Bitter Trad Syndrome

 Engage in any discussion long enough regarding trads, and eventually the subject comes up, like clockwork.  "But why don't you stand up to the angrier trads?  SOMETHING MUST BE DONE ABOUT THEM!"  Sometimes, this question is asked sincerely.  A lot of the time, it is in bad faith.  What is meant is "why don't you spend more time telling people they aren't holy enough."  I have zero patience for those individuals, and they rise beneath my contempt.  Go ahead and ask the legion of them on social media who have asked that question dishonestly, and gotten a nasty answer from me.  Yet for the one in good faith, let's discuss this question a little more.

There's a lot of assumptions that are made in this, and those assumptions are why the answer you get isn't very satisfying at best, at worst, you're cursed at and shouted away.  (You may have even deserved it.)

First and foremost, I can't stress this enough, The Catholic Church is NOT a political party.  There are no membership dues, and you aren't expelled from the party, except for some very rare circumstances involving clear canonical crimes.   Being an idiot is not a canonical crime.  Believing crazy things is not a canonical crime.  What people often want when this is said is for those bitter trads to be told they are no longer welcome at that Church, and they should be shunned until they change their opinions/disposition.  That isn't Catholicism.

I'm reminded of the story of a group of parishioners who were furious Michael Voris (a dishonest grifter if there ever was one) was attending a parish more frequently.  Several parishioners were enraged, not wanting their parish to be "represented" by the likes of Voris.  They wanted the parish priest to take action against him, some even wanting the priest to say Voris and the other "crazies" weren't welcome there.  The priest responded in his usual somber voice "the crazy people need confession just as much as you do.  Well, after this discussion, maybe not as much."  Catholicism isn't a party or a book of the month club:  its a communion of sinners being transformed into saints.  If we start modifying Church law to where the priest can deny the sacraments to someone he (or the congregation) doesn't like, we're heading into very dangerous grounds.  It was precisely this rationale that was given to a pretty rabid anti-traditionalist priest several years ago that made him see the errors of his ways, at least on that point.

The second assumption is that you matter.  You likely do not.  At all.  I'll give you time to process being offended, because clearly you have not been told enough in life you don't actually matter that much.

You good?  Let's continue.

There's a pretty prominent rabid anti-trad blogger once who was in discussion with me, angry that I wasn't opposing bitter trads to his satisfaction.  He admitted that I've offered real correction on a lot of issues, but I wasn't offering enough correction on this or that social issue he felt was really important that trads weren't listening to enough.  After reading him go on and on for hundreds of words (all getting increasingly nastier at me), I responded with the simple question:

Who is X (his name), and why on earth should I care about him?

Are you a bishop?  Are you a pastor?  Are you part of that individual's family?  In this case, he was a bitter fool consumed by hate.  Why should I care what such a fool says?  In better circumstances, the individual making this request is still an "outsider".  Why should your outsider criteria be listened to for a single word?  Sometimes there are good answers to that question, but you have to approach it with the assumption you have to prove that answer.

If you understand we can't vote people off the island for being knuckleheads, and that you have to prove why your criteria matters, you will probably get a fair hearing from trads about the question of bitterness.  Now we can speak, and I hope you will allow the brief answer I give to start a conversation.

I don't look at bitterness as something that is unique to trads, or even something that trads exhibit in an atypical sense.  I can say that having pretty extensive experience in both communities.  I've watched bitter scolds in the Novus Ordo try to humiliate my wife for failing to keep a special needs child quiet, and I've watched bitter scolds in the TLM tell me to go to the Novus Ordo down the street so my son's stimming won't bother him.  I've also watched their bitterness increase when they learned in no uncertain terms that we weren't leaving, and in the case of the Latin Mass, I informed the elderly man (after standing up towering over him) that unless he had a plan for making me leave, I was staying right in the back of the Church.  I've even felt bitterness at times over the way my faith life has turned out.  Sometimes even intense bitterness.

Bitterness is part of the human condition, a realization that the world (or the Church) is not as you thought it should be, and that disconnect causes you stress and anxiety.  Those same bitter trads consumed by anger at the latest this or that of the Pope or some idiot washed up blogger tend to be the same bitter trads looking to nitpick every little thing going on in the parish.

I also see that bitterness among a lot of ex-trads, who saw this kind of behavior, and not only stopped going to the TLM, but now make it their passion and burning crusade to attack it (and their former brethren) at every step.  To both sides I offer the same cold but sincere advice:  I am deeply sorry that the Church is not as you think it should be, and that somewhere some Catholic attending whatever Mass he attends isn't as holy as you think they should be.  I don't mean that with crocodile tears, I am sorry for the hurt and anguish they often cause, and if I'm there, I'll offer whatever help I can.

Yet I sincerely believe that the best way to help that situation is to get people to accept that source of their bitterness, because once they understand that source, it is something that God can work with.  Maybe the Church should be what it isn't.  Yet what are we going to do to bring that about?  We also should be something we aren't.  Do we want people to react in the same way we do to their imperfections?  Sure, the Pope might indeed be everything bad you think he is.  This is exactly why we pray for him.  When Christ told Peter the devil meant to go after him and sift the flock by that attack, he meant he would exploit every weakness a shepherd has to scatter the sheep.  Christ told Peter his faith wouldn't fail in the end, he never said Peter would always do the wisest or smartest thing.  So we pray he does.

The way to counteract bitterness (whether the traditionalist or the bitter ex-trad) is through understanding.  What other tools do we have?  There are indeed more coercive measures, but as we pointed out above, its a bad idea to use them because someone is cranky.  The Church, even in her degraded state has understood in her wisdom not to employ such tools for that purpose.  Maybe consider my approach instead.

The Changing Landscape: Part II

When we last talked about the changing landscape of the Church, we talked about how a lot of the things that mattered before really don't matter as much now to people.  We should also consider that on some issues, there's been a genuine change of belief among people, and the benefits this could potentially have to traditionalists.

When we talk about these changes, we aren't really talking about doctrine.  For better or worse, people's opinions on doctrine are pretty set in stone.  In the Church of public opinion, Catholics in the West favor, by a pretty wide margin, changing the doctrine of the Church, in ways Pope Francis supports (communion for the divorced and remarried), and ways he absolutely does not.  (Women's ordination, a Church where decisions are made according to democratic vote, etc.)  So when we talk about the changes, we are talking about people's changing belief in how Catholicism is meant to work.

Since the pontificate of John Paul II (and in more embryonic stage before that throughout the 20th century), the Catholic Church, to the extent it has "worked", worked in a very top-down way of understanding.  The Pope was the "Gold Standard" of Catholicism.  He wasn't just Christ's vicar by virtue of office, he was the image of Jesus Christ on earth in the minds of many.  Asking if something was "Catholic" or "the right thing for Catholics to do" simply meant pointing to whatever the Pope was doing.  Or, as one writer put it in 2014 (a viewpoint she no doubt rejects today), it is our job as Lay Catholics to "be the kind of Catholic Pope Francis needs us to be."

Combined with this spirit was a belief (at least in theory) that it was the Pope's job to handle every matter of the Church.  Bishop's lost their identity as successors of the Apostles, and were transformed into the yes-men.  So a Bishop was measured by how in line he was with whoever the occupant of the Holy See was.    The lasting impact of a Pope came to be understood in how many Cardinals he selected, so that those cardinals in the future would become pope and carry out that pope's agenda.

That way of thinking is crumbling.  For better or worse, Pope Francis is no longer looked to as the ideal Catholic by a growing amount of the Church.  Bishops have recovered a bit of the backbone they have given up over the years in a variety of ways.  (But only a bit, as the McCarrick affair showed.)  While he may or may not be able to decide his successor, Cardinals are forming into camps not based  upon the pope that appointed them, but other factors. (Region, ideology, etc.)

This is different than Vatican II simply no longer being relevant.  To a growing number of Catholics, they reject the understanding of Catholicism that was the consensus understanding from roughly 1979-2013.  This is an opportunity for traditionalists to present an alternative, one not based upon a stale and dead consensus represented by a pope in his mid 80's barely listened to by anyone, and certainly esteemed by even fewer.  We have that advantage precisely because we aren't bound by thinking that everything about Catholicism has to be understood solely through the prism of 1965 and later.  The way out of the current crisis doesn't exist in the mind of the present pope, and likely doesn't exist in the mind of either his successor or his successor's successor.  The solution will likely come from outside the Vatican.  Yet today's Catholicism cannot conceive of a Catholicism that isn't solely understood through the texts of the current pope, and maybe his immediate predecessors.  That puts us at a natural advantage.