Steve Skojec: “Traditionalism” = “Sewer”, “Toxic”, “Tribalism”

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My present purpose, however, is not to analyze these two letters en toto (which would be inappropriate and improper, anyway) but rather, to look at what Steve says specifically about what he calls “traditionalism.” He has flat-out rejected it. I have drawn a stark contrast between legitimate traditionalists (characterized primarily by a love for the extraordinary form / Tridentine Mass) and reactionaryism, which is a more  essentially extreme position that has the four hallmarks of being 1) anti-pope, 2) anti-Vatican II, 3) anti-ordinary form Mass, and 4) anti-ecumenical [which is basically a subset of #2].

Steve, like virtually all reactionaries (usually misunderstanding what I actually mean by it), vehemently rejects my title, and calls himself (or has called himself, if he wants to now discontinue) a “traditionalist”. But then that makes what he is saying all the more dramatic and noteworthy, because he would then be criticizing the larger category of Catholic traditionalists + reactionaries, which is a criticism that goes beyond even what I have been saying, as an active observer and critic of the movement(s) (and despised by many in both movements as such) for over 25 years now. I’ve written two books on the topic and have devoted a very large web page to it.

When I found traditional Catholicism in 2004, I thought I’d finally discovered a safe haven. . . .

I’ve spent the past 17 years of my life as an apologist for traditionalist Catholicism — the most recent seven of which have been devoted to founding and running 1P5, which was, for a couple of years at least, the most-read traditionalist Catholic website in the world.

I thought I had, at long last, found my place. . . .

[T]raditionalism isn’t [Catholicism] . . . Instead, it is an ideological mask more identifiably in the shape of true Catholicism. It is, in some respects, a long-running Live Action Roleplay — a LARP — in which participants act out what they think Catholicism looked like in “the good old days” while perpetually running down any kind of Catholicism (or Catholic who practices it) that isn’t traditionalism. But it is essentially an affectation; an attempt to reconstruct and live within a historical context that no longer exists. Traditional Catholicism does exist, in the sense that all history exists. The Traditional Catholic liturgy exists not just historically, but even now. But traditionalism, as a “movement,” as an ideological oxbow lake, is a novelty. It’s not a historical reality, . . .

Let me try to explain it another way: no matter how many old movies you have in your DVD collection or how often you watch them, you can’t go back to the time and cultural context that forged them. Any attempt in the present to make something like Casablanca or The Manchurian Candidate or [insert your favorite here] will essentially fall short. It will be a reproduction that apes the signature characteristics — dress, décor, modes of speech, vehicles, and so on — of another time. Similarly, a Civil War re-enactor’s club may help keep the memory of that history alive, but it doesn’t make that history present. At the end of the day, the actors put away their muzzle loaders, change back into their normal clothes and drive home to their modern dwellings with electricity, indoor plumbing, and internet. . . .

[T]raditionalism, though it retains real treasures from the past that enliven the faithful today, becomes predominately ideological. A version of Catholicism that remains in constant tension with and sometimes open rebellion against the only institution that can give it life: the very Catholic Church that discarded it.

It’s paradigmatic crippled religion. And that is a problem.

It’s easy enough to see if you look at it objectively. Traditionalism, in my experience, is often attracts an unrelentingly toxic and negative sort of person — particularly online, but this filters down into the real world, too. Everything that is seen as non-traditional is perceived as hostile, even malicious. Since it has no authority structure of its own, no governance, no recourse to anything but old documents interpreted however the reader wishes to read them, it gives rise to an autonomous collection of mini-popes, all of them reveling in their “duty” to speak truth to power, analyzing anyone who ostensibly professes the same creed to death, searching for every “gotcha” moment with which they can be browbeaten for being insufficiently pure. . . . The same mantra is repeated countless times a day in trad comboxes and social media, “Ha! And you call yourself a trad!?”

Anyone still involved in the post-conciliar Church, whether or not it’s any fault of their own, is reduced by this kind of person to an epithet like “neo-Cath” or “modernist.” The purity spiral comes for us all, and there’s nobody trads would rather eat alive than other trads who have fallen short in some way. I’ve never endured more calumny, more vitriol, more outright enmity in my life from any group of people as I have from certain members of my own in-group. And all of it is in response to imagined deviations from this or that dogmatic opinion held by whichever mini-pope was standing in judgment that day. . . .

COVID hit, and the world went insane.

Viganò quickly turned into the Catholic Q Anon. Squandering his prophetic role for a more reliable job as a pundit, he started offering comment on all things political, even as he failed to produce the additional documentation about Church corruption he seemed to hint at possessing. A poor scientific grasp of epidemiology was no impediment to his pontifications about how this fake pandemic was a tool of the New World Order to usher in the Antichrist. . . .

Viganò spoke with conviction against nefarious and undefined global powers, and that was enough to earn him a slot at the top of every traditionalist speaking list. Although I published a number of his earlier pieces, I remember coming to a distinct point where I couldn’t, in good conscience, do that any longer. Some of what he was saying was simply wrong. He turned out to be a big, bright, canary in the COVID mine. Like the rest of the secular political landscape, COVID conspiracy theorism has become inextricably intertwined with mainstream, online traditionalist Catholicism, and its dogmatic axioms are no longer up for discussion — under pain of excommunication.

17 years after thinking that traditionalist Catholicism was the bold answer to what ails the Church, it became startlingly clear to me that it was, perhaps, quite the contrary. . . . traditionalists spun their wheels as they set about the Sisyphean task of trying to convince the Church to go back in time. . . . they got cocky. They got way too political. And now as a group, I think they’ve lost their way.

They also can’t stop eating each other alive.

While I am typing this, my cautionary posts about the completely uncritical adulation being thrown like laurels at the feet of a particular imprudent and overly political priest are being barraged with negative comments by precisely this sort of person. I’ve had something like 700 comments in the last 24 hours alone. My appeals to historical precedent of celebrity priests who appear orthodox but turn out to be bad actors as a reason to proceed with caution are being scoffed at as though I’ve announced that the moon is made of cheese.

Here are similar thoughts of his in his second open letter:

[Y]oung advocates of traditional liturgy like me found ourselves heading to worship God every Sunday in the company of individuals who, as often as not, seemed dour and judgmental. They spoke in effusive terms when they described their Mass, but appeared pained when they actually attended it. No smiles ever seemed to touch their lips, and they would glare at women (like my wife) who would at times forget their chapel veils, or wear makeup, or fail to provide some means of instant corporal punishment at the first sign of a squirming toddler.  In short, they had become terrified of novelty, and accustomed to betrayal, they had seemingly lost the capacity for joy.

That joylessness became the traditionalist brand, and they spread it everywhere they went. From the condemning, anonymous masses who pass judgment on all things Catholic on forums like Angelqueen to the rantings of The Remnant; from propositions that the solar system is Geocentric to the pamphleteering Fatima Crusaders to the seemingly endless discussions on whether it’s ever appropriate for women to wear pants, the attitude of many of the “trads” we encounter is often petty, conspiratorial, uncharitable, or out of touch with reality. Sometimes, it’s all of the above.

Years ago, when I first became enamored of the traditional Catholic liturgy, a friend of mine who enjoyed going to the Extraordinary Form (but wasn’t committed to it) asked me a pointed question: “If traditional Catholics have this great treasure, as they say they do, shouldn’t it make them the happiest people you know? Shouldn’t their joy over so beautiful a liturgy be overflowing, and thereby draw others in to find out what they have that’s so great?” . . .

Condemnations, judgments, specious arguments, and morose dispositions do no favors for our cause, or its future. We’ve got something great going on, and it’s about time we acted like it.

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Here are some excerpts from chapter two of my 2002 book,  Reflections on Radical Catholic Reactionaries. The chapter is entitled, “Faith and Optimism vs. Pessimism.”

Complaints, undue criticism, condemnation, disobedience, dissent, bickering, moaning and groaning, silly and self-important pontifications, whining, waxing eloquently cynical: that’s what we so often see in the reactionary movement. It’s extremely unseemly, unedifying, and unappealing.

It is denied that the reactionary position is characterized by an attitude of pessimism and lack of faith. “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matthew 12:34). One reads the sort of comments reactionaries habitually make, and one is more than justified in arriving at certain conclusions, if words mean anything at all. If individual proponents of these viewpoints happen to have a joyful heart, then they would do well to include some positive remarks in public also. How about an article once in a while like “What’s Good in the Church?”? A gloomy “quasi-defectibility” outlook is contrary to a truly Catholic faith in God’s guidance of His Church. Many reactionary writings do not convey this sort of hope and sunny optimism at all.

The alarmist reactionary rhetoric gets worse and worse, as with all conspiratorial schemes and theories trumped-up in order to explain things that people find themselves unable to comprehend or understand (therefore, they disobey and lose confidence in their ecclesiastical superiors). Like Job’s comforters, reactionaries fail to see that God is at work: though mysterious and inexplicable His ways may continue to be. A little reading of Church history (the bleak periods) might do wonders.

Faith and perseverance must enter in, in such troubled times in the Church. We need to understand that Church history repeatedly shows this pattern; that even the early Church had tremendous scandal and hypocrisy, and — above all — that the Church is indefectible. That’s why the orthodox Catholic remains forever an optimist. We readily acknowledge that modernism is rampant; we deny that it can ever overthrow the Church. One must have faith. reactionaries ought to read the book of Job. Tough times afflict the Church as well as the individual. It is to be expected. Why does that surprise reactionaries? Liberalism, heterodoxy, and unbelief are never surprising, but a Church that remains orthodox despite all is perpetually a delightful and heartening “surprise.” The glory of the Church (like that of the saints) is not that it has no problems, but that it always sees a way through the problems. It always conquers them. Heresy has no life of its own, so it always fails eventually, while the Church marches on (as in Chesterton’s marvelous reflections on “orthodoxy”). It does so because it is God’s own Church, and God cannot fail.

Reactionaryism is profoundly pessimistic, which is fitting for Buddhists, Hindus, or nihilists, but not Christians. So God has given up on His Church? Even our Lord Jesus had His Judas, and St. Paul had his Corinthian church. God saw fit to include in the ancestry of Jesus a harlot (Rahab) and a murderer and adulterer (David). There was no “golden era,” if by that one means a period without serious ecclesiastical problems. I think reactionaries continue to believe in original sin, and the world, the flesh, and the devil. The Church is to be reborn in the caves and backwaters of Pharisaical reactionary gatherings? I think not.

Things take time. The pessimist always concentrates on present miseries, while the optimist, idealist, or person exercising faith look at the good things that will come in the future, as the present decadent cycle comes to a close and the new revival starts to gradually pick up momentum. We need only look back at Church history to see what is coming next (excepting Christ’s return, of course). If the Second Coming isn’t imminent, then it is almost certain that major revival will come in this century.

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The indefectibility of the Catholic Church and its divine protection from the Holy Spirit is our grounds (in faith) that things will get better, and are, in fact, not as bad as they seem in the first place (at the deepest, spiritual level). Joy rests on grounds other than circumstances. Joy comes from inner peace of the soul, by the grace of God, and a Christian can possess it even in a concentration camp, or with incurable cancer. The saints even truly embraced suffering with joy, as a privilege and honor and a way to help save souls. I am referring to the optimism of the eye of faith: the assurance that God knows what He is doing, and that history has a purpose: that all things are in His Providence, though He obviously doesn’t will all things in His perfect will. He allows bad things, and then uses them for His own purposes. The modernist crisis is no different than anything else; God uses it for His benevolent ends, and is not mocked. Doom-and-gloom and Chicken Little pessimism are contrary to faith and the true Catholic spirit.

I suspect that a lot of the reactionary analysis of the crisis in the Church comes down to temperament. Some people are of a state of mind and emotional make-up that they are naturally pessimists. They may struggle with depression or find it difficult to be of good cheer, with regard to day-to-day life. They might be going through any number of things that are legitimately troubling. Sensitive souls will be harmed and troubled more by evil and “things gone wrong” than less sensitive types. We mustn’t pretend that temperaments and personality types have no effect on our worldviews. They certainly do. Nevertheless, I think there are real, objectively measured grounds for optimism with regard to the Church situation, other than simply a feel-good delusion based on mere temperamental factors and circumstances.