Since the advent of Traditionis Custodes our Bishop has retained two locations in our diocese where parishioners can have access to the Tridentine Rite with committed priests who offer both liturgical forms each Sunday. This gracious gesture reflects the pastoral sense of a Good Shepherd who knows the smell of his sheep and continues to meet their spiritual needs, even in the face of an abusive governance from the Church out of Rome. I fully realize it is a challenging time to be Catholic, but I also recognize the gift of being one currently as well.
Part 1: Discovering The Mass of the Ages
For the first thirty years of my life, I was a functioning pagan in-spite of receiving all of my sacraments in the Novus Ordo Church. I had fallen into a very immoral life but began to crawl out of it with the help of a Catholic men’s group led by a now deceased priest. The priest was the chaplain at a Catholic high school where I was currently teaching. After an initial reversion in this environment, my faith was tested in September 2008 by facing my greatest fear, being the parent of a seriously disabled child. That fear manifested itself in a devastating prenatal diagnosis sixteen weeks into my wife’s second pregnancy. We were told our child was diagnosed with a birth defect so severe that 80% of the couples who receive this diagnosis choose abortion. We chose to pray for a miracle. That journey is chronicled in my first book, Waiting for Eli: A Father’s Journey from Fear to Faith. That child is now approaching his 15th birthday.
Following his birth, I began speaking all over the country sharing that journey. I eventually found myself appearing on EWTN with Raymond Arroyo, as a keynote speaker at the March for Life in Washington DC in 2014 and functioning as a full-blown Catholic apologist while still teaching full-time. Nudged by students and cooperating with Divine providence I shifted from the history department in one Catholic school to a Theology department in another one.
At this point the world was three years into the Francis Pontificate and most faithful Catholics had yet to realize how scandalizing his method of governance over the next seven years would be; I was one of them. Over that period, numerous events have revealed the damage and division brought about because of ill advised statements and constant ambiguity on doctrine.
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