Since we spent the past couple of days with Sr. Mary Eucharista helping people escape the toxicity of Traddery, it seems healthy to be reminded of why Traddery needs to be escaped, renounced, and starved of all support. Mike Lewis tells us why: because it is hatchery of hatred for the Church, the least of these, the gospel, the Holy Father, and the human race:
This is a world where the USCCB’s former Executive Director of the Secretariat on Doctrine has said that he can no longer listen to Newman (let alone the Magisterium) on the development of doctrine and about adhering to the teachings of the pope and bishops. He has instead decided that his private interpretation has primacy, saying “that any pontifical teaching or teaching from bishops that overtly and deliberately contradicts the perennial teaching of previous councils and pontiffs is not magisterial teaching.”
This is a world where the former friendly host of the radio program Catholic Answers Live is now a full-blown conspiracy theorist and sedevacantist, organizing conferences and leading “Catholic” pilgrimages in Europe alongside equally reactionary figures (including Bishop Strickland). This is a world where Catholic Answers sells books that support the death penalty or are written by Strickland.
This is a world where editors of the once-serious conservative Catholic magazines First Things and Crisis have, respectively, written articles dismissing the severity of Covid at the height of the pandemic and stating that “giving ladies the right to vote was the single greatest catastrophe in the history of our storied republic.”
This is a world where the current editor of the aforementioned Crisis Magazine and the country’s second-most popular “celebrity exorcist” both believe that the Covid pandemic was caused by “idolatry” allegedly on display during the Amazon Synod in the Vatican — a ridiculous, racist, and thoroughly debunked moral panic that only the most gullible and ignorant can possibly believe at this point.
This is a world where highly-trafficked websites like LifeSite News and One Peter Five provide an open forum for sedevacantists to argue their positions. This is a world where open antisemitism is given a platform and no one bats an eye.
This is a world where archbishops turn a blind eye to the dangerous and heterodox views of the reactionary clergy under their authority and who do nothing when heretical radical traditionalists speak in their parishes. This is a world where bishops grant imprimaturs to heretical books and refuse to comment further.
These examples barely scratch the surface of the irrational, paranoid, unhinged hatred of the schismatic, anti-Francis movement. It’s an anti-Catholic movement led by gullible and brainwashed Catholics, many of whom are seminarians, priests, bishops, and cardinals. Many, like Strickland, have abandoned the faith they once believed for an irrational crash-and-burn ideology that is clearly headed for disaster. Others are attracted to this ideology and become Catholic because these notions appeal to them.
This is a world where once-prominent “JP2 Catholic” thinkers like Larry Chapp and George Weigel devote their efforts to sitting on the porch and shaking their canes because they imagine Pope Francis is on their lawn — ignoring that their longtime ideological and theological peers have collectively gone mad and are trying to burn down the house.
Flee the unclean thing.
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4 Responses
Right wing Catholic media is very critical of Pope Francis, but lionizes Donald Trump. Incredible.
Hey, so I agree with you on all the things you wrote above. I like reading and not watching videos to get my news/information and I used to go to Catholic Answers or First Things and actually all the sites you mentioned above, but stopped when I noticed they turned weird. Having said that, I have sort of run out of places to turn to get updates on solid Catholic stuff besides your blog and Fischer’s. Do you have any recommendations for places I can surf that will fill those voids? Thanks
https://wherepeteris.com/
Around 2016, I became convinced that the mainstream of the Church was “the unclean thing” and I fled it for what I thought were the greener pastures of the Traditional Movement. Being the impressionable oaf that I am, it didn’t take long for me to get suckered in by the worst of the worst and embrace Beneplenism (now indistinguishable from sedevacantism, since Pope Benedict is no longer with us). Thankfully, the Good Lord saw fit to pick me up and turn me around, allowing me to flee another unclean thing and plant my flag on the “safe” side of the traditionalist camp. But over the course of the COVID pandemic, the 2020 election, and its aftermath, it became clear to me that many if not most of the leading lights even within “safe” traditionalism – so many of whom eloquently denounced the supposed cult of personality built up around Pope Francis and the papacy in general since Vatican II – were just as eager as could be to sell themselves body and soul to the Cult of Trump (if that’s not an unclean thing, I don’t know what is).
Let me be clear: Despite how disillusioned I’ve become with what passes for Traddery these days, nothing will ever convince me – as Austen Ivereigh seemed to imply in his Commonweal piece from January 2022 – that desiring to live the Faith in a more traditional manner is in and of itself a sign of incorrigible corruption, nor will I ever be convinced that attempting to cull the reactionary elements by suppressing the T.L.M. and other pre-Vatican II rituals themselves was a good idea (or even a doable idea). But however many good souls are left in Traddom will have to do SOMETHING if they want to bequeath anything sane, healthy, and…y’know…CATHOLIC to their children and grandchildren, even if it means breaking every idol and purging the MAGA venom from their midst by any means necessary.
As for me, having run out of unclean things to flee and being far too jaded at this late stage to give anyone else the time of day, my gut impulse is to shout, “To blazes with all of you!” and channel my inner Wile E. Coyote, retreating to a high vantage point and waiting until the leaders of all the warring Church factions get close enough to each other that I can dispatch them all at once by means of some comically large object courtesy of the Acme Corporation.
However, because such an impulse is not in any way compatible with the demands of the Gospel, what I actually hope to do this Lent is get back to regular Confession and reception of the Eucharist and pray every day that God’s Will be done, no matter what happens.