A Traditionalism for the People

In the wake of the Popes (initially unsuccessful) attempt at suppressing the Latin Mass, I've seen a lot of talk about how traditionalism needs to rethink itself, sometimes even reinvent itself.  Some of this is useful and helpful.  While we like to think of a Church that moves "in centuries, not years', the reality is that the landscape we inherit in 2021 is radially different than the Church of 1962.  I would even say the landscape is dramatically different than when I began writing back in 2001 as a newly minted Catholic.  If we cannot address that landscape effectively, we are no better than Pope Francis, who has completely and utterly failed to confront these new realities, bitter at a world and Church that does not behave like he thinks it should.

Yet I think a lot of these attempts are doomed to failure.  Before exploring better options, lets look at what I think will not work.

Signaling too Hard

The first impulse tries too hard.  It looks at a lot of online elements of traditionalism, is embarassed, and overcompensates.  Its not enough to conclude that the Council doesn't teach heresy. Indeed, we have to think it is an "essential guidance for Catholics in the modern world".  This is something very few non-trads actually believe, much less trads.  Nobody goes "how should I live my life as a Catholic" and starts a deep dive into the Second Vatican Council's decrees.  That's just not how real people work.  No Catholic would seriously dive into the decrees of Trent or various other pastoral councils to figure out how to live their lives.  The majority of Catholics throughout history have never read a word from an ecumenical council, or a word from a papal document.  There's nothing wrong with that.  If we want to reimagine traditionalism, we need to stop lying to our audience.  Nobody is looking at how to renew their lives in 2021 by doing a deep dive on Vatican II.  We can say that while still holding the documents don't teach error or depart from Catholic teaching, and in some cases might even offer something useful.

Yet we do this because we feel we have to fit in.  A lot of online theologians try to act like the ideal Catholic life is centered around a the Summa, the Ecumenical Councils, and papal encyclicals.  They then gather with other online theologians and talk about what the ideal Catholicism would be.  Speculative theology is fun, but its not something you build a movement around.  Its not something you build renewal around.  Its a fun book of the month club for eggheads.

Restoring..... What Exactly?

There is another bad impulse that needs to be countered, though I sincerely think this impulse has been on the wane.  Traditionalism has always had a certain restorationist and counter-revolutionary current to it.  We will end the "crisis in the Church" when we abandon what came after the Council, or 1969, or whatever.  We will then "return to tradition" and go back to renewal.

Like the first approach, there is little attachment to reality here.  One can appreciate a lot of the good that came in the pre-concilliar era, and think that the modern approach that everything before 1962 doesn't matter to Catholics today is silly, and cuts off the Church from an awful lot of her intellectual and spiritual heritage. We could revert back to 1962 and have the flourishing external Church of that era, yet we would pretty quickly wind up in more or less the same situation.  We could move back to the era of St. Pius X, and within 60 years we would probably still be at the Second Vatican Council.  We should not look at traditionalism as an attempt at recreating a particular ideal time.  Like the first example, this is a book of the month club for eggheads.  True restoration comes in not only applying the wisdom of previous eras to today, but in understanding what didn't work from those previous eras, and how many of the problems today find their embryonic form in earlier eras.  

So What Then?

If we've examined what's wrong with other attempts to reimagine traditionalism, what should we focus on instead.  I think both failed approaches have the same root:  they attempt to transform renewal into a mere intellectual exercise and discussion club.  These have their uses.  In a certain sense, this writing is the product of those discussions.  I will even be going to dinner with some local trads this weekend, where I will likely be pitching them on this very topic.

If we want true renewal, we have to understand how limited this stuff is, and we need to be able to offer the Church something more.  We have to offer to traditionalists a way to deepen their faith and their commitment to renewal, and we need to offer the Church at large an authenticity and uniqueness that is sorely lacking, in both the lay and clerical state, from the smallest to the throne of St. Peter itself.  If I were to offer a few foundational ideas, they would be:

- The Primacy of an individual AND communal relationship with Jesus Christ

- The Centrality of the Sacred Scriptures

- A spirituality focused on Interior Renewal

- The Right Ordering of the temporal in our lives, and in society, towards the Gospel (without it necessarily being a political program)

- The Sacred Liturgy is the Primary Means of Mediating this experience in your life, especially in the Traditional Roman Rite of Mass, though not exclusively so.

What don't you see in this list?  You don't see:

- What to think about Pope Francis or any Church leader, lay or clerical

- What to think about this or that Ecumenical Council

- Who you should vote for in the upcoming election

The Catholic Church exists, as a divine institution founded by Our Lord, for the purpose of guiding us along the path to heaven.  She guides in a sense of fixing the boundaries, and major points along the way.  Outside of that, there isn't a lot of direct control.  Indeed, the Church has put herself in a bad position many times when she overthinks her Divine Mission, and attempts to supplement that Divine Mission with human programs or ideological goals often lead not just to ruin, but to irrelevance.

I don't propose scrapping a lot of the other ways to reimagine traditionalism.  They have their uses, even the ones that try too hard.  But I do think that first and foremost, we should have a Traditionalism for the People of God, offering something to Catholics that they have often felt lacking from the Church:  a reason to care.

To the few hundred people who read this, and to the 50 or 60 fans, I hope that last sentence gets your attention.  We will explore this theme in future writings:  the biggest threat to the Church is not that she can preach a false message, but that she preaches something nobody cares about.  I'd say that's exactly what is happening right now, and that is what we need to reverse course on.