What Traditionalists Get Right

The HIdden Dynamism of Traditionalism

This morning I received a DM from someone, as he offered a thread with his takes (as someone not a traditionalist) on what he felt we got right as traditionalists. He also wondered my take. I’ve decided I’m going to use this (and a follow-up on what we get wrong) to jump into my overall theory on the present moment in the Church: she is entering a Springtime of the Laity, and this springtime she is ill prepared for.

Before we get too deep into things, just a quick definition: I’m going to be using “traditionalist” in a very broad sense: a movement within the Church that has the promotion/preservation of the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) and skepticism on the benefit of continued emphasis on the Second Vatican Council as its core elements. In the ideal dictatorship of Kevin Tierney, the limits of acceptable opinion within traditionalism would probably be far stricter, but this isn’t that dictatorship.

1.) It is a movement dominated by the laity where the hierarchy still matters

When Traditionis Custodes was released Pope Francis wrote an accompanying letter that every traditionalist knows by heart, and defenders of the Pope’s decision often downplay. In it, he’s quite clear. After identifying traditionalists as a threat to the Church, a threat he intended to eradicate by doing away with all liturgical diversity in the Roman Rite, he gives the charge to bishops:

Indications about how to proceed in your dioceses are chiefly dictated by two principles: on the one hand, to provide for the good of those who are rooted in the previous form of celebration and need to return in due time to the Roman Rite promulgated by Saints Paul VI and John Paul II, and, on the other hand, to discontinue the erection of new personal parishes tied more to the desire and wishes of individual priests than to the real need of the “holy People of God.”

In the narrative Pope Francis and Arthur Roche tell themselves about every night before bed, the People of God were having their rich experience with God obstructed by clericalism, where priests were thwarting the will of congregations and imposing on them the most hideous things, and by hideous things we mean anything Rome does not like. A funny thing happened after this: bishops were flooded with letters from hundreds and even thousands of lay Catholics telling their bishops how important the TLM was to their spirituality, and how it provided them a welcome spot in the life of the Church. If one is looking for why the decree has been implemented at a snail’s pace (requiring two official Vatican interventions, and a public plea for bishops to please enforce TC after Francis granted concessions to traditionalist groups), it is likely from this lay intervention. To anyone who regularly attends a Latin Mass, this is no surprise.

If you are a priest who wants to learn how to say the Latin Mass, you don’t go to the seminary. It’s highly doubtful any diocesan/non-traditionalist seminary in the United States or France could turn out a halfway competent priest at celebrating the TLM. Instead, you go to lay groups. You look at videos online, you buy study guides written not by priests, but by laity. Once the Mass is up and going, most promotion doesn’t come from the diocese. (They are indifferent at best, and even when enthusiastic, often have no clue how to promote it.) That comes from word of mouth and social media of individuals. (The Pope decreeing that all advertising of the Latin Mass in Church bulletins must cease is a sign of how behind the times the Vatican is on this.) The more organized traditionalist communities have nonprofit charitable organizations setup to handle most of the expenses. Since a lot of communities historically didn’t have a regular priest, it was up to the laity to organize priests coming in. These communities are incredibly tight knit, and in every community, there is typically a Matriarch (typically a woman 50 or older) who wields the true power in any community. Priests provide the sacraments (an integral part of the community), Mass, and sound spiritual direction, but the actual running of the community is left to the laity. (Even in areas where a traditionalist order is present, they often lean heavily on these lay groups who have infrastructure in the local communities the orders do not.) The more vibrant ones have homeschooling communities where, you guessed it, the laity run the show.

There is a belief (dominant in Rome) that traditionalism is a world infested with clericalism and top down management. The blunt truth is that, for better or worse, clerics don’t control those communities, and their influence is far more subtle.

2.) Strength in Flexibility

While it might seem paradoxical, a hidden strength of traditionalism is it is not very dogmatic. Sure, we have a set of beliefs that must be held, but most of those are beliefs all Catholics must uphold. You might also see a lot of nasty fights on social media and wonder if what I said was true, yet most of those fights are between people who celebrate the Latin Mass and have it as the core of their life. They might different strongly on a lot of issues, but most of them will still eat at the same table at the end of the day.

This flexibility is a strength, in that it invites everyone to the table, so long as they understand what is on the menu. This is one reason why your average TLM parish is full of both working class professionals and college professors, a place where both the programmer and the line worker have something in common. You don’t find this kind of diversity in your average suburban parish, where, like everything else in contemporary Catholic life, everything is balkanized.

This also gives us a far wider playing field. During the Franciscan Pontificate, the idea of what makes a good catholic has grown exponentially. It is no longer if you believe all the Church professes, but if you also have the wisdom and discernment (at every moment) to know how to apply it, and if, in every moment, you are giving sufficient weight to if the dogmatic truths are outweighed by the need for pastoral reality, and if the action you are taking is sending the signal that the dogmatic truth might be undermined, and if you also subscribe to certain political/ideological programs, or if you have sufficiently abandoned something which was okay for your parents to hold (such as admitting any use of the death penalty), or things such as are you exhausted yet? In the average paradigm of what makes a good Catholic today, there is so little room for the Holy Spirit because we have erected in its place orthodoxies, party lines and regulations that require the Wisdom of Solomon to parse. When Christ said pick up your cross and follow me, the cross was not meant to be the Church’s conceptions of what made a good Catholic.

While there are always exceptions, your typical traditionalist community asks the following:

• Are you willing to worship in the Latin Mass?

• Do you agree that there’s more to the Church’s life than discussions about the 1960’s?

• Are you thirsting for something more than the mediocrity of the present?

Congratulations, you can worship at our table. The hope is, as you worship at our table, you experience grace, and it transforms you so a lot of those other things which are important can be achieved. It’s not perfect, and it isn’t for everyone, but you will have the benefit of always knowing what you will believe, and why you should believe it.

For these two reasons (and many more!) traditionalists have a durability that is probably unmatched in the Church. Sure, we had a low floor, but how many other movements within the Church can talk about 5 decades of steady growth, despite strong opposition from Church authorities for all but 13 years of that time? Many other lay movements come or go depending on the charisma or a leading individual, or they lose importance once they run afoul (or lose the favor of) Church authorities. Given the trajectory of everything to shrink in the last 50 years, that growth stands out. It also is why any attempt by the Church to kill it normally backfires, because it does not rely on the present hierarchy for its favor or legitimacy. Its legitimacy rests in centuries of practice, and the individual call of the Holy Spirit within the hearts of those who find a home at the table. This is a sign of great hope, but also of great disruption that I will continue to talk about.