For Brian Craig

Sorry, my mistake, then.  Please accept my apologies if any of my misdirected rhetoric was any too personal.

Unfortunately, there are enough in real life who are actually more over-the-top and exaggerated than your parody that I didn't recognize it as such.  The rhetoric was so realistic that I missed that.  It was "too good," perhaps.  With the proper context, I rather like it.  The choice of the quite conservative Bl. Pius IX to trump the huge reformer St. Pius X was a nice touch.

Aside from that, I entirely agree with what I think the point was - that once you have decided that you represent real Catholicism and the pope does not, any place you decide to settle is arbitrary enough that someone can out-whatever you in whatever you think you are unbeatable in.  And once you start peeling away layers that really are an organic part of the whole but that you think ought not to be there, how do you decide where to stop?  Arbitrarily, to be sure.  There is a friend of mine who went over to the Lefebvrists; for him, every pope up to and including Pope Pius XII was a good, real pope and every one after has been a bad, defective pope.  It is no good pointing out to him the efforts of reform of the pre-Vatican II popes, or how they led up to the Council, because they were good popes and the ones afterwards were bad ones, period.

Comments

[Brian]

You'll be interested to know that More Traditional Than Traditio has set up shop at its new blog:

moretradthantrad.blogspot.com

[Thomas]

I had good chuckle at the wrestling bit.