Vigano, Traditionalism, and the Quest for Identity

When I did blogging regularly, I took pride in the fact that the blog stood out from others in that I normally avoided two things.  I avoided a running commentary on Catholic news, and I avoided a running commentary on various Catholic personalities.  If you read between the lines, it was clear these things inspired me to write about issues, but I tried to avoid being stuck in a time-specific piece.

I'm going to violate that rule here, and I think its important to give an outline as to why, and make clear this will be a norm I do my best to follow.  I think the case of Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano is a fascinating study in itself, and what his popularity in traditionalist circles says is pretty instructive of traditionalism, though not for the reason most of your bloviating idiot pundits think.

As mentioned elsewhere, after his scathing J'Accuse of Pope Francis for complicity and coverup in the scandal of Theodore McCarrick, Vigano soon became a minor and then not so minor Catholic celebrity.  He opined on various issues, and he wrote in ways that were clearly trying to grab certain audiences.  This style became a hit among traditionalists, especially as he began to be influenced  by your traditional standard boilerplate about Vatican II.

The standard criticism about Vigano is that it shows how far off the deep end he's gone, and allegedly this is proof of what happens when you are in "rebellion against the Holy Father", whatever that means.  Yet it is also clear that he is going beyond even the standard criticisms of Vatican II.  Its not just that Vatican II is a failed council: its that the council itself was a conspiracy a century in the making, and that it was actually a wildly successful council: it was a successful redefinition of the Catholic Church.

I want to mostly avoid those debates.  I point them out to simply make mention of the fact that there is a bit of a point when some worry about a radicalizing effect Vigano could have.  He's not just thrown his lot in with conservatives and traditionalists:  he's thrown his lot in with the most conspiratorial of the bunch.  So, what are we to make of him?

First, whatever his positions now, it says nothing about the overall truth of his testimony against Francis regarding McCarrick.  This entry takes for granted the truth of his claim because REALLY MAN?  We really have to do this?  Okay then.  His first argument was that, unknown to everyone save a few, Benedict XVI suspended McCarrick from ministry, essentially permanently, for the crime of sexual sins regarding the confessional and sexual abuse of a seminarian.  (at the time his serial child predations do not seem to have been known.)  At the time it seemed like an utterly insane accusation.  For many of us, its sheer absurdity was why it was likely true:  nobody would make that up.

That turned out to be 100% correct: confirmed by McCarrick's own pen.  He admitted to his secretary Benedict had forcibly imposed restrictions on him.  We also learned that from at least the late 90's/early 2000's Rome was made aware of allegations regarding McCarrick that were pretty substantial. We also learned that Rome had secretly punished a few other bishops for similar crimes.  Suddenly secret sentences weren't that crazy.  So on that claim Vigano was absolutely right.

The second claim was the more explosive one:  that Pope Francis knew about it.  While we'll never get a confession, I think its pretty clear he knew about it.  His refusal to originally deny it, along with the overwhelming evidence that the pope would of course know about a good friend, advisor and senior cardinal being punished.  If he didn't, his staff would've made it clear the second his name popped up in the news.  To this day Rome has never answered how Francis couldn't have known, leaving us with only one possibility:  he knew.  He knew, and for whatever reason (it need not even be conspiratorial or sinful) he let those restrictions lapse around McCarrick.

So yes, Vigano was correct on both accounts.  This does not necessarily make him reliable on everything else.  It just means that he was in a unique and fundamental position to know that Francis wasn't being honest.  That doesn't suddenly make him qualified to speak on anything else.  Nor does it make him a figure worthy of belief on everything else.  Still, the man is enjoying his time in the spotlight, and doing what he can to stay in it.  If that means fighting with otherwise natural allies over perceived slights personally and professionally, so be it.

What does this say about traditionalism as a whole?  That's where I think its more interesting.  Traditionalism has always had a bit of a populist strain to it.  They are suspicious of the hierarchy (who, despite their ordained role as shepherds are viewed as rotten for a variety of reasons), and view conformity to a dominant way of life with skepticism.  This strain was evident in its popular thinking.  While today Benedict XVI is viewed as a natural ally of traditionalists who (in the eyes of his critics) did more than anyone to mainstream the movement, as Cardinal Ratzinger traditionalists looked upon him with skepticism, if not outright contempt.  That he mostly agreed with them on the liturgy was viewed as a trojan horse for a variety of other ideas.  Any bishop who did likewise was often treated with the same skepticism, outside of elder princes like Cardinal Stickler.

That is not the traditionalism of today.  Today traditionalists count among their allies or heroes bishops such as Schneider and yes Vigano.  They also count among them Cardinal Sarah, Cardinal Zen of Hong Kong, and a host of other leaders.  Far from an adversarial relationship with bishops in the US, it is pointed out that relations have improved pretty remarkably outside of a few bad dioceses.  That traditionalists are so hungry to quickly point to anytime someone remotely agrees with them, this in itself is instructive.  Its a sign of a movement looking to become more accommodating to the mainstream.  

It is for this reason that a lot of the calls for traditionalists to denounce those individuals tends to fall on deaf ears.  They suspect, often correctly, that the Dawn Eden's and Where Peter Is gang are operating in bad faith.  Traditionalists are rebels against the hierarchy, but when they find episcopal support, those individuals are cranks or rebels.  They are in a perpetual state of rebellion against the Holy Father, but they are also preventing the Holy Father from wielding his Petrine authority when they appeal to him to use that Petrine authority to not allow married priests in the Latin Rite.  

For far too long traditionalists have been told they need to mainstream themselves, and that it wouldn't do to have just high school religion teachers or lay columnists advocate for them.  So they went and persuaded priests and bishops, and are now accused of radicalizing them.  We can't win gang.  We have these kind of debates about what to think of these individuals all the time.  We just refuse to do so on the schedule of hostile outsiders.

If you want to ignore all this and have a quick summary, its this:  we should always be careful about who we elevate, but the choices in who is being elevated should be instructive.  We're playing the game people have long asked us to win, are playing that game pretty well, and now they want us to stop playing.

Vatican II and the Case for Not Caring

In the latest installment of “Some Things Never Change”, Bishop Robert Barron has given a lecture to the Napa Institute in which he lays out why Vatican II is so important today. This is meant as a barely veiled corrective to his brother bishop Carlo Maria Vigano who has grown increasingly hostile to The Second Vatican Council. It is not my intent to say who is right. It is my intent to say that nobody should care.

Wait, did a Catholic just say you shouldn’t care about an Ecumenical Council? Did I just forfeit my Catholic card? To get it out of the way, Vatican II is a lawful and valid ecumenical council, called by a valid, lawful, and reigning Pope. There is nothing in the Council that explicitly contradicts previous Church teaching. In areas where it could be argued it implicitly does, this is nothing new for Church history, and the Church has attempted (sometimes productively, sometimes not so productively) to provide a synthesis. Nothing I have said above or will say below is meant to contradict this.

What I am saying is that the dominant debate about Vatican II is mostly a waste of time, and Catholics need not concern ourselves with it. There’s a lot of nuance to this debate, but a brief summation should suffice. Everyone agrees that at a pivotal moment of the Council deliberations, most of the original plans for the council were scrapped, and instead everyone went in a different direction. Almost everyone at the council (save a few “conservatives”) favored this change. After the Council, a debate among theologians erupted about the nature of this change. One group felt that while the original change was justified, the direction people were claiming “Vatican II” required them to take was a bad idea, and not actually part of the text itself. These are typically called “conservatives” or “orthodox Catholics” in mainstream parlance. They were opposed by those who viewed the initial change as a down payment on a far larger agenda of reform. They didn’t view themselves as betraying the Council, they were its spiritual children. These are known as “progressives”, “liberals”, and a variety of other names.

Who is right? Who is wrong? Do we honestly have to care? There may be some esoteric distinction between “What the council said” and “how the council was implemented”, but its mostly a distinction for purposes of narrative. The most visible change the Council ushered in was the liturgy, and the documents on the liturgical reform that became Sacrosanctum Concillium were almost verbatim the same before and after the change in direction. Second, Paul VI closed the Council, and Paul VI oversaw its implementation. At no point did he view his work being a fundamental change or a hijacking. Quite the contrary, he viewed the work most associate with the “liberal” understanding as the fruits of Vatican II. He also strongly disagreed with many of those voices when they tried to change Church teaching on contraception. We are attempting to read into the immediate post-concilliar era a factionalism that was nowhere near as crystallized as it is now or 15 years later, even if it involved many of the same players.

Finally, Barron and Vigano are debating attitudes about Vatican II. They are not debating teachings. Barron doesn’t mention a specific teaching that is rejected that Vigano is required to accept. Vigano is not calling on Catholics to reject an explicit thing Vatican II taught. Instead, we are debating what Vatican II should look like in an idealized universe.

Yet we can’t say what Vatican II would look like properly implemented, because, spoiler alert, there is no authoritative guide to what Vatican II’s implementation was supposed to look like. The documents were often compromises that would be worked out later, and that “working out later” is very fluid and always in motion. You may think tone policing is a productive part of debate, and there’s no doubt temperatures should be lowered. Yet this is very much a debate tailor made to our social media age: a lot of bromides and rhetoric without really doing anything

To those who would disagree, what do we traditionalists need to “accept” from Vatican II in regards to teachings? Trent had synods and far greater lay involvement than the current Church. Pre and Post Tridentine Catholicism fluctuated between being more and less centralized than the Church today. (Today the Church is considerably more centralized) This would seem to cut against the idea that Vatican II requires x or y when it comes to how the Church is governed. The only serious question is about religious liberty, and the Church has itself allowed far more liberty on this subject than people wish. What she requires people to accept from Dignitatis Humanae is actually quite small.

Sometimes we just need a blunt reminder: the world is not stuck in the 1960’s anymore, and the solutions to the problems facing the Church 60 years later are not necessarily in those documents, for good or ill. We also run the risk of a debate about navel gazing when the Church is facing a post-pandemic and post-abuse crisis world that ravages every faction, and cares little if its still 1968 in Napa Institute lectures. 

Yet in this we reach the real reason everyone is obsessed with debates over Vatican II: the more we debate that, the less we have to take a hard look at the reality that leaders of every faction failed us, and probably deserve being swept to irrelevance by future generations, except as a reminder of what not to do. Faced with that reality, Barron and Vigano would love to debate Vatican II for eternity. At least they are both relevant to history in such a world.

World Youth Day: Theory and Practice

Leonard: I love cheesecake

Sheldon:  No you don't, you're lactose intolerant.

Leonard:  I think its a good idea!

Like so many of my generation, we find a bit of wisdom behind the laughs (and not all of them appropriate) of CBS' The Big Bang Theory.  A few weeks ago someone asked me in the comboxes here what I thought about World Youth Day.  This scene came to my mind when reading that question.  I'm really not a fan of World Youth Day, but I still to this day think its a good idea.  Another way of saying it is that World Youth Day is a terrible idea, and the only thing worse than World Youth Day is no World Youth Day.  This came into my mind when I read the following article at Catholic World Report.

The Return of Peter Miller

Want a good way to figure out if the traditionalist you are talking to has been one before Benedict XVI's pontificate? Ask them if they read Peter Miller's Seattle Catholic. Between 2001 and 2006, SC was a website that served as an all purpose internet hub for traditionalists. Mr. Miller collected links from around the web that trads would find interesting, and linked them without commentary. When Peter Miller gave you a link, your traffic exploded. This was always comforting to young traditionalists such as myself, who at that time were written out of polite Catholic conversation. In 2002 at 20 years old and only starting to discover the Latin Mass, Mr. Miller always "put me over" (to borrow a wrestling phrase) by giving me a couple links every now and then. As Michael Brendan Dougherty (my original blog partner who transferred into really interesting political journalism) put it, a lot of us got our start thanks to Seattle Catholic and their influence. 

 

When you actually wanted commentary, he always had some interesting opinion works that spanned the viewpoint of traditionalist commentary. Most importantly, it allowed viewpoints that went against the prevailing traditionalist ethos. Many believed that traditionalists were all monarchists politically and you had to be a distributist economically. Mr. Miller allowed incredibly intelligent writers to come on and argue otherwise. Some might not have realized it at the time, but he was broadening the traditionalist movement through his actions. Agree on the same faith and our love of the same liturgy, everything outside of dogmatics can and should be debated. That's what I learned from reading the site several times a day. If anything I would argue traditionalists need a modern day Seattle Catholic, if someone was insane enough to do that much work.

 

That's why it is with much fanfare and celebration that Mr. Miller stepped out of his self imposed exile to give a current state of the traditionalist movement promo over at Rorate Caeli. In it he talks a lot about the same themes we have covered lately, mainly about how much has changed in the past 7 years since SC went dark. They are teasing this as the first of many, and I hope that is the case.

Mr. Miller offers a very sobering analysis, emphasizing how far we've come, how far we still have to go, and stressing the importance of individuals, on all sides, doing the right thing and fighting the good fight. That's a call I made in two well received columns at Catholic Lane. Someone with Mr. Miller's influence and auctoritas will hopefully be able to get more to pay attention.

Pete Vere to Catholic Commentators: Stop using "Radical Traditionalist" and "RadTrad"

Most of you reading this won't know who Pete Vere is, unless you are a canon law wonk, or a veteran of the early days of Catholic Blogging. Mr. Vere was a well known canon lawyer who had done extensive work on the SSPX. What makes him interesting today is he was also one of the people who did the most to make "radical traditionalist" and "radtrad" a popular phrase. As someone who not only went to the Extraordinary Form but someone who helped guide a lot of Bishops into establishing indults (remember them days? If not, blessed are you!), when he used the phrase, it stuck. The big name apologists of the world got their info about "radical traditionalists" from Pete. I include all of this backstory for a reason: namely Pete's surprising reversal on using the terms in a post on his facebook page. Here are the money quotes:

But that does not mean Kevin is wrong. Rather, like Shawn, I suspect Kevin is right... And deep down inside I think that is what bothered me most about Kevin's response- the fact that him being right means I have to let go of old prejudices formed during yesteryear's battles. battles that today's generation of trad never faced...

In essence, the expression "radtrad" was coined to allow traditinoalists to escape the menu. It served its purpose. However, today's generation has been invited to eat at the table.

I'm not a fool. I realize a lot of people will keep using radtrad and other insulting terms. Yet I think they should really reflect on Pete's words. He is known as an old school scrapper when it came to debates. Yet he also realizes that such an approach actually harms everyone today: it harms the SSPX, it harms loyal traditionalists, and it harms every other Catholic as well. If you think there deserves to be a spot for traditionalists at the table (and at least in public these individuals profess for that to be the case), then it really is simple: drop the terms. The man who made the term mean what you think it means today is telling you to do so.

Pope Francis and the "Mission" Thing

"In time, we will understand the mission of Pope Francis."

"Just give it time, and we will see what great things the Holy Spirit has in store for the Pope."

My friends tell me this all the time whenever the discussion centers on Pope Francis. Some of my traditionalist brethren fear he is going to set back the traditionalist cause decades if not outright killing it. Others parse every word, looking for a grand agenda, and when his sweeping reforms will start. All of this happens even though, according to Pope Francis' own words, he hasn't done much of anything since becoming Pope, and he has played his cards incredibly close to his chest on what he was going to do.

On Divisive Terms, Dialogue, and Reading "The Signs of the Times"... Guest Editorial by I. Shawn McElhinney

KMT note: Longtime readers of the Catholic blogosphere may remember Shawn McElhinney. If you remember him, your perception of him depended greatly on whether or not you attended the Extraordinary Form during the early days of Catholics blogging. He ran the "Lidless Eye Inquisition" with several others in attacking what they perceived to be "radical traditionalists" and "radtrads." Here Shawn explains why he no longer uses the terms.

 

It was brought to my attention recently that Catholic Answers had done a two hour program on traditionalism and terms such as "rad-trad" were utilized as well as a new term "mad-trad." As I helped popularize the terms "radical traditionalist" and "rad-trad" in weblog publications years ago, I was asked by my good friend Kevin Tierney for some thoughts on the use of the term in the modern ecclesial climate. A simple comment would not suffice and after some pondering of the matter, the result is what you have before you. Now I was admittedly privy to some apologists resurrecting the term earlier in the year and proceeding to use it in ways it was never intended to be used. However, that was small potatoes compared to when Catholic Answers (among the largest Catholic apologetics organizations in the world) decides on one of their shows to sanction the use of terms like rad-trad and "mad-trad." With that in mind, a bit of personal disclosure at the outset of this article is necessary.

Closing the Door (Finally) on Vatican II

With the canonization of Sts. John XXIII and John Paul II, many are interpreting these actions as the triumph of the Second Vatican Council, and how now the council will continue to dominate Catholic discourse for the next several generations.  For many of my traditionalist brethren (even those who have no problem accepting it as a valid ecumenical council without error), this gives us distress.  For some of our friends across the way, this gives them another chance to concern-troll the crap out of us.   I would like to offer an alternative idea.