I’ve never understood

…these polls. If you are a Catholic and you grasp the first thing about the implications of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, how can you be anything *but* hopeful? You believe that death–freakin’ death–has been conquered. Isn’t everything else kind of small beer in comparison?

It’s one of the most baffling and telltale things about Rad Trads. I *expect* liberal Catholics who conceive of the faith as a social club to have their hopes wax and wane with the economy, popularity polls, and various trendinesses. If you have no supernatural dimension in your Catholicism and see it as a sort of ethnicity, then yeah, your “hopes” (such as they are) will rise and fall.

What I don’t get and have never gotten is the weird combination of proclamations of “orthodoxy” with utter despair and bitterness that so often seems to characterize Rad Trads. Dudes! I repeat: We’re talking about the conquest of death and the triumph of everlasting love! But, for so many Rad Trads, if you act happy about that, you are guilty of Kumbayah Catholicism. True happiness can only be found in complaining that 1956 Cleveland piety is lost to us forever and the world going to hell in a handbasket. All mention of hope is empty happy talk and is to be despised and bitterly mocked.

I just don’t get that.