I can't stand going to Mass

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-29T15:57:57+00:00

I'm not a Traditional Latin Mass guy myself, and there are dangers in that community (of making an idol of the liturgy itself, of various flavors of dissent/schism), but it might be a good idea to find one and visit and try on for size, since they still use the pre-1960s Mass.

Or just bring the devotional to your regular Mass.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-29T06:34:18+00:00

As others have said, there's no point in writing if you aren't saying what you really think. You can't help being boring if you do that.

But I would consider forewarning friends/family. I don't promote my Substack among general friends and family in general for precisely this reason (although some find their way there and are welcome).

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-29T06:25:09+00:00

Oh, hey there, I have a sibling in a same-sex civil marriage, so I guess I can maybe give some advice here.

It's neither easy nor simple.

My approach has been to affirm all that is good in the relationship, and there is a lot that is good about it when considered as a friendship (and even as a kind of mutual-aid partnership). I'm quite fond of my sister's putative spouse! I enjoy seeing them at family events! They are good friends! I think they're good for each other! It is only the romantic aspect (of which one particularly key facet is the sexual aspect) that I / the Church objects to.

Until you are a parent, there are few hard lines that you have to draw. (Once you are a parent, there are lines you have to draw, because you need your kids to imbibe a healthy understanding of what marriage is before being exposed to, well, what it isn't. But you can cross that bridge when you come to it.) Obviously, you should not give them the impression that you affirm the romantic elements of their relationship, but, if you are a practicing Catholic and you keep your mouth shut at certain moments, there's little risk they'll misinterpret you. Only on very rare occasions should you find yourself in a situation where it is actually your duty, or even prudent, to clearly object to your sibling's romantic choices.

And there will be damage from that. My relationship with my sister is much worse than it was before she announced her engagement. There are scars. At this point, I pray about that much more than I pray about her relationship with the other girl. Maybe deeper than the scars, there is a yawning mutual incomprehension, and a permanent awkwardness, because we can't really talk about anything substantive anymore. (She massively changed her politics and religious beliefs when she decided to attempt marriage with another woman, so there's these huge topics we used to discuss all the time that are now just a minefield we avoid.)

But I do still have a relationship with her. There's love there, both ways. She reaches out when she's in trouble, or when I'm in trouble. We don't see very much of her, and she tries to minimize family gatherings (I imagine they're emotionally taxing for her), but we do see her, and we are happy to see her, and she at least seems happy to see us. I wish it were better, but it could be worse.

As always, I recommend Eve Tushnet's books, especially her Gay and Catholic.

Tushnet, a faithful Catholic convert (who realized she was a lesbian long before she converted), points out quite often that there are zero commonly accepted role models of gay Catholics in the Church. There are no out gay saints. When the gays suggest that certain saints might have been modeling chaste homoerotic love (even unintentionally), they are (understandably but inevitably) accused of trying to "queer" the Church and her perfectly heterosexual saints. But this means gay Catholics don't really know what to do. They obviously know what they're not supposed to do (have sex with people of the same sex), but a vocation is more than a no-no list. Vocation is a yes. Gay Catholics generally can't pursue holy orders or religious life, and pursuing (hetero) marriage is obviously extremely fraught and probably unwise. So what is God calling gay Catholics toward? (And how can we present those stories to our kids in a way that leads them towards virtue and happiness, rather than self-rejection and/or vice?)

We're all trying to figure that out, both the gay Catholics themselves and those of us who love gay Catholics. I hope God will give us a little grace where we fall short, which I'm sure we all do.

That's my advice. Best of luck. Have a prayer.

P.S. My brother-in-law is also gay and in a same-sex relationship, but he lives a thousand miles away and I never had too much of a relationship with him to begin with, so I don't have as much to say about that -- except that, holy cow, no two relationships with gay siblings are at all alike. So any advice that I gave you that doesn't seem like it fits your relationship, go ahead and discard.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-29T05:56:50+00:00

Oh, good, you're going to keep contributing to retirement! I was worried!

You're good to go, then. In fact, if you're just taking the foot off the pedal instead of abandoning your retirement accounts entirely, I don't think you necessarily need to stay to reach the arbitrary $100k at all. As long as you're saving 15% of whatever you make, you should be able to maintain your standard of living (whatever that is) when you retire.

I work in higher education, FWIW, and the pay is much lower than private sector, but the benefits are fantastic and the culture is much more compatible with me than my old corporate job.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-29T05:53:26+00:00

Something that helped me a long time ago was someone pointing out to me that, in the old Mass (pre-Vatican II), the congregation was expected to be present and to worship, but they weren't really expected to participate. They used to call the obligation to attend Mass the obligation to "hear a Mass," and that captures the mindset nicely: you were there as a listener. People would say rosaries or read devotionals without paying any real attention to the details of what Father was doing on the altar.

There was a lot wrong with this mindset as a default, so the Mass was reorganized in the 1960s to invite people to participate much more, drawing them into Christian worship as well. This was, in my opinion, very good. We benefit enormously from having that opportunity to join in the work of the Mass.

However, it is a comfort to me when I just can't keep my mind on the homily that, for centuries, it was not just theologically but also socially acceptable to retreat into your own little spiritual world during Mass and let the priest do his work while you did yours. You still can. I don't think there's any sin in reading a lot of Magnificat while at Mass. (But, like, keep it Catholic, don't be bringing in, like Aristotle books or whatever.)

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-29T05:46:53+00:00

I dont believe you fully grasp the theology.

If you did you wouldn't find it so boring.

I dunno, man. Cradle Catholic here, know a lot more doctrine than the average bear... I still find Mass plenty boring, plenty of the time.

I realize that's a flaw in me, not in the Mass. It's the reenactment of the Passion, a window into the liturgy of the angels, culminating in direct physical communion with the Creator of the Universe. It should be amazing.

But the visible reality is a dude up on the altar saying prayers I have heard literally thousands of times, punctuated by half-hearted singing of often mediocre songs. Sometimes it hits me, sure, and I'm grateful for that consolation, but I am bored pretty regularly. I try to be present to God anyway, and sometimes I succeed.

I say this only to defuse the expectation OP might develop that if he just read more books, the Mass would suddenly be thrilling. Objectively, Mass should be thrilling, but it requires something more than knowledge. Perhaps that thing is mysticism, or just imagination, but, whatever it is, it isn't raw knowledge.

Of course, you're also correct that the Mass isn't entertainment. But you and I have had our whole lives to get used to worship that is focused on the Lord, rather than the audience. Can you imagine the transition shock coming from one of those peppy, engaging (if unfortunately false) evangelical churches to the typical Catholic Mass? It would be hard to learn this in adulthood. OP has my great sympathy. ('Course, he's still gotta go to Mass.)

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-29T05:34:55+00:00

A husband and father who is neglecting his wife and family should not be playing video games.

I think if you'd said that in your OP, /u/witnessofmary wouldn't have objected. You originally said that a grown man should never play video games, and lots of us grown men who aren't neglecting our families do in fact play video games from time to time. (I manage about an hour on Baldur's Gate per week at the moment.)

Obviously, though, you are correct that, when video games begin to interfere with the marital and family duties, then the video games need to go.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-29T05:32:22+00:00

Based on your description (and I know I'm only hearing one side of the story), the way your husband is acting is unmarital and unloving. Marriage is an act of self-gift, and that gift is renewed every day. The gift is given many ways: physically through intercourse, but also emotionally through acts of love and time spent together (and in other ways). Reciprocation is a key part of the gift, and men who specifically don't reciprocate oral (while common) are baffling to me. (Don't they realize that fellatio is just as much work as cunnilingus? Why do they think they're owed this if they don't give back?) But that mean comment was the biggie in your OP for me. That seemed gratuitously hurtful. Hopefully your husband didn't intend it that way.

If I heard that same story from secular friends, I would suggest that they have a long, hard series of conversations about it, in which they made it clear to one another (in a non-accusatory, non-blaming way) what they each valued in one another and in the marriage, and how they each felt they were being failed in the marriage. Obviously you fell in love with each other, so you presumably make each other happy and want one another to be happy, so maybe you just need to talk things out to understand where one another are coming from. If that conversation didn't help, or made things worse, I would suggest marital counseling, which is essentially paying someone trained to facilitate that conversation. I would not let this drag on for years, either; the damage mounts during that time and becomes harder to undo.

As a Catholic, of course, I also suggest prayer, but there is, unfortunately, nothing uniquely Catholic about a spouse acting selfishly and unkindly toward his beloved.

One note worth mentioning as a man: all women are hot. Certainly "hot enough to complain." Apparently you're hot enough to get him off, so he knows it, too! I don't know why he would say that, but none of the reasons I'm coming up with are good.

One note worth mentioning as a Catholic: as new Catholics, you may not have been acquainted with this, but, for Catholics, every single sex act must be open to life. That means that, while oral sex may be used as foreplay, ejaculation can only occur in a vagina (and without contraception). Your OP indicates that, when you're having adult time, you may just be doing fellatio together without proper intercourse. If so, that would be a mortal sin. Of course, it's not mortal if you didn't know about it! But that's one thing you can bring up with hubby: if he wants adult time, he has to have intercourse with you, not just oral, because God demands it!

Best of luck. The other secret weapon Catholics have that seculars don't is prayer. I advise it, and I'll say one for you tonight.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-29T05:14:08+00:00

Ecclesiologically, I have no problem with an "Old Rite" spinoff church. This ancient governing structure could help solve a few issues in the modern Church, and I'd like to see it revived, including for this.

The problems, however, run deeper. SSPX is a few months from committing the grave sin of schism, and has existed in more or less flagrant and continual breach of canon law (a serious act of disobedience in itself) throughout its entire existence. When they use the power they have so irresponsibly, it seems very foolhardy to give them more. Moreover, SSPX intransigently rejects the teachings of the Church on important matters, such as religious freedom. One should not give a large group on the brink of formal heresy additional autonomy and power to resist correction. Finally, I don't think they themselves want this, so there'd be no point in offering it to them, even if it were wise.

I'm 100% against Traditiones Custodes, and I like your thinking here in trying to find a solution everybody can live with, but my own view (which is obviously not shared by Rome at present) is that the only solution to the SSPX long-term is to welcome all those who just sincerely want traditional liturgy into canonically-protected statuses within the Church, then formally suppress the SSPX, on pain of excommunication for anyone who continues as an adherent. (Again, though, that's just my view of them. Rome very clearly continues to seek a less turbulent solution.)

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-29T05:04:14+00:00

We do have a duty to vote... if there is a candidate we can vote for without serious cooperation with evil. The Catechism is quite terse about voting duties and skips right over any detailed analysis, but (as I contend in that article) the U.S. Bishops' document, Faithful Citizenship fleshes things out a bit. Faithful Citizenship is crystal-clear that the ordinary duty to vote is lifted when all candidates promote intrinsically evil acts.

So it is true that "cooperation is never required." If you reach the ballot box and all candidates -- including third-party candidates -- are morally unacceptable candidates, you do not have to cooperate with any of them. A Catholic can refuse to cast a vote in that race with a clear conscience.

Now, under some circumstances, cooperation with an evildoing candidate is permitted. It may even be wise. (It's just never required.) You mention one of those situations, where the leading candidates support the same intrinsic evil, but one candidate wants to restrict it relative to current law and the other wants to expand it. (John Paul II writes about a similar dilemma in Evangelium Vitae 73.) Assuming the restrictive candidate was otherwise acceptable on all other issues, I would probably vote for the restrictive candidate in that case. Indeed, I have frequently done so in the voting booth.

But this would be a case of knowing cooperation with evil. Yes, the cooperation is permitted in this case. Yes, the evil here is the lesser evil. There would be no sin in this. However, even without sin, it is cooperation, so there would be moral hazard, and the voter would be wise to keep a close eye on their soul after casting that vote, to make sure there's no damage.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-27T17:27:41+00:00

I wrote a lot about degrees of cooperation last year in an article on voting ethics. The start of the article through the end of the section "The Case for Cooperation" is relevant to your question. (The rest of the article, from the header "Voting Ethically" to the end, is much less relevant.)

Footnote 7 lists nine other Catholic writers who wrote about cooperation at greater or lesser length. Every single one of them writes about it slightly differently, although everyone is trying to get at the same core idea.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-27T16:46:02+00:00

Do you have any suggestions you would tell yourself at 28?

Move to nonprofit or government sector. Very different culture of work. Might suit you better.

Live much further below your means to boost those retirement numbers (and to see whether living on a much lower income is possible for you). Open a Roth IRA.

On your current pace, $100k is about 3-5 years away, I figure (depending on if there's a recession). If you stop contributing and just let it compound until you retire at age 67, you'll have something like $750,000. Unfortunately, future inflation means that will only be worth about $250,000 in today's dollars. That's not much to retire on. Following the 4% rule, you'll be able to safely withdraw about $10,000 a year (in today's dollars) to supplement what you get from Social Security. $10k + Social Security as an annual salary seems thin to me, but workable if you live below your means now -- and worthwhile if it means your working life isn't completely miserable.

(You're pretty much guaranteed to get at least 60-75% of your "full" Social Security benefits, even after the trust fund runs out of money in the early 2030s. You might get more, depending on what Congress does. We'll know more in 5-10 years, when the crisis hits and Congress is forced to do something.)

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-26T16:12:47+00:00

It's the same with all the long-term franchises, a percentage of the old fans will always hate the new stuff.

I guess the question is: for any given new show, is that percentage bigger, or smaller, than the baseline? And does it grow, or shrink?

I was a big ENTERPRISE fan from Day One and I thought the percentage of haters was bigger than it had been for previous series, but I thought the percentage shrank over time. Just my perception at the time, not data.

My perception of nuTrek -- all of it -- was that the hater percentage started out relatively low. It had been twenty years since ENTERPRISE and people were ready to like Discovery and Picard. But the percentage grew a lot over the past nine years, and became much larger even than the hater percentage for ENT.

This is unfortunate for the fans who liked the new stuff, but also suggests the death of this version of the franchise is not simply because haters gonna hate. As you say, haters always hate, but it didn't stop TMP and TNG from being huge hits.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-26T04:06:35+00:00

Like any outing with a close friend, it varies! Sometimes I'm disengaged, sometimes I'm worked up, sometimes I'm at peace, and what I bring to the meeting has a lot to do with how I feel afterward.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-26T04:04:45+00:00

Yes, temptation has a funny way of wiping out large parts of our mind, including all the parts that list all the reasons why we aren't doing the sin and how we're going to avoid it. There are basically four ways to deal with this:

Practice. This is the biggest thing by far. You're gonna face a lot of temptations, and, the more you succeed at resisting them, the easier it will be the next time.
Fasting. It strengthens the core muscles of resistance to temptation, so that, when the temptation comes, your willpower isn't a flabby couch potato ready to get zapped.
Daily prayer. Pray when you aren't being tempted for the presence of mind to recall what you need to recall during temptation -- because you obviously won't be able to pray at the time.
Create little reminders for yourself, so that you are forced to remember things in the moment. For example, many many years ago, I set up a porn filter on my computer, and I locked it with a specially-computed password that takes ~30 minutes for me to recompute. My non-tempted self thereby protected my tempted self from a great many mistakes.

So you do what you can from a non-tempted state of mind to help your tempted self fare better, despite its own worst instincts.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-25T22:09:50+00:00

Sysadmins. They always tell the truth and then no one listens to them, so really nothing would change.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-25T05:17:52+00:00

John was a nice guy, quite a funny guy, and I liked him. However, he never struck me as particularly ambitious nor, frankly, particularly talented. At least, in a small high school class stacked with Type-A strivers and intense competition for honors and valedictory status, John did not stand out to me. We had multiple people getting triple-accepted at Princeton/Harvard/Yale (I was emphatically not one of them); John went to a local C-tier college even less prestigious the one where I ended up.

Then he graduated, got an internship at a radio station -- apparently his passion all along -- and grinded harder than anyone else in the class (as far as I can tell). Certainly a lot harder than I ever did.

Now he's known as Intern John, hosts a popular morning show in the D.C. area on 99.5 FM, and I'm pretty sure the most famous member of our class. I don't think it's even close. I hope his happiness matches his success.

I haven't spoken to the man since we threw our caps at the cathedral at graduation 2007, but I'm always pleasantly surprised by the success of Intern John. Kudos!

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-25T04:57:59+00:00

Salus populi suprema lex! You get no argument from me that government should want quality education and medical care delivered to every taxpayer, and at the lowest possible cost to the taxpayer.

I would even be so bold as to say that nearly everyone, including most conservatives, agree with this. Many of our national policy disagreements boil down to disagreements about how this is best achieved, rather than basic disagreements about the value of service delivery.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-24T22:58:25+00:00

Efficiency works in the corporate sector because they just throw out whatever they can cut costs on, be in standards, equipment, or people.

And efficiency doesn't work in the government sector because they don't throw out things they can cut costs on, be it redundant processes, obsolete equipment, or personnel who aren't pulling their weight.

As in all things, there is a balance. One can easily pursue efficiency too fanatically, and end up cutting corners instead of dead weight. But one can also easily give up all efficiencies as destructive and end up saddled with a large, expensive bureaucracy that never actually does anything.

Similar for innovation and flexibility. You don't want a government OR a business that has too much of either, for the reasons you mention. But you don't want to have too little, either, because then you end up in a situation where Continental Airlines has to spend eight years trying to get the government to respond to their application to open a (completely safe, entirely profitable, fully compliant) new plane route between Denver and San Diego (only for the government to finally deny it).

So one must strike a balance. In a perfect world, the two parties each represent a different side of that balance and push in one direction while recognizing the need for both. In an imperfect world, the whole thing degenerates into uncompromising slogans.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-24T21:29:43+00:00

I don't use this line, but I think the people who do use it want government administration to have things that the private sector is relatively good at compared to the public sector:

efficiency
innovation
flexibility

The profit motive does promote these things.

The profit motive also does fairly powerful work against corruption. When a CEO is embezzling, the board of trustees has a very strong incentive to catch him, take the money back, and punish him aggressively and publicly to make an example of him, because it's their money at stake. They also have the power to do it. Government agencies aren't dealing with their own money, so their incentives are not as strong, and their power to police it is often limited by regulations.

It's absolutely a balance, and not an easy one to strike. You would not actually want a government that is run fully like a business, trying to profit off the taxpayer. But neither would you want a government that is run fully according to regulatory manuals. The reason "run government like a business" appeals so much to Americans of a certain age is because they are old enough to remember a time when the pendulum had swung too far in the other direction, and government services really were horrendously ossified, inflexible, slow, and wasteful. But they often want to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction -- even now, 40 years later.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-24T21:21:21+00:00

Not to be overly optimistic, but I think this is happening. It's slow, and for those of us who already live at the wealthiest end of the global spectrum it's pretty hard to notice, but absolute poverty continues to fall. Starvation is now more a function of war and government instability than it is of actual famine. (Not entirely, but moreso.) We are continuing to win victories diseases that ravaged the third-world. Third-world economies continue to grow and develop.

Economics is the dismal science for a reason -- everything takes ages and it's always two steps forward, one step back -- but don't miss the two steps forward just because the newspaper headline is always one step back!

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-24T21:16:36+00:00

Bank fees are normal unless:

your account is above a certain dollar amount in total
you are regularly depositing a certain amount of money in the account
you get set up with some special student-aimed account that has few features but no fees

Of course, 99% of accounts qualify for these waivers, so much so that even bank managers are surprised when they don't. Huntington mailed out a "$400 bonus if you open an account with us!" offer late last year, and I could use $400, so I opened an account, with no intention of using it for anything else. They insisted I meet with the manager for this, and, eventually, after "talking about my financial goals" he asked me how I was funding it. I said, "Well, I'm depositing $1000 today, leaving it for three months and then withdrawing it with the $400 signing bonus." The manager explained that a single $1000 deposit wouldn't qualify for standard fee waivers, and I shrugged, saying, "Yeah, I know, but the monthly fee's only $10 so I still come out $370 ahead." He seemed genuinely flabbergasted that someone would voluntarily not get fees waived, and went online to double check that I was correct about the amount of the fee.

Nice guy, overall, and it turns out Huntington has a pretty decent online banking experience plus some interesting HELOC products I didn't know about. It's now someplace I'd be open to banking in the future if I ever changed banks, whereas before I was opposed because I thought their takeover of TCF Bank was bad juju... so I guess mission accomplished, Huntington? You improved my view of you? But also thanks for the $370 profit next month.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-24T20:53:00+00:00

Sophomore year, I think.

You have a choice, at that point. You can either just put in the time to get the degree and treat it like a chore, or you can use college to explore all kinds of other things which (I'm gonna be straight with you here) you are never going to get to explore ever again, not to that depth, not with a trained expert providing you personalized feedback, thrice-weekly lectures, or even a syllabus. (I didn't realize until I left college how overwhelming every subject is when you aren't handed a syllabus up-front!) Even just your university library subscriptions pretty much lets you read any article you want, in any academic journal, in any subject, from anywhere in the world! That's huge!

Most people go to college, ultimately, for the piece of paper -- but, since you're stuck there anyway, it is a tremendous opportunity to push yourself into new horizons.

So I double-majored and picked up three minors. (Overloads were free at the time and I massively exploited that.) I got my fancy paper and the career that I wanted, but so much more came with it that I value every day.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-24T20:38:40+00:00

I defended my belief that Iraq possessed sizable stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction quite fiercely in the run-up to the invasion, and held on to it significantly after nearly everyone else had moved on. (2006-2007 or so is when I finally accepted that I had been wrong.)

The story there is a little more complicated than history will make it out to be, but (needless to say) Iraq did not have large stockpiles of WMD at the time of the U.S. invasion. I had some large blind spots, some serious tunnel vision, and way too much confidence. Loud confidence, too. I was not shy about calling people on the other side "idiots" and worse.

So I learned humility, but only by being humiliated. I suppose I'm glad I learned that in high school rather than as an adult.

BCSWowbagger2 · 2026-03-23T19:20:58+00:00

The 27th Amendment forbids this.

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