Papal without a Pope: Recent Manifestations of Conservative Catholicism.

As the nature of the policies of Pope Francis became clear, American conservative Catholicism quickly found itself in a grave dilemma. No other tendency within the Church had placed so much weight on loyalty to the papacy as the ultimate criterion of Catholicity. Yet the new pope, while insisting on absolute loyalty to his person, systematically rejected or reduced to a nebulous ideal everything for which the conservatives had fought: ”life issues” (especially opposition to abortion), alliances with evangelical Christianity, their opposition to socialism, liturgical abuses, “LGBT” and the entire progressive Catholic agenda. The pope regularly coarsely denounces revered conservative champions. (EWTN, for example, is claimed to be “doing the work of the devil”). And in the greatest humiliation of all for the conservatives, a hail of disparaging remarks and insinuations continued to shower down from Francis’s entourage on the Catholic Church in America and on the United States in general. All this commenced, of course, years before Francis launched his war on traditionalist Catholics. But even amid this campaign, in word and deed, Francis and his sycophants continue to make clear that all adversaries of the Left are also their targets. 

The conservative movement has been searching for a response. To their credit, few were able to follow the example of clerical institutions like Opus Dei and celebrate the steps the pope is taking against them. Instead, some conservatives simply withdrew into silence. Others surreptitiously shifted into a quiet alignment with the positions of the traditionalists, their erstwhile adversaries. Still others denounced the ever-increasing number of outrages in the Church while avoiding mentioning the Pope’s role in them.  I myself considered that, in view of this, conservative Catholicism had reached the end of the road, that from now on the landscape of the Catholic right would be dominated by traditionalism.

Indeed, the drift to traditionalism – or at least the openness to traditionalist thought – among conservatives has continued to progress. But I was a bit hasty in my expectations regarding the demise of the entire movement. After more than nine years of the reign of Francis, conservative advocates have returned to the secular media – as conservatives, but without the pope. They champion conservative Catholic issues – sometimes now even including the right to attend the Traditional Mass. But they are forced to argue without the benefit of reliance on authority. Let us look at some of their recent products.

Michael Warren Davis speaks of “us trads.” 1) He writes of the beauty of the Latin Mass. But what is exactly his position?  Although Davis claims to be a “trad,” his positions resemble much more closely those of a Catholic conservative. According to Davis:

As many of you know, there is a powerful clique of Catholic bishops who oppose the Traditional Latin Mass. ….Last year, Pope Francis published his apostolic letter Traditionis Custodes. It gave those anti-TLM bishops the excuse they needed to beginshutting down their Latin Mass parishes in their dioceses. 

That is the last reference to Pope Francis in Davis’s article. I don’t think many people would characterize the relationship between Traditionis Custodes  and the subsequent actions of the bishops in this manner.  The bishops’ enforcement actions are clearly the intended result of Traditionis Custodes and indeed reflect some coordination with the Vatican.  Of course, Davis earlier had propagated the utterly erroneous notion that Pope Francis had once been indifferent or even favorable to the Traditional Mass.

Naturally, Davis thinks whatever is happening now is largely the fault of the traditionalists themselves:

No doubt they (the anti-Traditional Mass bishops – SC) would cite the army of bloggers, vloggers, and Twitter trolls who devote themselves to castigating the hierarchy. And it’s true: some of these traditionalists say things about the pope that would make Martin Luther blush. So, if your only exposure to traditionalist Catholics came via the internet, you might agree that TLM is a bad influence.

Look: I’m the first to admit that there are problems in the Latin Mass community… I’ve bent over backwards to give our bishops the benefit of the doubt. 

I even have a soft spot for Cardinal Gregory…I have to believe that he truly loves Jesus Christ and His holy Church.

Why does Davis “have to” believe that?  Is he Gregory’s confessor? As he has done in the past,  Davis is denouncing those he is claiming to defend – and whose rights have been violated – while “bending over backwards” to excuse the establishment. 

So why does Archbishop Gregory do what he does?

There’s only one answer that makes any sense. Cardinal Gregory doesn’t understand the desire for beauty in worship.

So, you see, Gregory is just aesthetically challenged. Davis has a profound misunderstanding of Catholicism if he thinks all these people who sacrifice so much to attend Traditional Masses do so primarily because of the aesthetic experience. 

George Weigel, the grand old man of Catholic conservatism, argues in The Wall Street Journal for the “necessary” Vatican Council 2) However, he also signals his dissent from the views of the circle of the bishop of Rome:

Contrary to the claims of those votaries of Pope Francis who claim the Council instituted a “paradigm shift” in the Church’s self-understanding, John XXIII did not convoke Vatican II to reinvent Catholicism.

Pope Francis’s views on the subject are not explored further in this article.  But Weigel devotes paragraph after paragraph to the claimed original vision of John XXIII.  But how then did the problems of today’s Church arise? Weigel does, after all, frankly acknowledge the current catastrophic situation. According to Weigel, this is the fault of those (unnamed) individuals who abandoned John XXIII’s original intent to embrace secular modernity uncritically. In fact, much of Weigel’s article is a covert critique of the interpretations and policies emanating from the Vatican today. In this regard, it’s remarkable that Weigel does not mention the name of Paul VI. 

The traditionalists are, nevertheless, still utterly mistaken:

The more radical Catholic Traditionalists of our day seem to imagine that the Catholic bastion of the mid-20^thcentury could have sustained itself indefinitely. Thoughtful assessments of Vatican II and its legacy must acknowledge that the pre-conciliar Catholic past was more brittle and frailer after two world wars . and more vulnerable to the cultural tsunami of the 1960’s than some nostalgic traditionalist imagine. 

Weigel’s “thoughtful assessment” is just the usual list of calumnies against “radical” and “nostalgic” traditionalists as well as gratuitous assertions about the past.  I don’t think anyone on the traditionalist side today imagines that the pre-Conciliar Church was perfect.  But to make the claim – as George Weigel does – that the problems after the Council are (at least in large part) attributable to the debility of an already feeble structure seems to contradict empirical studies (such as those of Guillaume Cuchet ) and, in the case of some of us, the evidence of our own eyes. George Weigel seeks to disassociate himself from the “votaries“ of Francis yet his rhetoric here is virtually indistinguishable from theirs.

But in Weigel’s view what are the points of light of post-conciliar Catholicism? Where has John XXIII’s vision been realized sufficiently to support Weigel’s claims that the Council has been, at least in some places, a success? Weigel cites the progress of the African Church. But Africanization and the growth of the Church on that continent had been underway well before the Council – didn’t a certain traditionalist Archbishop have a key role in that? And under Francis hasn’t the African Church been regularly portrayed as an “adversary” of the Conciliar establishment? Then, Weigel speaks of the movements within the Soviet bloc and the emergence of John Paul II in Poland as fruits of the Council and specifically, of  the Declaration on Human Freedom. But Poland under Cardinal Wyszynski was viewed in the Cold War years as one of the most retrograde Churches, not as an exemplar of implementation of the Council.  John Paul II was after all the product Poland’s conservative, nationalist, even clerical Catholic culture. And when Weigel writes of the “self-liberation” of the Eastern bloc from communism I think that is more than a little exaggerated. Overall, Weigel can only assemble a highly selective and factually questionable historical summary to back up his narrative. 

We have covered in an earlier post a third example of conservative journalism: the announcement of the new Institute of Human Ecology at Catholic University – also published in The Wall Street Journal. 3) The  author, Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, however, focusses not on conflicts within the Church but on the Church’s potential role on politics and the secular world ( a subcategory of Catholic conservative thought).  In this article, too, the current pontiff and the hierarchy (except for Archbishop Gomez of Los Angeles) are noticeable by their absence. Apparently the “dazzling intellectual tradition of the Church,” supposedly offering so much potential benefit to our world, is not necessarily best represented by the Church’s current leadership. 

Finally, Ross Douthat has written the most interesting of the pieces we are considering – dealing with the anniversary of Vatican II. 4) Douthat expressly claims for himself the title of “conservative.” His contribution, however, compared to those of his peers shows the greatest understanding of reality and departs farthest from prior conservative orthodoxy. He freely concedes that the Council has been, on its own terms, a failure. He acknowledges the problematic nature of the reign of Francis. Indeed, the very existence of  Pope Francis illustrates the failure of the conservative Catholics’ attempts over the years to contain the Council to a restricted and fixed set of provisions. Yet, like Weigel,  he declares that  the Council was “necessary.” Furthermore, it is “ irreversible.” I believe, though, that Douthat has na understanding of that word very much more nuanced than the Vatican’s. (Historical events, of course, can never be “undone.”) Nevertheless, these two terms serve to remove the Council from all rational inquiry. It is transformed into a scientific fact or even an article of Faith – much like Pope Francis’s statement in his letter accompanying Traditionis Custodes that to doubt the Council is to doubt the Holy Spirit. Thus, whatever Douthat’s reservations about the current state of the Church and its leadership may be, at the end of the day he defers to the irrational authority of the Council – even in the face of its failure. There is no way out.

This brief review shows that conservative Catholicism lives on even if deprived of what once was its most essential feature: reverence for papal authority. These conservatives of today acknowledge, to a greater or lesser extent, the post-conciliar disasters and losses. They can regret the persecution of traditionalists. Whether openly or not, they diverge in many respects from the current party line of the Vatican and do not rely on (current) papal authority. And at least in the case of Ross Douthat, they can even admit the failure of the Council itself. Yet despite all these insights,  the Traditionalists remain adversaries for them. Instead of seeking further reconciliation with the defenders of Tradition, these conservative authors inevitably take refuge in dogmatic assumptions which allow a return to the principle of institutional authority, at least in some attenuated form: Davis’s bishops acting in good faith, Weigel’s necessary Council as defined in the era of Pope John XXIII; the “dazzling Catholic intellectual tradition” of Picciotti-Bayer; and finally, Douthat’s necessary and irreversible, even if failed, Council.  Regardless of the continuing rapprochement between the two parties under the relentless pressure of Pope Francis’s regime, the divergence between traditionalists and Catholic conservatives regrettably remains intact.

1. Davis, Michael Warren, “Politics of Reason and Beauty,” The American Conservative (Sept. 29. 2022)
2. Weigel, George, “What Vatican II Accomplished,”  The Wall Street Journal (Oct 1-2, 2022)
3.  Picciotti-Bayer, Andrea,  “Counterfeit Catholicism, Left and Right,” The Wall Street Journal, ( 9/23/2022). My review is at “The Dazzling Catholic Intellectual Tradition” – the Institute for Human Ecology at Catholic University.”
4. Douthat, Ross, “How Catholics became Prisoners of Vatican II,” The New York Times (October 12, 2022)