The Paradox of the Demi-Traditionalists

The Catholic Proletariat are Fellow-Travelers, and thus Allies

Example from one of the churches I visited this weekend. How do you classify this?

Part III of my series on James Lindsay and the “woke right” will be delayed as I’ve been moving between states this week and am starting a new job. In the meantime, here are some brief thoughts on things I noticed while traveling this week. I have not posted a podcast episode in a while either, but we should be returning soon with a more comedic, even if sad, look into various schismatic movements and how many are more revolutionary and leftist than traditional.

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In the decades-long buildup to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, one of the things most bemoaned by so-called “professional revolutionaries”, the upper-class young intellectuals who ran secret organizations, published radical newspapers, pulled off assassinations, and engaged in constant infighting and power struggles between each other, was the lack of participation by those in whose name they were preaching the “gospel” of revolution. Where were the peasants, factory workers, and oppressed proletariat? Why were they not excitedly joining the conspiratorial Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, the People’s Will Party, or any of the hundreds of other parties with confusingly similar names and strategies? To the revolutionaries, the general lack of peasant and worker participation through the manifold plots, demonstrations, and uprisings of the late 19th century was an embarrassing demonstration of their aloofness from the real desires, and the real life of the proletariat they supposedly championed. All their studies and theories were a bad representation of how the proletariat actually lived. Thus, it took them nearly seven decades to succeed in pulling off their revolution because they didn’t know how to build alliances with those they needed, because they didn’t know how to reach them.¹

James Lindsay would take my using this example as further proof of Marxist thought infiltrating the right, but this is a good analogy to how I, as a relatively conservative and traditional Catholic felt at two, well, paradoxical experiences I had when attending Novus Ordo Masses at two parishes I attended today and yesterday while moving across country this week. Where I used to live in Lander, Wyoming, I either attended the Latin Mass or a very reverent Novus Ordo attached to a college chaplaincy, and at home or while traveling, I similarly only attended “traditional” either in the strict, or general sense liturgies. And my view of the liturgical situation with regard to reverence and tradition was black and white: there is all-in with regard to them: Latin Mass and the Novus Ordo done as reverently and with as much Latin as possible, and then there’s the opposite, those liturgies which participate in the genus of clownishness, low Church Protestantism, and buffoonery if they even merit the title of liturgy.

Only yesterday and today, however, when, in Madison, WI and Bismarck, ND, I picked Masses to attend out of the blue, did I realize that the situation could be more complicated and paradoxical. My conception of the landscape of practice in post-Vatican II Catholic parishes was oversimplified. The oppressed Catholic proletariat at many parishes, even if not having—or seeming to desire as reverent or traditional a liturgy as I would have them, may actually in a skeuomorphic or pastiche manner, be more traditional in intention and desire than I—or they—realized. But how you judge it, and this for me is the real question, is whether you focus on the very real deviations and issues from proper practice or on those positive steps and signs of tradition that are being attempted.

But yesterday, it started with noticing the deviations. At a Novus Ordo in Madison, WI yesterday morning, it started with noticing that a middle-aged woman was serving—but she was wearing a large flowing chapel veil.² The priest spoke the Mass mostly slowly—but with abnormal pauses, and in my mind, a sing-songy rhythm. He constantly added words and phrases and definitely substituted at least a few, but had a retro-fitted attempt at a communion rail and also immediately followed Mass with Eucharistic adoration. Also, there was a hilarious and seemingly overcomplicated electronic Holy Water dispenser and a prominently posted “Incense Usage Policy.” The seemingly relatively newly built sanctuary itself was hard to classify, and I could call it neither entirely sacrilegiously bland nor fully traditional in style. Similarly, at a parish today in Bismarck, ND a Novus Ordo was packed in attendance with lots of young families and young people, with many altar servers although two of the seven were young girls, a very strong smell of incense pervading the also confusingly modern and yet still not fully bland church, and a full altar rail that all knelt at to receive even though, along with two priests and a deacon, an “Extraordinary Minister” was also distributing Holy Communion at a side extension of the main rail next to a side altar.

The confusing part to me, and, I admit, distracting, was my constant attempt on both days to classify what I was seeing. Were these Modernism—perfused, quasi-sacrilegious liturgies, or were they, albeit within the Novus Ordo, an example of reverence and tradition? Was it, I constantly asked myself, cringy and edging on liturgical abuse?³ Or were the priests at both parishes trying to improve things? Or was I seeing, albeit in an imperfect, pastiche, and skeuomorphic manner, an attempt at returning to tradition?

I started to think more and more in this latter direction as I realized that as much as we apply an idealized, judgemental standard to others, we never really do meet the standard. Even in the most perfect parish, with a Latin Mass celebrated with the strictest adherence to the rubrics, there always could be something that could be done better (i.e., each attendee could be even more focused and full of divine charity). Even though it is true that there are objectively better or objectively worse liturgies, something to critique can be found in every parish, as well as, relative to a worse liturgy, something also to praise within each parish. It could always be worse, it can always be better, and we all have a need for improvement.⁴

In my desire to quickly judge each parish’s Mass as “good” or “bad” and thereby, implicitly to judge the priests, the parish, and the people as “liberals” or “conservatives”, “modernists” or “traditionalists”, I had overlooked the possibility that the vast majority of Catholics, the Catholic “proletariat” within which we who seek to increase reverence, devotion, and traditional practice, could just be “in the middle.” Like sheep, most will go along with what is offered and done as normal. They will kneel for communion if everyone else is. They will make cringy ostentatious and hipsterish signs of peace if that is what everyone else is doing. As I noted in my essay on mimesis observed during the Office of Compline, this is not to say that they have no devotion or desire, but their attempts and desires are mimetically filtered by what everyone else is doing, mediated through a broken or twisted mirror, meaning that what is a real attempt of the heart appears cringy, flawed, or paradoxically parodic to those who do have a greater experience with the Church’s tradition.

The best analogy, of what was going on, as I thought more about the odd mixture of details about both Masses that I attended, was Charlemagne’s 9th-century attempt through the Carolingian Holy Roman Empire, to reinstate or bring about a renovatio of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire had been fallen in the West for centuries. The eastern half, the Byzantine Empire, was still around but had mutated in practice to acquire far more oriental customs and characteristics. But there were decaying buildings, scraps, and scraps of memories of what had become before lying around everywhere in the West. Charlemagne’s renovatio thus was in practice a semi-jumbled pastiche, with certain scattered elements of Roman custom adopted perfectly, yet intermingled with Frankish—and ultimately Saxonian customs and styles. This included, in some cases, literally disassembling stones, bricks, and tiles from old Roman buildings, and using them as building materials for new constructions. The end product, yes, did not look fully Roman, but—one must admit—it was a real attempt.

The same I believe can be said for what I now realize, having seen it twice in two days, is the disposition of many Catholics and Catholic parishes. Many in the proletariat of what I might call “average Catholics” do realize that something is very wrong with the outfall of the Spirit of Vatican II and they thus work to bring back individual elements of reverence and tradition without remembering or bringing back the full picture. Others around them who aren’t so moved go along with these elements but push back for the retention of certain other more questionable “liberties” of practice that followed the council. The result is thus neither clearly traditional nor modernistically libertine. But it is a pastiche attempt at renovatio.

How should we feel about this? Obviously, I wish things could have been less cringy, and more traditional, or at the very least that proper words without continuous jumbled substitutions could have been used at Mass both times.⁵ But we should at least congratulate and encourage the positive effort and inclinations that must be present at their root, even if the outcome is a paradoxical, hard-to-classify jumble. While it is very right to judge and criticize the flaws, the state of mind in considering situations such as these should be one of a continuous split-frame, of praise simultaneous with criticism, a perspective summarized best, as I have been discussing in past politics-oriented posts, with the oft-avoided concept of the fellow-traveler.

When you have a bigger enemy, the person who deviates less from you than your enemy, is often, qualifiedly, your friend, and deserves treatment as such. Such a person is not to be imitated in everything, but they are not to be constantly criticized. They are, rather too be encouraged in those areas where they overlap with you, as such is the best way to turn them from merely a fellow-traveler, someone who at least leans in your direction against a greater threat or evil, to someone who is fully “on your team.” Yet, too often ideological puritanicalism short-sighedly leads to criticism of such “allies” taking precedence over fighting larger threats, and—in the end, to little actually being done, and the larger enemy winning. We often forget, it seems, that the people in the middle are far more mimetically persuadable and should be targeted for cooperation more than for opposition, even while, obviously, continuing to be honest over our very real differences.

These paradoxically in-between tradition and modernism Catholics at these parishes, and I now, presume, at many others, are the Catholic proletariat who are at least moving in a proper direction. They are not the enemy right now. The fact that those who have not sunk to the lowest low of clown mass farcicty proves that they have a Godly desire and ought to be helped along their journey. They are, perhaps, demi-traditionalists, neither fully traditional nor not at all, but, partially so. Similarly, the Catholic conservative ought to feel proud to ally with Protestants in American political and social affairs. Relative to the culture, and some of them in amazingly deep ways, like the folks at Conspiracy Pilled or the YouTuber Redeemed Zoomer,⁶ are fellow travelers. In some areas, this is how we should relate to Jordan Peterson, and as I am in the middle of arguing, to both James Lindsay and Charles Haywood. Even, yes even Joe Rogan, is an ally of conservatives now, a very very loose and slow-moving traveller, but someone who has been moving slowly against the mimetic currents of the culture for some time now.

For in allying with, offering a hand to help them along their journey, as hipsterish and cringy as that phraseology does sound, we are bringing them closer to the truth. The Catholic proletariat in whose name we fight for friends should be invited into it as friends, praised for what they are doing better right now, and only after that praise, constructively brought deeper in to what they, we must admit, are already, like us, imperfectly desiring and practicing right now. When we understand them this way, for what they are, and praise them for it, they will likely be far more willing to follow us deeper into tradition.

1. Or, you could say, they were just too afraid of getting their hands dirty.

2. I will write on this another time, but she was likely one of those women, who, customarily, it seems, seem to be the power behind the throne at many Catholic parishes, influencing and controlling things almost more than the pastor by her ability to control public opinion within the parish.

3. In Madison, it did at least feel cringy.

4. Most of all in my distracted focus more on what was wrong with the Mass at the parish than on the Sacrifice itself.

5. There is a different sense implied by the word “love” than by “charity”, for one.

6. Conspiracy Pilled’s hosts have many Catholic friends and they are slowly talking themselves into deeper Eucharistic devotion. Redeemed Zoomer, for one, loves Aquinas, and uses him all the time, sometimes to hilarious end, when he tries to justify John Calvin’s theological positions.