The Maturation of the Traditional Movement after Summorum Pontificum

Part of the "Trad Godfathers" series, a fascinating look at the Trad movement both before and after Pope Benedict XVI's Summorum Pontificum.

From One Peter Five

By Phillip Campbell, BA

It’s difficult to say exactly when I began the turn towards traditional Catholicism—it was, after all, a gradual process spanning several years with many side quests and meanders along the way. It’s easier to think of it in terms of milestones rather than a single moment of “conversion.”

One of these milestones was definitely around 2004 when the parish I was attending installed altar rails and began doing the Novus Ordo in Latin once a month. I was only recently returned to the Church and thrilled to be attending a Mass that seemed more in alignment with what I was reading in my historical studies of Catholicism—but it was also my first experience of the acrimony that such things can produce. When a Novus Ordo parish begins implementing Latin, chant, and altar rails, you can be sure there is going to be a kerfuffle, to put it mildly.

I never understood the strong objections people had to the residue of tradition. As a Roman Catholic, I am a member of the Latin rite. What should be so objectionable about worshipping according to the traditions of our ancestors? Was not Catholicism a religion of tradition? The more I paid attention, the more I began to notice that Catholicism seemed to be embroiled in a bizarre multi-generational war with itself.

Eventually my noticing led me to the Traditional Latin Mass, which I first began attending occasionally in 2007 (the same year I founded Unam Sanctam Catholicam) and then with greater regularity after my parish introduced it in 2009. It was also in the mid-2000s that I started moving in Trad spaces, both online and in real life—and let me tell you, it was a different world back then!

This article is part of a series on Traditionalism at Sixty and there are doubtless many developments one could reflect on, but one of the most interesting differences I notice between the Trad landscape in the mid-2000s and today relates to private revelations. There was something almost eschatological about traditionalism in those days. A lot more head space was devoted to this or that private revelation, always with the implication that the messages in question were germane to the crisis in the Church.

I remember the first Trad I ever met in real life was a retired Boomer who spent most of his free time promoting the Traditional Latin Mass, but his discussions about the TLM were intimately bound up with the apparitions of Garabandal. Garabandal’s messages seemed to offer him a framework for understanding the situation in the Church: originating in 1963 during the Second Vatican Council, Garabandal’s emphasis on corrupt clergy, a coming chastisement, and the necessity of return to traditional piety conveniently synced up with Trad sensibilities.

Not long after, I joined a Traditionalist prayer group where most members attended the TLM either exclusively or most of the time. I found among this group that the revelations to Luisa Piccarreta provided the lens through which they understood God’s will. The truths of the so-called “Divine Will” movement were simply taken for granted. This was due in large part to a certain priest (of irregular canonical status, I might add) who circulated this material among the group and encouraged us to use Luisa’s writings—and certain commenatries on them—as the sure path of spiritual discernment. The writings of venerable spiritual masters like St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Francis de Sales, or St. Alphonsus Ligouri were never mentioned. Luisa Piccarreta alone was the guiding light.

Long time readers of Unam Santcam Catholicam may remember my long-running beef with proponents of the Bayside Apparitions of Veronica Leuken, which had seduced some of my close Trad friends a decade ago and became the occasion of a massive critique of the apparitions I wrote which spans 56 printed pages (it is still up at the USC website if you have a few hours you don’t need to get back). Bayside had a special appeal to Traditionalists because of its bizarre insistence that the real Paul VI had been replaced with an “impostor” sometime after Vatican II, which offered a handy explanation for the pope’s autodemolition of the Church’s liturgy in the decade following the Council. Bayside also catered to Trad sensibilities in its wholescale condemnation of certain postconciliar customs like communion in the hand and the permanent diaconate, as well as its harsh critiques of modern pasttimes, like watching television, which Veronica insisted was created by Satan.

And let’s not forget the (admittedly smaller) subset of Trads who embraced Maria Divine Mercy because she pushed the line that Pope Benedict was illegitimately ousted from the papacy by an internal Vatican coup, thus feeding into Bennyvacantist narratives.

I find it interesting that these movements are largely post-Conciliar phenomena. Garabandal, Bayside, and the Divine Will movement are overwhelmingly Novus Ordo-oriented phenomena (Luisa Piccarreta died in 1947, but her cause for canonization was not opened until 1994 and the vast majority of Divine Will literature has been published since then). It seemed to me that Trads were nevertheless eager to embrace them because their criticism of the Church and society aligned with Traditionalist priorities and were thus Trad-adjacent. As such, whatever was unsavory in these apparitions could be quietly swept under the rug.

I noticed a similar trend in online discourse. In my early days as a Trad blogger, a large portion of my readership seemed to be deeply invested in interpreting contemporary ecclesial events through the lens of private apparitions—Quito, Bl. Anne Catherine Emmerich, and of course Fatima were commonly referenced.

Sometimes it was not a specific apparition but a certain eschatological event that Trads seemed fixated on: Three Days of Darkness and the necessity of retaining blessed candles made of beeswax, the coming of the Great Monarch and the era of peace, or the alleged “illumination of consciences” believed to take place before the end. One Trad family I was close to kept entire cases of holy water jugs and beeswax candles on hand in quantities that would make even most avid doomsday preppers envious.

These are, of course, just personal anecdotes, but I do not believe my experiences were incidental. I’ve discussed this with other people who were in the Trad community prior to Summorum pontificum and our stories are all quite similar. There seemed to be a kind of apocalyptic undertow that permeated Trad spaces. It was an ever-present membrane layered just beneath the surface. It provided a context for understanding what was going on as well as a justification for Trad responses to it all. And I do see why this was the case—Traditionalism was far more marginialized before Summorum pontificum, and nothing engenders apocalypticism more than a sense of staking out a last stand for a doomed (but righteous) cause. In an age when the institutional Church is no longer a reliable oracle of common sense, one yearns for reassurance by a direct communication from heaven—something that says, “You are right; everyone else is wrong. Stay the course and your labors will be rewarded.” Something that confers a divine mandate upon one’s status as a defeated outsider, in a sense, lending redeeming value to the institutional ostracism that came with being a Trad.

This is not about the veracity of any particular private revelation as such. To be sure some are utter rubbish (Garabandal and Bayside come to mind) while others, like Fatima, are sanctioned by the highest authority in the Church. And others I’d place in the category of, “If you get something out of it, good for you,” like the revelations of Bl. Anne Catherine Emmerich. Private revelations have always been a part of the Catholic religion and they certainly have a valid place in our heritage. If you love Luisa Piccarretta or Our Lady of Quito, that’s perfectly fine. So don’t mistake this as a screed against private revelations as such, much less of any specific revelation. Rather, I am speaking about the unbalanced spirituality that comes when we are preoccupied with private revelations—when they begin to function as a kind of “mytsical magisterium” that underlies our entire spiritual life. No private revelation should ever be so central that it becomes the entire paradigm by which the faith is understood.

I thought so too, even at the time. I spent a lot of time and energy rebutting the less credible apparitions and trying to remain balanced in my approach towards those of higher authority. Eventually I got tired of such polemics and moved on to more interesting matters, and it seemed that the whole Trad movement did as well. I noticed that in the years following Summorum pontificum, the apocalyptic tenor of Traditionalism began to abate—not right away, to be sure, it took several years, but in general it seems that there was an inverse relationship between the growth of the TLM post-2007 and the Trad fixation on private revelation. The unhealthy tendencies I described above seemed to decline to the degree that the TLM grew and became increasingly mainstreamed. Today, I don’t know any Trad families that are still wrapped up in some private revelation. And I no longer get comments on my articles along the lines of “This was all prophesyed in the writings of Sister Huanita of the Little Heart of Jesus!” or whomever the seer of the year is.

To a large degree, this change has been accompanied by the popularization of more empirically grounded writings focused on subjects that lend themselves to serious research—the documentary history of the Conciliar era, demographic analysis, and a veritable literary renaissance in liturgical studies. These developments represent, as I have called it, the “professionalization” or “maturation” of Traditional spaces. This is both a result and a cause of Traditionalism going mainstream—and to a degree few could have fathomed back in the early 2000s.

Now nothing is perfect, and today’s situation has its own pros and cons as well. Even so, I am happy to see that emphasis on private revelations seems to have subsided into a more balanced place within Traditionalism, at least compared to where it was fifteen years ago. Of course, there’s going to be exceptions (just recently I heard of a certain Trad community where all the women had taken to wearing chains and medallions around their ankles based on some apparition) but overall I think the trajectory I have sketched here is accurate.

Traditionalism has developed considerably over my twenty-ish years in the Trad spaces. And while the movement certainly has its own sins it continues to wrestle with, overall I have welcomed the changes I have seen in my time. They reflect an intellectual maturation that was still struggling to emerge a generation ago. The road has been bumpy, and not always pretty, but it was a necessary process of honing. As Scripture says, “Iron sharpens iron” (Prov. 27:17).