It was a simple enough task: my eighty-three year old father had mentioned that he’d like a Missal for the Tridentine Mass, and his birthday is coming up. If you google “tridentine missal” you find many websites willing to sell you one, as there is, apparently, a booming market for people wanting to relive the glory days of the Catholic Church when priests spoke Latin and nuns wore habits and people kept their pants on. At least in public. And I’m talking all three groups.

So I found a website with a proper Catholic grounding and found a lovely missal (which, by the way, contains the standard prayers for the Mass plus a year’s worth of readings…you could look up June 29th and find out that the gospel was from John and it would tell you which epistle would be read, and other prayers and items that are specific to the day; one nice thing about being a Catholic is that no matter where you go, the Mass is pretty much the same. It’s like McDonald’s, only without the secret sauce.)

And I ordered a missal and got it engraved with his name and determined that it would show up about a week before his birthday in late June. Perfect.

Perfect, except when I got to the checkout, because the good staff at catholicsrus.com may know their theology but they don’t know how to make a virtual shopping cart that won’t bomb. Each stage of the process kept failing (read: White Screen of Ineptitude), causing another barrage of increasingly-colorful language from me. I think I had to re-enter my credit card about six times, and each iteration only added more syllables to my tirade.

So, the upshot is: I get Bonus Heaven Points for getting my saintly father, who would also have been thrilled beyond belief if I had just had a Mass said in his name for the day, his missal. I am, however, going to Hell for the language I used doing it.