A recent article by Patrick Neve (“The Parish You Hate Might Need You”) set the Catholic internet alight, provoking defenses and counterdefenses of his argument that Catholics should not go parish hopping but instead dig in their heels at their “bad” parish and try to change it from the inside.>I am not going to address Neve’s article directly. He is clearly a Novus Ordo Catholic, as he cites Paul VI and seems blind to the massive underlying problems. I say this because his arguments do not appear to be framed around Novus Ordo versus Traditional Catholicism, but rather around irreverent Novus Ordo versus more reverent Novus Ordo. (By saying this I am not judging his heart; to be honest, until this little forest fire erupted, I had never heard of him before.)>I was not even planning to get involved in the debate. There are several reasons for this. People close to me are struggling with exactly this (false) dilemma, and I do not want to drag their personal struggles into the public sphere.

Originally published in Radical Fidelity. Read original article