution of the chalice after Communion (saying that we don't wash dishes at the table when we eat), once took me to see the seminary when he learned that I had considered a vocation. That's what completely turned me off to the NO priesthood. He spoke fondly about how they would bring loads of sand into the gym and have beach parties there (no doubt with a bunch of shirtless sodomites prancing around in front of one another), and how the seminarians (who weren't sodomites) had girlfriends, etc. My brothers and I were always "at war" with this priest. So, during Mass when he refused to do the ablution, sometimes we'd take the water cruet up there anyway and just stand there for 3-5 minutes waiting to do the ablution, and remained there even after he left to return to his "presidential chair" (presider chair), and only left after shrugging our shoulders for the entire congregation to see, occasionally turning toward the congregation making expressions of confusion about why he wasn't doing it. We'd mess with him by moving furniture around the sanctuary to throw off some of his carefully-planned liturgical productions. When we weren't serving, our entire family would often mess up their logistics for going to Communion because if the priest wasn't distributing Communion on our side of the church, we would deliberately cut across half the church, disrupting their lines, to avoid going to the lay minister. There was one time my mother was praying in the smaller weekday chapel and, as was this priest's custom, he'd run around in front of the tabernacle without genuflecting. At one point, he tripped up right in front of the tabernacle and faceplanted, almost in the pose of making a full prostration, and we all felt that was God's Hand forcing him to kneel. There was also a story we likened that to from Malachi Martin's Hostage to the Devil book where at one point a demon prostrated before a crucifix. When asked what he was doing, the demon stated that he was examining the patterns on the carpet. So we would joke that this priest was just examining patterns on the carpet in the chapel. During my trip to his seminary, he told me about his "vocation," that he told God that he would enter the seminary if he could sell all his furniture. Just after he made that promise, someone called asking to buy his furniture. We would always joke in imitation of this incident, pretending to call him and then saying in a deep/gruff voice (imitating a demon), "I want your couch." In any case, this poor soul eventually left the priesthood (unsurprisingly) to get married (surprisingly to a woman), but he was absolutely instrumental in our family's conversion to Traditional Catholicism. So perhaps that was God setting up the furniture sale.
I went back to college then and sought out an SSPX chapel there. I didn't have a car, so I made the combination of train and bus rides that took me about 90 minutes each way to get to a hotel Mass in Chicago every week. It was at that time that my thoughts of a vocation to the priesthood were rekindled, since the Traditional priest's sense of vocation was perfectly in line with what I had desired, rather than the Novus Ordo parody of it. I accelerated my time in college, finishing in 3 years, so I could attend the SSPX seminary in Winona. I was there for a few years, but it didn't work out in the end.
Strangely, before we became Traditional, I had long been attracted to Latin. I took 4 years of Latin and 3 of classical Greek in High School. Then I won a full scholarship (as "Classics" scholarship) to Loyola University in Chicago (another Jesuit school). So I double-majored there in Latin and Greek, taking some classes in computer science and math the the University of Akron during the summers, while also attending daily Mass at Father Carley's chapel, which was not too far from the University. After seminary didn't work out, I spent 3 years as a graduate student at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., having gotten a full scholarship there due to my GRE scores and undergraduate gradepoint average. I finished all the coursework for the Ph.D., but then never completed my tests or dissertation ... because it would have taken me another 7 years, and I was already 28 years old at that time. I went there because it was the only program in the country that focused on Biblical/Patristic Greek and Patristic/Medieval Latin. But, as a result, you had to basically take two sets of tests that were the equivalent each of the full Ph.D. at most universities, one in Classical, the other in Patristic/Medieval. And at that point, I had no real means of support other than having to get a job, and thus relegated to working full time, I figured it would take me another 7 years to finish everything up.
So that's my basic story.
Topic: Has your experience in the novus ordo been anything like mine? (Read 1921 times)