Defende Nos in Proelio...

Growing up in the northeast you couldn't swing a dead cat around by a rosary without hitting a Catholic church. Here in North Cacalacky we are not so blessed. It as thus made me appreciate more the majesty and thoughtfulness of my parish in New York, or at the very least its professional choir. But having enjoyed a lovely evening of singing carols at Love Feast last month, I am saddened to announce that one tiny little Methodist church has more singers who can carry a tune than the entire Catholic population of Durham.

And it's certainly not for lack of trying. Oh, do they try. Encouraging as it is to see an enthusiastic congregation at each Catholic church in the city, genuineness of faith is no excuse for laziness. Making mass a pleasant experience requires more than just showing up and at the very least requires the cantor to get her vowels right, particularly if she isn't bothering to pay attention to the key. Why, oh why, must we sing Gaelic folk songs and Caribbean allelujahs when there is nary an Irishman or a Jamaican in the place? And surely someone close to the "choral director" is aware of a mass setting that was not written by Marty Haugen.

But the hand-holding. Oh the hand-holding! As if I didn't have enough crosses to bear down here, I have to suffer through the whole congregation grabbing each others' hands, sometimes across the aisle, during the Our Father, as if that's the best time to invoke traditional camp-fire activity. And color me a literalist, but I don't think you can call it the Agnus Dei (tr. "Lamb of God") if you don't say, um, "Lamb of God." Look, if I wanted to kum-ba-ya like in a hippy-dippy liturgical clusterf*ck, I'd be Protestant.

So, anyway, this was the (extremely uncharitable) mindset I was in when visiting the future in-laws in an even more southern state (Georgia) for Christmas. We came dangerously close to going to an Episcopal church for midnight mass until God stepped in and totally got us lost and made us run out of gas. Providence is either truly mysterious or simply a synonym for absent-minded. Needless to say we went to the little local church the next morning and prayed for the best...

... Boy, you sure do find those RadTrads in the strangest places. Now I admit I used to troll the Catholic blogs back in the day (still do sometimes) so I knew they existed but I'd never seen any up close. And these guys were good! It was very subtle; you had to know what to look for. Everything was just a little bit off, like those bells I haven't heard since I was a kid or when the little altar boy stuck a plate under my hand just in case I spilled a few crumbs of the Eucharist. Little stuff that made you go hmmmm.

Again, everything was just a little off, that is until the end of the mass, when the entire congregation prayed, in full Stepford unison, for St. Michael the Archangel to protect them from the demons and evil spirits that prowl the world in order to prey on good souls. Oh yes, they said "prowl".

It was that moment when we knew we had to flee lest we be discovered, moderate cradle Catholics in the bowels of the RadTrad beast!

But the kicker (and this is where I really believe that the good Lord is testing me by fire) is that in the midst of a clearly conservative, traditional congregation complete with totally suppressed prayers to heavenly warriors, I still had to hold hands during the Our Father! Will the indignities never end!