What I Saw at the Counter-Revolution: Traditionalism at Sixty

Mr Coulombe compares the Traditionalist Movement with Catholic rebellions against the imposition of the Cranmer BCP in the 16th century.

From One Peter Five

By Charles Coulombe,  KCSS, STM

We will have the Mass in Latin as before. We will have the Sacrament hang over the high altar, and there to be worshipped as it was wont to be, and they which will not thereto consent, we will have them die like heretics against the Holy Catholic Faith. We will have palms and ashes at the times accustomed, images to be set up again in every Church. We will not receive the new service because it is like a Christmas game, but we will have our old service of Matins, Mass, Evensong, and procession in Latin not in English, as it was before. — The demands of the “Prayer Book Rebels,” 1549.

I was born the day John F. Kennedy was elected – November 8, 1960. In many ways, this was the apogee of Americanist Catholicism of the kind sponsored by Archbishop John Carrol, Fr. Isaac Hecker, Archbishop John Ireland, and James Cardinal Gibbons. Eschewing evangelisation of the United States in return for assimilation, it was epitomised in May of 1898 from Msgr. Denis J. O’Connell, rector of the North American College in Rome to Archbishop Ireland:

For me this [the Spanish-American War] is not simply a question of Cuba. If it were, it were no question or a poor question. Then let the ‘greasers’ eat one another up and save the lives of our dear boys. But for me it is a question of much more moment:-it is the question of two civilizations. It is the question of all that is old & vile & mean & rotten & cruel & false in Europe against all this [sic] is free & noble & open & true & humane in America. When Spain is swept of [sic] the seas much of the meanness & narrowness of old Europe goes with it to be replaced by the freedom and openness of America. This is God’s way of developing the world. And all continental Europe feels the war is against itself, and that is why they are all against us, and Rome more than all because when the prestige of Spain & Italy will have passed away and when the pivot of the world’s political action will no longer be confined within the limits of the continent; then the nonsense of trying to govern the universal church from a purely European standpoint — and according to exclusively Spanish and Italian methods, will be glaringly evident even to a child. ‘Now the axe is laid to the root of the tree.’

This kind of belief grew ever stronger with the Catholic American participation in the Two World Wars. The cult of the Four Chaplains, the Fr. Feeney Case, the popularity of Archbishop Sheen on television, the work of the Knights of Columbus in getting “Under God” put in the Pledge of Allegiance, the publication of Fr. John Courtney Murray, S.J.’s We Hold These Truths – these and much else showed how rapidly American Catholicism was trying to become – on outward appearance, at any rate, as much like its non-Catholic alternatives as possible. As Msgr. Pope points out in one of his fine columns, during the same era, the faith of many priests was being eroded by precisely this kind of assimilationism. He quotes at length a priest friend of that era, whose comments are worth quoting in extenso:

I think I need to say that we really thought we were doing the right thing. Many of us had grown greatly concerned that the Catholic Church was no longer able to speak to the modern age—an age that was becoming increasingly sophisticated, scientific, etc. Increasing numbers of people had college degrees and demanded that faith speak to the intellectual and social issues of the day. But despite this need, we were still running churches that catered to a peasant and immigrant community. We were hunkered down in Catholic ghettos. The Catholic Church was increasingly identified with poor old immigrant women kneeling before statues, lighting candles, and fumbling with beads. Yes, our schools were full, but our children weren’t being ‘prepared for the future.’

It was thought to be a time that we had come of age in America. Science had reached new heights. There was talk of going to space; we had split the atom; computers and televisions were entering onto the scene.

Meanwhile, in our churches we were chanting in ancient languages and reciting old formulas. Many of us desperately thought this had to change if the church was ever to survive and be able to speak to the modern age. It’s funny that we didn’t turn to our own intellectual tradition. St. Thomas, St. Anselm, St. Augustine, and so many wonderful Church Fathers and Doctors had developed a rigorous intellectual tradition in the Church. Even still, all this seemed to us so ‘old-fashioned,’ and the stuff of dusty old books.

A popular book from that time, ‘A Catholic Priest Looks At His Outdated Church,’ articulated our many concerns for a Church that was out of touch with the modern world.

Regarding architecture, remember that Art Deco and other streamlined forms were very popular in the 50s. The phrase, ‘sleek and modern,’ comes to mind. Straight lines and functional design were all the rage. But our churches pointed back to flourishes and excesses of what many people considered ‘myths’ of a previous time. Why should we keep running to St. Blaise to bless throats when modern medicine has more to offer? Did priests really have more to offer us by way of counsel than Sigmund Freud and other modern psychotherapists? Who needs exorcism when you have psychotherapy? Was not our time mumbling on beads better spent with social action?

Yes, we were desperately afraid that the Church was frozen in time, while the modern age was moving forward at the speed of light.

So we thought we were doing the right thing. Updating was essential if the Church was to survive and be able to speak to the modern age. We started gutting and simplifying churches to make them look ‘sleek and modern.’ We started demanding more vernacular in the Liturgy and  in the celebration of the Sacraments. English was common in the Sacraments long before Vatican II. Baptisms and weddings were conducted almost wholly in English as early as the 50s.

For most of us, changes like these couldn’t come fast enough. How could we appeal to the new, young college ‘jet set,’ to those were going to school on the G.I. Bill? How could we ever appeal to a young, intellectual crowd while running old-fashioned, peasant churches, reciting ‘old myths,’ novenas, legends of the Saints, and catechetical formulas?

And so we ushered in our little revolution, convinced that we were doing the right thing, convinced that this would save the Church from irrelevance in the modern, scientific, intellectual, and supposedly-sophisticated age.

Remember the times! We were building the interstate highway system; we had just introduced television; there were scientists in lab coats seen everywhere, and computers were entering on the scene. We were planning to go to the moon by the early 60s! Yes, we thought we had come of age. If it was old it was bad, but if it was new it was good.

So, when the cry for ‘aggiornamento’ (modernization) went out, the foundation for this phrase had been laid more than a decade before. Whatever the Pope meant, most of us in the trenches heard, ‘out with the old, in with the new!’

This was the background against which my boyhood was set – and that really was the mentality of the priests then, as it remained that of such as the late Pope Francis and his still-breathing henchpersons. The changes kept coming as the years went by and were brutally and nastily imposed. In the new “Spirit of Vatican II,” wherein the laity were supposed to be empowered, they were cruelly shut down if they dared to question the dictates of Oz, the great and powerful. It was true clericalism at its very worst, and it has deeply disgusted me from that day to this. But I was fortunate in my parents, who could distinguish between a worthless man and his exalted office. As my father said, “there is no greater act of humility than to go to confession to a man whom you utterly despise.”

My brother and me would need his wise counsel – and so we (and my ten nephews and nieces and their families) are Catholic to-day. But there were others who saw what was happening. As early as 1965, Fr. Gommar De Pauw founded an organisation literally called the “Catholic Traditionalist Movement.” The following year, L. Brent Bozell founded Triumph magazine while Norwegian Borghild Krane commenced Una Voce, and in 1967, Thomas A. Nelson launched TAN Books. That year also occurred a symbolic rift with a family that epitomised two different reactions to the post-conciliar changes. The venerable Wanderer newspaper – a stalwart journal dating back to the 1870s, which had played a key role in upholding orthodoxy against the Americanists – was owned by an equally venerable family, the Matts. Brothers Alphonse and Walter Matt quarrelled over the proper reaction to the changes pouring out of Rome: compliance in the most orthodox manner possible versus outright rejection. Holding the latter view, Walter left the family business, and started the Remnant, which continues to this day. (This writer, having met and liked both sides of the family, will always see this as a tragic episode). Concerned with the concomitant decline in doctrinal orthodoxy, Lyman Stebbins started Catholics United for the Faith in 1968 – CUF was most definitely in the Wanderer camp. Advent of 1969 saw the dawn of the New Mass, but by that time what was said in most churches looked very much like it. The following year, Archbishop Lefebvre started the SSPX to preserve the 1962 version of the Mass. 

In 1973, Fr. Francis E. Fenton (not to be confused with Fr. Murray’s antagonist, Fr. Joseph Fenton) started Our Lady of the Rosary Chapel in Monroe, Connecticut, and founded the Orthodox Roman Catholic Movement, which in time would boast chapels in California, Colorado, Florida, New Jersey and New York. In 1974, the Congregation for Divine Worship issued a note forbidding the use of any books other than those of 1974 – an act tacitly admitted by Benedict XVI in Summorum Pontificum to be ultra vires. Two years later, the Latin Liturgy Association was founded to promote use of the New Mass in Latin. Things burbled on, but later in 1975, when the first graduating class of the SSPX seminary did not offer the New Mass, Archbishop Lefebvre was suspended a divinis by Rome. He appealed his case to Rome’s Apostolic Signatura; the Secretary of State, Cardinal Villot, in a spectacularly ultra vires move, forbade the Signatura to hear the case. Not to be outdone in ultravirestas, the Court responded in similarly illegal fashion by accepting the prohibition. The Archbishop would never trust the Holy See again.

Space forbids much more in the way of detail; after a decade, Pope John Paul II, not content with reviving Marian and Eucharistic devotion gave the Indult in 1984. Legally this was of course unnecessary; but as the state of canon law was roughly that of the Chicago Municipal Code under Al Capone (under whose provisions parking tickets were still being written as massacres went unpunished), it was de facto essential for Traditional Latin Masses to return to the “mainstream” of the Church. Three years later, Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated four bishops for the SSPX; it was declared that Latae Sententiae had been incurred by the Archbishop and the four consecrandi. But in an attempt to head off their popularity, Ecclesia Dei set up a machinery for a number of Latin Mass communities – most notably the FSSP and the ICKSP – to exist and grow. This they did continuously, exploding after Benedict XVI promulgated Summorum Pontificum in 2007, and the lifting of the SSPX excommunications. When COVID hit, Pope Francis and his minions shut down the vast majority of Masses around the globe, since as Benedict XVI had noted in 2016, the Church no longer believed itself or its Sacraments to be necessary for salvation. Unfortunately, all of that inactivity roused the desire of those in charge to show their power in some form: the result was Francis’s Traditionis Custodes, wherein the Holy Father attempted to put the genie back in the bottle. The problem of course is that it was not merely a question of legalities; guardians of the law who misuse it soon find that no one cares what they think, unless they owe their salaries to them. So it is those Bishops currently trying not only to shut down the Traditional Mass, but to purge the Novus Ordo of anything obviously Catholic.

So where does all of this leave us? All of the action I have described I watched, boy to man. I have known a great many Traditionalist and Conservative figures in the past fifty years, and respected the vast majority of those whom I met – even when they were violently opposed to each other, and sometimes me. All of us were trapped in a situation none of us created, and thought alone should have had great prominence, but it did not. Having been, as it were, abused by the Church hierarchy, we often enough turned our anger toward those as powerless as ourselves – thus setting up some epic, and utterly useless feuds.

Looking back, I would say that a large part of our problem is that we have all lost sight of what of the Church exists at all. Remembering again what Benedict XVI said about the Church after Vatican II no longer believing in its own necessity nor that of its Sacraments, the whole thing has become a useless, pointless exercise, and its clerics mere purveyors of mumbo-jumbo. If this view – as demonstrated during COVID – is correct, that the whole thing and its various infights are ridiculous. Who cares what kind of Mass is used, since none are necessary for salvation? Whether or not the SSPX is in union with Rome is moot, since the whole thing is a farce. Please don’t bother me with the Trad versus Conservative thing; it really is ridiculous. Sedevacantism? It doesn’t matter whether or not that useless chair is occupied, and if so by whom. Even the most recent so-called “Occult Infiltration” of the “Traditionalist Movement” (which I myself have been implicated in) means nothing and less than nothing. As Pope Benedict rightly observed, under to-day’s theology, none of it means anything. Let’s just cut to the chase, and stop annoying people with all this nonsense. Even Pope Leo XIV’s Christmas 2025 message to the Curia (the first of which in every Pontificate tells one what that Pontificate shall be focusing on) spoke of the need for mission and evangelisation without once mentioning salvation.

Seems like an open and shut case: if the highest quarters in the Church hierarchy regard it as in the final analysis unnecessary, why bother? Well, despite the mouthings of men, there really is such a thing as objective reality – even as far as Catholics concerned. Eucharistic miracles, to take only one example out of many, are simply real, and are powerful witnesses of the truth of one of our most bizarre doctrines – Transubstantiation. Such miracles usually occur however in response to a lack of Faith – which is perhaps why there are so many now. Having written a book about the Holy Grail – of which more momentarily – I had to make quite a study of them. Put them together with all the other miracles, with the Saints, with the Fathers and Doctors, all the miraculous shrines, and on and on, it would require an enormous amount of Faith in things unseen and unseeable to believe that the Church is the useless repository of parasitical witch doctors so many of its leadership would have us believe.

So let us look again at the alternative Benedict noticed and dismissed, held by “the great missionaries of the 16th century [who] were still convinced that those who are not baptized are forever lost – and this explains their missionary commitment…” Now, I understand that the received theology for over a century has quarelled over the specifics of why the Church is not needed for salvation, and Benedict in this interview summarises them very well. But let us just say that if there are exceptions to the requirements for Salvation set down in the in Four Creeds every Catholic must believe (Apostles, Nicene, Athanasian, and Tridentine), they are not part of Revelation; what we have in Revelation – the Fall of Man, what was done by God to rescue him afterwards, and our own duties in return – are enough, if fully absorbed to fill the most sluggish of us with zeal for spreading the Faith.

That being true, suddenly the issues raised by the Traditionalists reassume importance. But let us remember always that dogma comes before liturgy. Personally, I wholeheartedly support Restore the’54, for all that I am one of the few cradle Catholics who is a member of the Ordinariates founded by Benedict XVI to preserve the Anglican Patrimony within the Church. I love the FSSP, the ICKSP, and all the others. But I understand why the SSPX are devoted to the 1962 Missal, and the 1955 Rites of Holy Week. I hope to see – in accordance with Pope Benedict’s vision – the Novus Ordo one day conformed to the greater part of the Traditional Mass. In the meantime, I’m all for the Latin Liturgy Association, and am as grateful for the work of Magnificat in deepening and Catholicising the prayer life of Catholics who have nowhere to go but the Novus Ordo as I am for the work of Benedictus. I salute the work of the SSPX; if you question me on that, then I will answer with the words of my lamented friend, the late John Senior: “If [scandalous former Archbishop of Milwaukee] Weakland’s in, who could possibly be out?” Add the sterling work of all the Eastern Rite Churches in the Catholic Church, and you have a complete picture of the innumerable roads to Heaven we have been given if we shall take one.

Now, having said all of that, it might be argued that I find all of the causes dear to the Traditionalist heart to be secondary. Yes and no. In and of themselves? Yes. But then we come to the issue of what conduces most to the salvation of souls. When that comes into the picture, then, all of a sudden, these various issues acquire enormous weight – and the comments of such as Msgr. Denis O’Connell and Msgr. Pope’s friend as quoted in the beginning, and of such as Fathers Murray and Rahner, become positively inane. The question of whether the Church is modern is entirely transcended by the reality of her being true.

I said I would return to the Holy Grail before finishing – and so I shall. Although as a relic of the Last Supper (wherein Christ accomplished Transubstantiation for the first time) the Holy Grail is probably in Valencia, Spain, as a symbol and literary motif, it had a much wider range. The Arthurian legends connect it with wonders eerily repeated by many of our Eucharistic miracles. In one version, the Knight Sir Parsifal journeys through the Wasteland, only to find the Grail Castle, well appointed and healthy, and the wounded Grail King and his company living off the contents of the sacred vessel. But while it can sustain them and the King, it cannot heal him. Taught never to ask questions, Parsifal does not ask any, and so the banquet ends, and he repairs to bed. He awakes outside the Castle, to find the Grail King’s daughter berating him for not asking the all-important question – “What is the Grail, and Who does it serve?” Parsifal rides off, and has other adventures – although he does return triumphantly one day.

We Catholics to-day live in a Church which is well-nigh a Wasteland – a “Devastated Vineyard” as it has been described. The Sacraments can sustain us, but they cannot, alone and of themselves, heal us. The Holy Grail has also been seen as a symbol of the Church; so perhaps we can apply the same methodology. If we ask the question, “what is the Church, and Whom does she serve?,” Scripture and Tradition, the Fathers and Doctors, and the Infallible pronouncements of Popes and Ecumenical Councils shall respond to us, “the Ark of Salvation; God and Man.” The more of us who internalise that reply and try to live it in our lives, the sooner the Wasteland of the Church shall begin to heal.