An Open Letter to Traditional Catholics

You are very amusing, but I am sorry to inform you, children: you aren't really traditional Catholics. You can't be. The culture around you prevents you from ever following traditional Catholic practice and belief as if it were the very core of your existence. You cannot live Catholicism as Catholics have for most of Catholic history:

• You don't live in a subsistence-level society, as every Catholic did for 1800 years.
• You aren't constantly threatened by famine, disease, or war.
• 80% of the people your family interacts with are not farmers. 
• Locust plagues don't eat your crops, you don't live in a dirt-floored single room home, with one bed shared by the whole family. 
• You own closets and closets full of clothes, warm blankets, winter coats, socks and shoes. 
• You heat your house with natural gas or electricity, not animal dung. 
• Your animals don't share living quarters with you. 
• Your children don't regularly see farm animals procreate in front of them, nor do they see animals slaughtered before them, nor do they butcher those same animals. 
• You've never been so driven to hunger that you have eaten your own pet animals.
• You do not watch your family members die in front of you on an annual basis.
• You don't watch one-third of your children die before their first birthday.
• Your wife has never wet-nursed someone else's baby, nor has any woman wet-nursed yours.
• You aren't familiar with leprosy, gangrene, untreated tooth infections. 
• You or someone you know has had braces for their teeth.
• Gallbladder operations are laparoscopic outpatient surgeries.
• You don't have a lifespan that averages 45 years.
• You don't advocate for the removal of pews from your churches (a Protestant innovation unknown to 1800 years of Catholics)
• You aren't preparing your children to be married by age 12, even though canon law permitted precisely that for most of the last 2000 years of Catholic practice.
• Your family is literate - most Catholics weren't. 
• Your family buys/owns copious amounts of books - most Catholics never saw a book outside the Bible chained to the lectern in church.
• Your town square isn't centered on the local Catholic church.
• Your priest is not the most important political figure in your village.
• Most of the town you live in is not related to you.
• You know about and use vitamins, minerals and pain relievers, like aspirin and ibuprofen.
• You eat bananas, oranges and kiwis. 
• In December. 
• You give up chocolate for Advent and Lent. 
• You are reading this on a computer. 
• Your family has other things to talk about than farming and the priest's sermon, unlike 1900 years of traditional Catholics, who had no knowledge of physics, chemistry, cellular biology, germ theory of disease, plate tectonics, calculus, statistics, citizen's democracy, economics, or several other dozen domains of knowledge.

No matter what you do, Catholic knowledge can never be as central and solitary, Scripture can never be as dominant as the sole source for explaining the world around you, as both were for all Catholics for almost all of Catholic history. We simply know so much more about so many more things in so many more ways than any Catholic ever has, that Catholic faith and Catholic Scripture can never, ever dominate our lives the way it dominated the lives of all Catholics for most of recorded history. 

And, no, having more babies than the surrounding culture doesn't make a difference. The Disney Epcot center version of ancient Catholicism that parades itself as "Traditional Catholicism" will not grow larger while the surrounding culture grows smaller. All of human society would have to lose 90% of what it knows for that to happen. It hasn't worked out for the Amish, it won't work for you. And let's face it, you are NOT going to make anywhere near the same sacrifices even the Amish make in order to maintain your "traditional Catholic culture". You won't give up electricity, you won't give up access to books, clothes, modern HVAC, you won't restrict yourself to farming and blacksmithing, you won't give up your computers or automobiles or modern medicine or even your reading glasses and ball-point pens. 

You just aren't "traditional Catholics" in any serious sense, nor will you ever be.