The chancellor has given us a budget to help women 'to get back to work'; but we want a budget that will help mothers to be with their children.

— Fr Thomas Crean OP (@crean_fr) March 16, 2023

Is the King of England a traditionalist?

Well, Yes and No!

Certainly he thinks of himself as a traditionalist - or at any rate trad-adjacent. And he certainly self-identifies as firmly anti-"modernist".

The problem though is that if you dig a little deeper he does indeed have some very odd ideas about what modernism actually is. Yes, it's something artificial - perhaps even "rationalist" (and, at that, not necessarily particularly rational). But what is the fundamental principle of the idea? What is the source of its power?

For what it's worth, I don't think he really understands Modernism, and that's because he doesn't realise quite how deep, dark and dangerous its roots really are. And thus his "traditionalism" isn't so much anti-Modernist as simple mystical perennialism.

And that, though it may be esoteric in and of itself, is hardly a secret. As Prince of Wales, the King was a patron of The Temenos Academy, and for a time he quite literally hosted it in the headquarter of his architecture institute (which is now The Prince's Foundation).

The connexion between the King's perennialist "traditionalism" and religious traditionalism in fact comes via people like Rama P Coomaraswamy, who was one of the first generation of Catholic trads to oppose "the changes" that followed Vatican II - and who was of course the son of Ananda K Coomaraswamy, at least one of whose works is available on the Temenos Academy's website.

All of which makes it particularly disappointing that the King's own understanding of revelation is, to put it bluntly, orthodoxly Modernist.

Revelation is not deemed possible from an empirical point of view. It comes about when a person practises great humility and achieves a mastery over the ego so that ‘the knower and the known’ effectively become one. And from this union flows an understanding of ‘the mind of God’. 

[The Prince of Wales, Harmony - A New Way of Looking at Our World, p. 13]

Because this is more or less exactly point 20 (i.e. condemned proposition) in Pope Pius X's Syllabus Condemning the Errors of the Modernists:

Revelation could be nothing else than the consciousness man acquired of his revelation to God. 

[Lamentabili Sane]

My feeling, for what it's worth, is that the new King is a very nice man. But unfortunately his "traditionalism" without an actual belief in the Revelation of Jesus Christ, in person, in our human nature, on earth, via his hypostatic union with the Father, to the Apostles, and thence to His Church by word and by scripture, is not going to count for much more than a vaguely fogeyish, Scrutonian (or even Hitchensite) "small-c conservatism".

Theology for Trads II: "Traditional" traddy bullsh*t

This is actually a pretty good example of traddy bullsh*t. Of course, it's Feeneyite (i.e. pre-Vatican II) bullsh*t rather than Lefebvrite or "sedevacantist". But the huge effort they've put into denying a perfectly orthodox theological opinion (i.e. baptism by blood) is directly comparable to sedevacantist attacks on the doctrine of the Church's indefectability, or indeed the more improbable complaints of Peter Kwasniewski about the liturgical "reforms" of the 1960s. (Bugnini is to blame for the decline in Christian marriage, supposedly.)

“Her Majesty prays that the blessing of Almighty God may rest upon your counsels.” pic.twitter.com/aoxi0JS66Z

— Andrew Cusack (@cusackandrew) May 10, 2022

Theology for Trads: A Brief Guide to Traddy Bullsh*t

So, this is the man the neo-Cisalpinist soi-disant "traditionalists" are pretending is an "Ultramontanist".

Pope Francis at Mass this morning: “In the Church their is always a temptation to rigidity and that to find God we must be very rigid, very rigid, rigid, with clear norms. God is not like this. When we see rigid proposals, we have to think this is not God, this is an idol” pic.twitter.com/tWrZwfZlwq

— Catholic Sat (@CatholicSat) January 23, 2022

Yeah! Riiiiight!

One has slightly more time for the fart-arse latter-day Gallicans of the Lefebvrite movement. At least they have the good grace to cough up conspiracy theories to justify why they're more Catholic than the Pope. (In fact one has slightly more time for the loons at Novus Ordo Watch: their position, which is that the Pope isn't really the Pope, at least means they don't end up attacking the papal office itself.)

• "Ultramontanism" is now being used not just as a term of abuse but to mean JPII-style "papal prophecy". It's also used as a general term for church "centralisation" - which of course is a process that has gone on continually under both conservative Popes and trendies and has nothing to do with ultramontanism.
• Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi - used by the Lefebvrites to attack Vatican II by implying that liturgical change is heretical. (As it happens, yes, the liturgical changes do smell a lot like heresy. But in reality the idea that the liturgy is the be all and end all of Catholic doctrine was condemned by Pius XII, and indeed the maxim has now been reversed out and is being used by trendies to attack the Latin Mass. (It implies a "false ecclesiology", supposedly.)
• "Clericalism" is now used to mean anything a cleric says that one disagrees with - and in fact abuse of the clergy for having a higher loyalty than to the sentiments of their lay congregations is very much of a piece with the proto-nationalism of Lefebvrite neo-Gallicanism. It goes without saying of course that most of the Church's problems are the fault of the clergy, so 'clericalism' is a useful go-to. For the trendies it produced "the abuse crisis". For the trads it produced a decline in religious vocations, a decline in lay apostolates like Catholic Action and Catholic youth organisations, and an increasingly clericalized laity for whom liturgical involvement (bidding prayers, offertory processions, etc.) is the be-all and end-all of Christian life. (You can then go home and vote for abortionists.) Unfortunately of course it's all bollocks. We live in an age when priests are generally treated with suspicion and contempt, and the clergy are in decline in terms of both numbers and training. Anyone who cannot see that is living in a fantasy world. 
• Muslims and Catholics don't worship the same God? What about Catholics and Jews? (And "implicit desire of baptism" = WTF?) Actually this is very much of a piece with a sort of traddy neo-Puritanism, which freaks out at any hint of folklore or authentic tradition as "paganism", and indeed sees little value in either monarchy or patriotic and national traditions. 

The big problem is of course that "Catholic traditionalism" is itself an awkward lash-up of French Gallicanism and English recusancy. The former in practice means longing nostalgically for the supremacy of a de facto totalitarian secular state (albeit a tastefully royal and liturgically elegant one). And the latter of course has its own unfortunate side-effect of Cisalpinism. ('Religious liberty' is something of a red herring. What the quasi-fascist loons at the SSPX object to is not so much religious liberty as liberty per se.)

And of course the very term "traditionalist" is pretty bogus. Yes, Pius X used the word, but he certainly didn't mean washed-up Gallican collaborationists or Catholics who lobby for more Latin Masses - which is particularly tragic given how many traddies don't even know very much about the Latin Mass*. For them going to "the old Mass" is simply an identification mark. To be fair, it's a good sign that one is serious about one's faith if one is interested in the Church's traditions, including her liturgical traditions, and if one knows what the Church means by "tradition". But to claim that going to the Latin Mass in and of itself makes one a better Catholic is unfair, uncharitable and, most importantly, quite misleading. It's possible that most "Novus Ordo Catholics" don't say grace before meals and that most trads do. But even if this is true, it's important not to confuse cause and effect, and to bear in mind that amongst Novus Ordo Catholics there is a wide spectrum of piety. (And, conversely, the same is true of trads.)

My own view, for what it’s worth, is that the Latin Mass does have an extrinsic value that the Novus Ordo Mass lacks: the silent canon, the longer prayers and extra prayers, the priest's orientation at the altar throughout (apart from the Gospels), its lack of variation from church to church, and of course the use of a "special" language that discourages illegitimate variations and make the Mass more "special" than a night at the bingo (or at any rate makes it more Verdi than G&S). And to lose all that would be a tragedy for the Church - not to mention an impoverishment of western culture. But there are plenty of pious, holy "Novus Ordo Catholics" for whom the Latin Mass (literally, in most cases) means nothing at all. But what about going to daily Mass? Or, in the case of certain rad trads, going to Mass at all?

In reality, nowadays traditionalism really is almost indistinguishable from fideism. And at the end of the day, the proliferation of traddy bullsh*t is down to the same lack of doctrinal authority as trendy bullsh*t. And so of course it ends up being as much part of the problem of "the confusion in the Church" as fideism is part of Modernism - the same enemy as condemned by St Pius X, only hydra-like with multiple heads. 

*Evelyn Waugh said that he preferred the sacred mumble of Low Mass to the ballet of High Mass. With theological insights of such a calibre from the educated Catholic elite of the day, it's hard to understand why the Latin Mass didn't survive.

Tonight MPs and Peers will gather in the chapel of the Houses of Parliament to pray the Rosary for Ukraine.

🇺🇦🇬🇧 pic.twitter.com/QOLQnpXMpH

— Catholics in the Conservative Party (@catholictories) March 23, 2022

Personally I don't think we do have an established church in this country. The C of E is simply an organ of the Establishment, like the BBC or the NHS. It's not an ecclesial body of believing Christians in any meaningful sense. https://t.co/rGOaJxWuIC

— Rewards & Fairies (@Rewards_Fairies) January 15, 2020