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Women in long, modest skirts loaded vans that had enough seats to accommodate eight or nine kids -unlike most American Catholics, SSPX members abide by the Vatican’s prohibition on birth control. On a recent afternoon, I visited the general store, where polite teens played bluegrass music beside rows of dried goods.
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Yet hints of the town’s utopian project are everywhere. Residents watch prestige television on Hulu and catch Sunday-afternoon football games moms drive to Topeka to shop at Sam’s Club. Marys isn’t nearly as cut off from modern life as, say, the Amish communities that still abjure all modern technology, be it tractor or cellphone.
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Throughout American history, religious groups have walled themselves off from the rhythms and mores of society. To most American Catholics under the age of 50, it would be unrecognizable. Perfumed with incense and filled with majestic Latin hymns, the service has an air of formality and grandeur. Though not fully recognized by the Vatican, the priests of SSPX see themselves as defenders of the true practices of Roman Catholicism, including the traditional Latin Mass, celebrated each day in St. Named for the early-20th-century pope who railed against the forces of modernism, the international order of priests was formed in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church’s attempt, in the 1960s, to meet the challenges of contemporary life. Marys is home to a chapter of the Society of St.
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