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.