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This is tiresome. I know what tradition is. It is what the Church has always prayed, always believed, always taught. I know what it isn't--a fabrication of the moment, a novelty, something never known before in the Catholic Church. It is not at all mysterious, except to those who have been brainwashed in the new religion. The new Mass, for instance, is not Traditional and no amount of modernist propaganda can make it so. It introduces a doctrinal perspective that is not at all Catholic and had in fact been condemned already by Trent. What people like you want is for people like me to stop thinking, to believe that authorities--who are not famous for telling the truth--can decide even what tradition itself is. But tradition is what has always been, handed-down by the Holy Spirit, not something that is made up to suit the present agenda. Catholics have always believed in the Real Presence, for instance. They have always fiercely guarded this belief. Only in modernist Rome is this essential doctrine ignored and left to wither, even as it is a belief which is fast disappearing among Catholics. Yet it had been an essential Catholic doctrine for two thousand years. So go on all you want about authority. Authority exists to serve the faith, not the other way around. If it violates its trust and defies even previous popes and councils, then it must be disobeyed. It is that simple. The faith comes first. This is because the laws of God's supercede all else, even duly appointed temporal authority.

It does become tiresome when someone who claims to be Catholic pretends to the right to judge what he is not competant to judge. If I am a lawyer, I may SAY that Roe v. Wade is unconstititional, beased on MY reading of law. That does not mean MY reading is in any way authoitative. Only a court is authoritative. Now I know this is not simply a matter of legal authority, but one does not get anywhere simply by railing against competant authority. I agree w ith you about many particular criticism of the new mass. I think it simplistic to blame decline in faith in the Trusde Presence,for instance, simply on it. The basic problem is not the mass but the failure of priests and nuns and religion teachers to support the doctrine in a clear and unambiguous way.