Sediziose Voci

I feel I have to respond to two items creating a tempest in the traditionalist teapot. Is it simply fortuitous that as reports circulate of an imminent confrontation between the Vatican and Traditionalists subversive voices 1) are heard?  Self-appointed “conservative” and “Traditionalist” spokesmen of the internet now denounce Traditionalists. And their alleged status as Traditionalists gives their words added credibility. Is it an accident that both articles discussed below appeared or were favorably reviewed in the American Conservative, where Rod Dreher holds court?  Rod Dreher recently has made a specialty of combining cultural criticism with endless denunciations of Donald Trump and his supporters. In other words, the conservative may criticize at length the political and ideological deviations of today’s culture but may not confront – like Trump and his movement do –  the establishment in any meaningful or effective way.

Michael Warren Davis is a cultural commentator who held – briefly – the leading editorial positions of Crisis magazine and of  the US edition of the Catholic Herald. He identifies as “conservative “ or “orthodox.” But he now also claims to have attended the Traditional Mass “on two continents” “almost exclusively since I was received into the Church”  and speaks of “us trads.” Davis was the author of a 2018 article denouncing long-departed Catholic conservative heroes – Joe Sobran and the editors of Triumph Magazine – while pontificating on how relevant some of at least Sobran’s thought may be. 2) The similarity to the Dreher party line is obvious. 

His Prodigal Trads and the Holy Father continues in the same vein. In a nutshell,  Davis  argues that any action the Pope takes against against Traditionalists is justified because of their strident criticism of him. You see, Pope Francis was initially favorably inclined to the Traditional mass but changed his mind after “we Traditionalists” became critics of his policies. Davis’s article is one long diatribe against Traditionalists. 

Both in the text of the article and the published title and headings Davis employs constant anti-Traditionalist innuendos: “prodigal“ trads:  “liturgical dissenters” “defiant,” “bizarre,” “angry,” “defensive,” a “clique.”  Pope Francis is of course quoted at length. And our author builds up to this indictment :

 The fact is that no other “clique” within the Church shares our (sic!) reputation for disobedience and uncharity. …trads are in a league of our own here.

Davis’s judgement in making these assertions is appalling; his errors of fact are monumental. Let me give some examples. For the proposition that Bergoglio began his  papacy as an “eager friend”  of the Latin Mass Davis quotes Michael Matt and Jeffery Tucker – neither of whom, regardless of their other merits, had any knowledge of Argentinian situation – while ignoring authoritative reports from 2013 detailing the new Pontiff’s consistent hostility to the Traditionalist movement. I should add that, entirely apart from this, I myself have spoken with two knowledgeable people who confirmed the actions and style of Francis the Pope are identical to those of Bergoglio the Archbishop of Buenos Aires. This consistency in word and action has been evident from the earliest days of his pontificate ( consider the actions taken against the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate) – all of which Davis ignores.

Quoting Bishop Fellay in favor of Francis is a little misleading:  the bishop’s statements very likely were made in the context of negotiations between the FSSPX and the Vatican.  Claiming Cardinal Sarah to be the “world’s most prominent Traditionalist” is simply nonsense; if anything, his adherence is to the “reform of the reform.” His appointment had nothing to do with favoring Sarah’s liturgical ideas but was undoubtedly a specific response to a spat over the role of African bishops in Francis’s synods. Davis doesn’t mention, of course,  how Francis subsequently  consistently undermined Sarah and blocked his (Novus Ordo) liturgical initiatives.

Davis seems to think that the Protestant Reformation only developed as such because Luther raised the level of antipapal rhetoric too high – after all, didn’t he just want to stop the sale of indulgences? At the Council of Nicaea in 325:

The Council then declared Arianism a heresy, and nearly all of Arius’s supporters relented.

Of course in historical fact the response of the Arians was the exact opposite. It’s true that  “for a while, it looked as if the Arians would win control of the Church” but that happened, contrary to what Davis implies,  years after, not before the Council. And it’s a joke to whine now about unique Traditionalist “disobedience” after that vice has been practiced by the entire Catholic left with great success for decades and as the German Church is indulging in now once again (with the Pope’s understanding).

More importantly, though, I don’t get a good idea of what Davis really stands for. He asserts that: 

[S]o many trads over the last few months … are walking away from the Latin Mass.  That’s ( the attacks on the bishops the Pope, Cupich, Martin etc. – SC) not what they signed up for.” 

I’d like to know what they and Davis actually did “sign up for.” Nice vestments and music? For Davis has nothing good to say about them in this article. Even though the things that Davis says the Trads criticize about Francis – which generally are not liturgical questions  – have also been the subject of attack by conservatives and by Davis as well, as a cursory review of the archives of Crisis magazine will demonstrate. He himself says:

As the Francis papacy wore on, and as the controversies piled up—“Who am I to judge?”, Amoris Laetitia, the McCarrick scandal, the Abu Dhabi declaration, the Affair of the Pachamama, etc.—traditionalists began to grow wary of the Holy Father. And I believe that our suspicions are often warranted.

Yet now all is forgiven:

I also believe that most of Francis’s actions can be reconciled with Catholic orthodoxy.

Davis quotes, in support of this assertion, from an essay by a fellow cultural commentator, also unqualified to render judgment in all these areas. And “can be reconciled with Catholic Orthodoxy” is, I might add, a mighty low standard for assessing a Pope’s teaching. 

According to Davis, it’s just a matter of interpreting Francis’s papacy in the best possible light – a mandatory “hermeneutic of putting the best spin” on whatever he says. At this moment, Michael Davis seems to be striving to be neither a Traditionalist nor a conservative but rather a “man of the establishment.”  And that establishment’s real operative rules are obedience and avoidance of criticism of ecclesiastical authority.    I wonder: is Michael Warren Davis seeking employment with Bishop Barron’s organization? 

Steve Skojec has been running a  website, Onepeterfive, that I have found helpful and informative. Recently, however, he seems to have had an altercation with his FSSP pastor in Phoenix, who according to Skojec denied baptism to one child and first communion to another. That resulted in a rambling article “Against Crippled Religion”  in which the author gives vent to many different frustrations with the Church. And he concludes by saying he’s done with that crippled religion:  “Nobody is coming to save us. Not even God.”

Now I sympathize with much of what Skojec says. The author is obviously suffering a crisis of faith. I too have certainly had my difficulties over the years with the “crippled religion” of today’s  Roman Catholic Church and its clergy. A religion that often harshly enforces petty formalities yet condones behavior of those having media, political or economy power. It’s commendable that somebody can summon up the character to react  – however explosively – to these at times insufferable conditions.

More specific to the facts Skojec’s case, I have heard tales of harsh, unpastoral treatment by FSSP priests and, going back quite a few years now, even experienced it directly in a few minor incidents.   So, although it would be unfair to generalize from what little I know to an overall judgement about the order, I am not exactly surprised to hear about this kind of thing in connection with thee FSSP.  In his pre-Traditionalist days, moreover,  Steve was exposed to the Legion of Christ and its practices  – I have only indirect experience of that but I can imagine what it was like. So to a great extent I am sympathetic with Steve Skojec’s predicament.

I am far less sympathetic about other aspects of Skojec’s article. Such as combining a narrative of a personal crisis of faith with petty resentments about the lack of space at the overflowing traditional parish. (It seems they are acquiring an additional church anyway) Skojec seems to ignore the role of his own decisions in certain bad experiences.  He voluntarily went to one of the World Youth Days; he stuck with Legionaries of Christ after he himself began to perceive  problems. In these negative encounters and circumstances, as Skojec himself describes them, an unacknowledged element of his own bad judgment is playing a role.

What I cannot accept at all is for Skojec to proceed from these real issues to a specific all-out attack on traditionalism, e.g.,

 “Traditionalism, in my experience,  often attracts an unrelentingly toxic and negative sort of person.”

“Traditionalism remains akin to that DVD collector or civil war re-enactor: a recreation out of place and time needing to justify its own existence in the present as a nostalgic aberration.”

Instead, (Traditionalism) is an ideological mask more identifiably in the shape of true Catholicism (compared to the post-conciliar Church-SC). 

But it is essentially an affectation; an attempt to reconstruct and live within a historical context that no longer exists.

Thus Skojec himself adopts as his own the litany of lies Traditionalists have heard about themselves for the last 50 years from progressives and the official Church: that they are toxic, rigid, perhaps mentally unbalanced; they are trying to recreate the past; they are ideologues; they are aesthetes… . It is distressing to hear someone say such things who claims he has lived with the traditional liturgy since 2004 and who set himself up as a spokesman. For it indicates to me the author, after all these years,  has no real understanding of why someone is a Traditionalist in the first place.  Does Skojec believe the families he reports as thronging his (former) parish became members of it because any of the things he enumerates? If these caricatures really reflect Skojec’s internet experience, that is an entirely different matter. And I can assure him unpleasant individuals are not confined to Traditionalism – or, for that matter, even the right wing of the religious and political spectrum. 

Again I am sorry for Steve Skojec who has contributed so much of value over the years. He has had the honesty to publicly reveal his pain. But to suddenly radically reject a movement that one had adopted as a mature man,  had practiced and advocated –  ultimately because of an experience, however distressing, with one priest, indicates that perhaps the foundations were not quite right in the first place. As Nicolas Gomez Davila says somewhere:

He who is rejecting the Church is often really rejecting the Sacristan.

1. “Subversive Voices” (Recitative from Bellini’s Norma)
2. My review: Sobranistas without Sobran