A Traditionalism for the People: Reading the Room

When you ask people what traditionalists advocate, you will first hear about the Latin Mass.  You may hear that they "oppose Vatican II."  (Whatever that means.)  Yet a third thing you might hear is that traditionalists advocate a Church that has little role for the laity.  We believe in a top down Church where the laity mostly exist to pay, pray, and obey.

In fairness, sometimes you hear about this among trads as well.  There seems to be a deep mistrust of lay leadership in the Church, with an inherent belief that "lay-involved" means "Liberal."  Like its political equivalent in the French Revolution, you had "the people" on one side, and "the authority" on the other.  This has mostly replicated itself in the Church.  When the Pope complains about clericalism, what he really is complaining about is "conservatives and trads are doing things I don't like."  If you don't think 100% the way Pope Francis does, you are a clericalist.  In our age of hyper polarization, some wear this as a badge of honor and lean into the caricature.

My problem is that doesn't really describe reality.  Traditionalism is a movement dominated by the laity, operates on a model far more decentralized than anything in the Church.  Your average Latin Mass community has a laity far more involved in governing the community than your average parish that celebrates the Novus Ordo, to say nothing of the parish dominated by a small graying clique promoting "Pope Francis study groups".

You will very rarely see a Latin Mass community willed into being because a priest just wants to start celebrating it.  It takes a lot of work learning how to say the Latin Mass on your own account, much less to find the servers willing to help, the musical talent for a lot of the traditional pieces of music, just to satisfy the priests own ego.  If a priest just moves to a new parish and decides to randomly announce that they will start celebrating the Latin Mass, the truth is that Mass will likely end within a few months.

Instead, what you often have is a group of lay faithful who want that Mass.  They meet with priests looking for a friendly locality.  They meet with their own pastors.  They find lay organizations to help them train servers.  They use social media to promote their Masses.  They often coordinate bringing in special priests for certain feast days.    Most of your day to day governance of a Latin Mass happens not by the priest, but by a married couple, and often by the female side of that equation.  (Every Latin Mass has a matriarch who makes it work.)  Since it is mostly organized from the bottom, there's very little episcopal oversight.  (Which can be a bad thing!)  The most successful communities happen when Bishops and pastors recognize and work within those existing communities, rather than trying to cultivate their own.

Almost every trad understands this is the way things are.  Yet there always seems to be a reluctance in leaning into that, lest we come across as wanting a "democratic" Church.  Yet this is a misunderstanding.  The Catholic Church's core elements come not from the laity, or even the hierarchy.  They come from Jesus Christ.  As such, her doctrine cannot change.  Yet the laity have a role in ensuring that the Church on earth remains ever faithful to her identity.  The Churches doctrines, absent her identity, are boring words on a piece of worthless paper.    It is here traditionalism thrives, in being a movement, primarily of the lay faithful, ensuring that the Church remains true to her identity, even if prominent individual leaders fall short.

In that light, we are less a movement of rebuilding a past, and more a movement that says we will have a say in what the future of the Church looks like, and that there is a differing alternative to the vision of the Church dominated by an increasingly out of touch and old hierarchy, and a pastoral bureaucracy that has long lost its touch with what the parish community actually wants.  We aren't preaching a revolution, but rather a rebalancing of the scales in the Church.

To continue thriving, we need to read the room and lean into what we actually are.