Back in October, I caught up with an old buddy of mine from high school that I haven't seen since before the pandemic. We grabbed a movie, went to dinner, and drove around our old hometown reminiscing and talking about how the place had changed. My friend is Catholic but...well, his faith has been hot and cold through most of his life—periods of intense zeal punctuated by episodes of falling away and years of non-practice; emotional reconversions and pledges to "get serious about the faith," followed by another inevitable fall, occasioned either by some serious sin or just sheer laziness.
While we were at dinner, he told me a fascinating anecdote about the Latin Mass from the most unexpected place...a strip club. When traveling on the west coast last year, he told me that he had stopped off at a truck stop strip club, as he has (unfortunately) always been accustomed to visiting such places. But upon entering, he found he wasn't in the mood for the festivities and simply sat at the bar nursing a drink and feeling dejected about his life.
It was a slow weeknight, and one of the strippers accosted him, trying to ply her wares for a private dance. He quickly brushed her aside and expressed his disinterest. Instead of moving along, however, she kept prodding him, asking about his work, background, and what he was doing there. Eventually he opened up, and from what he described, the two ended up having a fairly deep and mutually rewarding conversation. She told him she was studying for a master's degree at a nearby university and was stripping to help with tuition. It turned out she was actually very sharp, conversant in a wide range of subjects. Eventually the discussion shifted to religion (as I recall, she noticed a scapular or medal he was wearing, which, to his credit, he always faithfully wore regardless of how he was doing in life). She asked him, "Are you Catholic?" and he, somewhat ashamed, admitted he was.
"Oh I don't judge you, every kind of person comes in here," she said. "But I wanted to know, are you a traditional Catholic?"
It was not the sort of question he expected to hear from a stripper. Somewhat awkwardly, he explained that he was not always the most faithful Catholic, but that when he did go to church, yes, he preferred the Traditional Latin Mass.
She perked up instantly and said, "Oh! I dated a guy who was a traditional Catholic! He used to take me to the Traditional Latin Mass. It was so interesting." She went on explaining what an impact the Latin Mass had made on her and how she'd never forgotten the images and sensory experience of the liturgy. She said no other church service had ever moved her like the Traditional Latin Mass. Finally the stripper concluded by saying, somewhat wistfully, "I am not religious by any means, but if I ever were, I'd want to be a traditional Catholic and go to the Latin Mass."
There's many interesting aspects to this story, but the one that sticks out to me is simply this: a unique trait of our times is that the intellegensia have talked themselves into denying truths that are patently obvious to every common person.
Related: "Even the Homeless Prefer the Latin Mass" (USC, July 2022)
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