A Follow-Up

I meant to write a follow-up to the previous post awhile ago, but I guess I kept procrastinating about it. Sorry about that.

Obviously, liberal and conservative are the left and right. One can be closer or farther left or right, and one can have one foot in the boat and the other dangling either left or right. In other words, one may be liberal or conservative but have one leg in the boat of Catholic thinking; this gives us a nice assortment, eh?

Inside the Church itself, it would seem that there are four factions.
1: The liberals.
2: The conservatives.
3: The in-betweens.
4: The Traditionalists.

Liberals
Liberals are those who..... I don't know why they're in the Church. I guess there are nice things that they get from it, but they want the pleasures of the world at the same time.

Conservatives
The conservatives seem to be in the Church so that they can be right; the only problem is that they often are right. However, they miss an awful lot.

In-betweens
Now this is an interesting group! This seems to be the group that recognizes that both liberals and conservatives have their good points. So what do they do? They try to mix them both together and say that the Church is really about this mix. Are they right? There is the mix of "liberal" and "conservative", but this is all that they seem to see. The recent surge of Catholicism seems to have produced many Catholics of this group. What is it? A reaction against the strive between the liberals and conservatives.

Traditionalist
So, who is this weird bunch? Who are these Medieval monks and peasants? They are those who try to operate the way the Church has been ever since its founding. The words "liberal" and "conservative" are no more than labels to individual aspects of the Church to him. Are they open to addition and new discovery? Of course. Man does not know everything about God; he knows very little in fact. So, man chooses to accept whatever God reveals to him, whether it be directly or indirectly; always building and never tearing down that which has weathered the tests of time.

Before I cease my typing, I would like to add a final thought. Although the Extraordinary Rite of the Mass is definitely a Traditionalist element, attending it does not automatically make one a "Traditionalist". In fact, accepting all of the old teachings of the Church doesn't make on a Traditionalist either. What makes one a Traditionalist is his use of the Church, and that is to bring him to the Beatific Vision.