The story of how I became a traditionalist: Part 2
As what I had mentioned earlier, I did not even know that the Latin Mass was the mass of our ancestors due to the history curriculum being limited unlike the stock knowledge I have today, for example in my Grade 5 textbook, it mentions about the work of the Spanish missionaries in the Philippines:
''Nagtayo sila ng mga simbahan at ng mga bisita sa maliliit na barangay at doon nagdaraos ng misa at iba pang gawain upang palaganapin ang relihiyon.''
(They (the missionaries) built churches and towns in the small barangays and there, they celebrated mass and other things to propagate their religion).
It does not even mention that the missionaries celebrated the Latin Mass as opposed to this book about Bolhoon:
''During the Spanish colonial times up to the early 1960s, mass was said in Latin according to the Tridentine rite.''
-Bolhoon, a Cultural Sketch, Paul Gerschwiler
My grandmother remained a home aloner, not because she thought traditionalist priests were illicit, but because she thought the Latin Mass was no more. She died on April 26, 2018 at age of 83 of pneumonia on the feast of Our Lady of Good Counsel. She was given a Novus Ordo burial by Father Luigi, an Italian-German Discalced Augustinian priest who said the indult mass.
From 2019 to 2022 I had brushes with Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Protestantism, Anti-Catholicism and apologetics.
In 2019, I got interested in Chinese religions like Buddhism and Taoism due to one of the classrooms in our school having a Mulan theme. I studied the life of Buddha and Laozi, the fathers of Buddhism and Taoism and often visited their temples. In May 2019, I was exposed to Anti-Catholicism for the first time through one of Jack Chick's tracts. I got to know anti-Catholic beliefs such as idolatry, Inquisition and the wacky Alberto Rivera. It was also through Jack Chick I learned homosexuality is sinful. I briefly converted to Islam due to our class having an Arab themed performance, and I also learned about false preachers from Africa and Latin America who claimed they saw visions of heaven and hell, and in December 2019, I learned about the Latin Mass from learnreligions.com. I first attended the indult Latin Mass on March 1, 2020, first Sunday of Lent, and then lockdown came, and nearly fell prey to African false preachers and Protestants. I also had brushes with apologetics, notably, the so called Catholic Faith Defenders or CFD who were Novus Ordo apologists who debated Protestants, members of the Iglesia Ni Cristo sect, Adventists, Muslims, etc. But with the grace of God in October 2022, I finally learned about Pre-Vatican II Catholic teaching through the website, Tradition In Action, run by Atila Guimaraes and Marian Horvat. I also learned about the apparitions of Our Lady of Good Success and Mother Mariana of Quito, Ecuador, and that of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and their daughter Marie Therese, whom I have a strong devotion to. Starting out as a recognize-and-resist or what I call a resistancist, I attended my first SSPX Mass online for the dawn Christmas mass. I later attended the indult for a while in early 2023, then in May to early June of 2023, I discovered the teaching that a heretic cannot become pope through Paul IV's Cum Ex Apostolatus Officio.
To be continued
