Statement of Purpose
Over-Zealous Convert Syndrome - it began to set in like a plague in my spiritual life. Whereas beforehand, I had been more or less just frustrated and intellectually prideful on my journey into the Catholic Church, I now began to be angry, uncharitable, and ultimately headed down a slippery slope.
I had started writing this blog back in 2011, and one can see the progression. Even then, I lamented the fact that the online Catholic catechesis courses I was in were advocating "centering prayer", which sparked a massive rant about the influence of the New Age on Catholic spirituality. My rants became more frequent as I encountered more and more strange things - spiritualities, events, and experiences.
I became less-and-less concerned about my relationship with Christ, and more concerned about venting over all the spiritual and liturgical problems in the Church. My spiritual life began to die. If you want to see what this period was like, read my earlier posts on this blog - though, I did take some down out of sheer embarassment at who I had become, there are a few left.
I generally kept more to my interior prayer and tried with all my might to not notice all the little things that I had not noticed before - things that indicated that there had been a force in the Church that was eating away at its insides like a horde of termites. I just hoped for a renewal, a kind of resurrection, a chance to help "rebuild the Church." Some said to me that it was a product of a dying generation that would soon be gone, which to me always sounded far too harsh: "just wait for the people who changed it all to die, and then we can be really Catholic again." I couldn't hold to something that cold, no matter how frustrated I was.
And yet my eyes widened at all the tribal in-fighting in the Catholic Church between "Trads," "RadTrads," "Semi-Trads and Half-Trads," "Progressivists and Liberals," "Modernists," and the vanguards of mainstream Catholicism which I found out
I had started writing this blog back in 2011, and one can see the progression. Even then, I lamented the fact that the online Catholic catechesis courses I was in were advocating "centering prayer", which sparked a massive rant about the influence of the New Age on Catholic spirituality. My rants became more frequent as I encountered more and more strange things - spiritualities, events, and experiences.
I became less-and-less concerned about my relationship with Christ, and more concerned about venting over all the spiritual and liturgical problems in the Church. My spiritual life began to die. If you want to see what this period was like, read my earlier posts on this blog - though, I did take some down out of sheer embarassment at who I had become, there are a few left.
I generally kept more to my interior prayer and tried with all my might to not notice all the little things that I had not noticed before - things that indicated that there had been a force in the Church that was eating away at its insides like a horde of termites. I just hoped for a renewal, a kind of resurrection, a chance to help "rebuild the Church." Some said to me that it was a product of a dying generation that would soon be gone, which to me always sounded far too harsh: "just wait for the people who changed it all to die, and then we can be really Catholic again." I couldn't hold to something that cold, no matter how frustrated I was.
And yet my eyes widened at all the tribal in-fighting in the Catholic Church between "Trads," "RadTrads," "Semi-Trads and Half-Trads," "Progressivists and Liberals," "Modernists," and the vanguards of mainstream Catholicism which I found out