The Traditionalist Trajectory is a Dead End

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Traditionalist Catholicism is a dead end. If you start to question things, the logical end point is to leave the Roman Catholic Church, and that's not an easy move for anyone to take whose persona has been "Roman Catholic" - @tridentines1967

I saw the tweet above this morning (from my new Twitter account - @TheSkojecFile if you care to follow. The appeal to restore my old one has been denied without explanation).

The person writing this does have a stated anti-traditional bias. Their bio lays it out: “Exposing abuse & history of worldwide Traditionalist Catholicism.”

It’s not an account I follow, so I can’t speak to anything else they discuss. But on this point, I agree with them, based on my own experience. Allow me to explain.

The short version is: my own trajectory out of the Church began as a long arc of trying to find more and more reverent liturgy/authentic theology - one that continued until I ran out of road. I grew up in a parish with a folk group doing all the music. I went from that to seeking communion rails, then a stint with the Byzantines in college when there was nothing better, liturgically, available. I never felt like I belonged there, but it was a beautiful respite, especially from Steubenville guitar Masses filled with people who thought they were speaking in tongues at the consecration. After I graduated, I quickly found an ad orientem, Latin, Novus Ordo with well-performed sacred music. From there it took 2-3 years, a bunch of reading, and a push from a priest I knew, to finally land with the TLM. I stayed there for 18 years.

For me, it was a constant process of peeling back layers of modernity like an archeologist unearthing some ancient mosaic beneath a bustling city that had forgotten what came before it. “Uncovering orthodoxy” was a theme in my mind for many years.

But this search for authenticity was ultimately a futile one.

Yes, I found better liturgy and sacraments. Sometimes (though this was often not the case) I got better preaching. When I say “better,” I mean that if one believes in the Real Presence, in the Mass as a sin-oblation to God that re-presents the sacrifice of Calvary, offered by a man participating in the one true priesthood of Christ to God the Father on behalf of the faithful, etc., it was clear to me that the Church’s old liturgy did a far better job of putting a person in that space and in that mindset. Similarly, the deeper, more symbolic presentation of things like the old form of baptism with its ritual movement from outside the Church to inside the holy of holies (with several attendant exorcisms), the old blessing of holy water that really seemed to intend to impart an actual power over sickness and evil, and so on…all of this added up to an anthropology of worship that actually tracked with Catholic belief as I had come to understand it. But the deeper I dug looking for answers, the more questions I seemed to find.

The longer version of my story follows. And it is fairly long, so consider yourself warned.