Chartres and the Failure of Liberal Catholicism

This past weekend in France, there was an annual pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres, something that has always been a key unifying moment in the life of traditionalists.  Whatever our differences, we tend to put our differences aside and show a united front to the world once a year with that pilgrimage.  This year we saw a particularly strong showing, with more than 20,000 pilgrims registered.  Fearing a logistical breakdown, registrations were actually halted once 20,000 was reached.  Here we are, two years in Tradiotnis Custodes.  We are a decade into Francis telling anyone with ears to hear those who love the Latin Mass are a cancer infecting the Church.  We are two years removed from the Pope telling individual priests they needed his permission on what they could put in parish bulletins, and when they were allowed to invite parishioners into the hall for coffee.  (That everyone has outright ignored the Pope on this insane and ridiculous micromanaging is something even his ardent defenders are normally quiet on.)  In spite of all this clear opposition and dedicated attempts at marginalization, why has the pilgrimage grown larger than ever?

A recent study conducted by La Croix magazine might shed some light.  (For those who do not wish to pay for access to a magazine often hostile to their interests, The Pillar's Luke Coppen offers a pretty good summary.)  The results are pretty unmistakable:  among French Catholics, there is a growing cadre of Catholics (a growing minority) for whom the TLM is either their preference, or they have strong sympathies towards it.  What they also find is that Catholics increasingly come from the political right, even if they are not entirely at home with it.  I think this quote from a sociologist captures the essence of what I want to talk about:

"It’s not Catholicism that’s tilting to the right,” argued sociologist Raison du Cleuziou, “but Catholicism on the right that’s perpetuating itself better than Catholicism on the left.”

If you spend enough time steeped in online trad discourse (please, don't), you will inevitably hear of something called "The Traddening."  The Traddening is this belief that generational forces are behind traditionalists, and that over time, traditionalism will be all that's left.  This argument began in mostly French traditionalism, and, in fairness, it is easy to see it:  within 50 years traditionalist ordinations will dwarf those ordained in the more contemporary Church if present trends continue.  Yet The Traddening is mostly nonsense.  It ties Catholicism strictly to the amount of ordinations, it overlooks the large morass of Catholics for who this stuff doesn't matter (but are perfectly orthodox), and it makes the dangerous assumption that the ideas that have raged in the Church for the last 50 years will be the center of discourse for the next 50, which is quite the assumption!  

Yet, like all falsehoods, there's some truth here. I think the quote above captures that truth.  For traditionalists, they are finding people receptive to their message, and it is a message that is mostly positive.  See the TLM, encounter Christ, find peace in our beautiful liturgy.  You might think there's a bunch of other nonsense we attach to that stuff, but its clear that message resonates.  What is the message of liberal Catholicism, as personified by the likes of Pope Francis, Arthur Roche, the idiots at Where Peter Is, etc?

At this point, you'll hear the inevitable complaining about the use of the term "liberal", so before we dive into this too much, let's work with our terms.  From 1970 to the present, our Church has aligned itself mostly around one big question:  What are we to think of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council?  The reforms have happened, and, traditionalist complaining notwithstanding, you aren't going to get a wholesale reversion to before the Council.  This debate was had with the liberals in the 1960s, and its a debate we lost.  Decisively. Even if such a return were possible, nobody currently with any semblance of governance in the Church knows what that era was.  To the extent we argue about the Council, we do so entirely from a post-concilliar mindset.

Within that mindset, there are two camps.  The first could be called the "conservative" position.  Vatican II reformed the liturgy, it reformed ecclesiology, it reformed ecumenism, and it reformed how the Church approached the modern world.  Some of this worked, some of it didn't, but what's done is done.  The Church consolidated her positions during the reigns of John Paul and Benedict, and now we need to move on from the Council, towards handling the big questions tackling the Church from modernity.  The Council was the realignment, now comes the engagement.

The second could be called the "liberal" position.  They looked at Vatican II as a down payment on a new Church.  Even if it kept her ancient doctrines, the point of Vatican II was to launch a perpetual revolution within the Church.  Her doctrines might remain, but the myriad of ever changing circumstances requires a constant updating of how we express those truths, and, more importantly, when we allow the hard experience of reality to dictate how strictly we implement what we learn from doctrine.  These individuals were dominant during the 1970s, but then had to strike a careful balance with conservative popes.

These are not the only positions within the Church, and within this there is an obvious spectrum.  Sometimes people are fluid with their alignment.  For example, I think you could argue Francis, for the first half of his pontificate, governed within that conservative consensus.  (Even if he might not have personally believed it.)  The last five years he has thrown in his lot with the liberal consensus.

This consensus has dominated Catholicism over the last 5 decades, even if most people carried on their faith ignorant of it.  Debates happened largely within those terms.  Yet this consensus began to change.  Its first casualty were conservatives.  The abuse crisis combined with the death of John Paul II mostly shattered this consensus.  (For Bishops, this consensus was identified by someone like Fabian Bruskewitz, who was a rock star of 90s and early 2000s Catholicism but mostly forgotten today in his old age.)  Political events like the Global Financial Crisis also played its role in making sure that coalition (influenced by politics as much as religion) wasn't coming back.  While that consensus is dead, the legacy of John Paul II (and Benedict) carries immense weight among many of the old devotees.

I am of the belief the liberal consensus was shattered in 2018... also largely the result of an abuse crisis.  Liberalism survived the years of John Paul II and Benedict, only to be tried and found wanting during the years of Francis, who they always viewed as one of their own, being the principal organizers of his rise to the throne.  Since 2018 the Church has been rocked by repeated abuse scandals across the world:  her ethics and governance has broken down in a series of financial scandals requiring the pope to almost wholesale rewrite Church law on these matters. (With decidedly mixed results.)  The debates over the German Synodal Way have shattered the old ideological cohesion, and she is left arguing over who is the author and manager of the perpetual revolution:  Rome, the local Bishops, or "the people"?

For those who viewed Vatican II as the down payment on the asset they currently possess, what is the message they offer to the Church?  What is the message of hope the Pontiff provides?  What are the talking points they present to the world?  The blunt answer is:  they don't have any.  In the last five years, the Church of Pope Francis has grown extremely insular.  They only speak to themselves.  Whether it is Traditionis Custodes, internal financial reform, DDF dubias about the Synodal Way, the defining battles are internal struggles.  Listen to the Pope's weekly homilies, and they are seldom about a message to the world, but more a message at how disappointed he is in the various factions and members of the Church.  His homilies are far less about proclaiming the Gospel and liberty to captives as it is about his airing of grievances.  (This past weekend, while 20,000 Catholics were packed on a pilgrimage about encountering Christ, Francis used his homily to complain about people who helped others convert to the faith but didn't live up to his standards of perfection.  This column writes itself.)

The Church in 50 years will not be a trad fantasy.  Yet the liberal project of the last 60 years is on life support, its defenders having so thoroughly lost the plot they are quickly becoming best friends with Irrelevance.  The Traddening implied a stable Church we would eventually take over.  What happens when an unstable Church collapses into anarchy?  We might find out soon enough.