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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9918 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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The tradcaths on X do so much PR work by being miles to the right of their Church. And one has to believe they are sincere and genuine. Which leads one to ask why they present themselves as Catholic.

Because they believe that the teachings of the Catholic Church are true. What other reason would they need?

I mean, do they? Are the Twitter Tradcath Brigade staunch religious liberty advocates and fans of Dignitatis humanae?

Because they believe that the teachings of the Catholic Church are true. What other reason would they need?

While they simultaneously believe that the whole church, including the hierarchy and Pope, got these teachings wrong. Not an enviable position.

Can you name one dogma you think internet trad caths believe which the Catholic hierarchy does not teach?

Immigration is an area of prudential judgement and the Catholic Church has a nuanced view of it, more nuanced than you find here. The doctrines are to respect the host country's laws and customs, and for the host country to take in the needy as much as possible (acknowledging that there are goods such as social cohesion that can limit the host country's ability to take in the needy.) Trad Caths agree on these points, just disagree with the prudential judgement of whether or not the US has helped as much as it can and it's time to cool off on immigration.

This is quite the broad banded statement, though, or woolly as somebody else said below. If ‘taking in the needy’ includes opinions as diverse as ‘protect a white demographic supermajority, deport millions and ban all nonwhite immigration’ (the way Groyper Catholics like Nick Fuentes want) and ‘take in the entire world, legalize all illegal migrants, create legal routes for the global south’ (the way those on the radical left of the Church want) then it’s an essentially meaningless statement.

What we can actually observe from:

  • The central role the institution of the Catholic Church has played in resettling migrants into America and Western Europe under both liberals like Leo and conservatives like Benedict
  • The public messaging of church leaders including almost all senior Western European and American bishops and various Popes themselves
  • The significant lobbying the Church has engaged in to water down naturalization law, legalize illegal migrants and so on in countries like Spain, the US and elsewhere

…is that the Church’s policy here is actually very clear. And the Catholic Church is actually an organization. It’s not an ideological grouping. It’s an actual club, with a members list and an initiation ritual and regular meetings and a management structure and a leader and if you are a member of it, then to some extent it is reasonable to expect that you broadly agree with the organization. This is different from Lutheranism or Judaism or Islam, which have religious organizations but none that can lay claim to the institutional support of anywhere close to a majority of adherents.

~all institutional churches have done this.

then it’s an essentially meaningless statement.

It's a principle, which can be interpreted by different people in different ways. But that's not the part being interpreted. No one has a problem with setting up a temporary refugee camp for Canadians who are fleeing from the great Canada-Russo war of 2035 assuming the US still has enough oatmeal and blankets to keep them alive.

The part that people are interpreting differently is if the US already has all the people it can safely assimilate without massive social upheaval. The Catholic US Bishops are pretty clueless to the actual costs of mass immigration, the Catholic groypers have perhaps an oversized idea of the costs of mass immigration. The truth is that you can take a consistent set of principles and adjust what the recommendations are based on different facts available.

I'm not sure to whom you are referring by this. The tradcaths I've encountered don't believe that. They believe the previous form of the liturgy is better, but liturgy is not dogma and they are allowed to believe that. They don't believe that any actual dogma was put forth wrongly by the church.

I have had multiple tradcaths tell me that Muslims, Jews, and Protestants cannot be saved (“there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church”), let alone adherents of non-Abrahamic religions. Many also support the death penalty, don’t like government welfare, oppose immigration, oppose religious freedom, oppose separation of church and state, and hold several other positions that don’t fit comfortably with modern Roman Catholic teachings.

While CCC 847 does allow for the possibility of salvation for those ignorant of Christ:

Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience - those too may achieve eternal salvation.

I think tradcaths could have an out for not believing that the vast majority of Muslims, Jews or Protestants will actually make it to heaven, since they could just assert that in the modern world, most such people are not ignorant of Christ and his Church, and if they are, it is their own fault.

I don’t think that gives them much of an out. Other sections of the CCC address these groups pretty unambiguously.

Protestants:

818 “... the Catholic Church accepts them with respect and affection as brothers.... All who have been justified by faith in Baptism are incorporated into Christ; they therefore have a right to be called Christians, and with good reason are accepted as brothers in the Lord by the children of the Catholic Church.”

819 “... Christ's Spirit uses these Churches and ecclesial communities as means of salvation, whose power derives from the fullness of grace and truth that Christ has entrusted to the Catholic Church. All these blessings come from Christ and lead to him, and are in themselves calls to “Catholic unity.”

Jews:

839 When she delves into her own mystery, the Church, the People of God in the New Covenant, discovers her link with the Jewish People, “to whom the Lord our God spoke first.” The Jewish faith, unlike other non-Christian religions, is already a response to God's revelation in the Old Covenant. To the Jews “belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ”, “for the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.”

Muslims:

841 “The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind's judge on the last day.”

Now, I’m sympathetic to the tradcaths on this point (though they’re usually so loathsome, it makes it difficult to have sympathy for them at all), in that Rome didn’t always have such an inclusive attitude, so they have plenty of prior writings to point to that make the opposite claims. But those are just the sort of problems you have to put up with when your church changes its doctrine while pretending both that it hasn’t and that it can’t.

Not sure how they can square that with the need for baptism (even of infants).

That hasn't been a hard and fast rule ever.

In the fourth century, Roman Emperor Valentinian II was a catechumen who expressed desire to be baptized by St. Ambrose of Milan, but he was assassinated before the bishop could reach him. Ambrose consoled the mourning family by stating: "Did he not have the grace which he desired? Did he not have what he eagerly sought? Certainly, because he sought it, he received it."

Before then, St Justin Martyr developed the concept of the Logos Spermatikos ("seeds of the Word"). He argued that because Christ is the Divine Reason (Logos) that illuminates every human mind, anyone who lived righteously according to the truth they had was already participating invisibly in Christ:

"We have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Word of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists." — First Apology, Chapter 46

St. Irenaeus defended the idea that God’s saving grace was not restricted to only those alive during or after Christ’s death. He argued that God has always been present to humanity, judging people based on the capacity and information they possessed in their own time.

"For Christ came not only for those who believed on Him in the time of Tiberius Caesar, nor did the Father provide only for those who are now living, but for all men altogether, who from the beginning... feared and loved God, and behaved justly and piously towards their neighbors, and longed to see Christ." — Against Heresies, Book IV, Chapter 22

The Church has held for as long as we have records that people who want to be baptized are baptized, people who would have wanted to be baptized had they known of baptism are baptized, and it's all a mystery but if you know of and want to get baptized you should.

According to the CCC, they're a little more wishy-washy on that these days:

1259 For catechumens who die before their Baptism, their explicit desire to receive it, together with repentance for their sins, and charity, assures them the salvation that they were not able to receive through the sacrament.

1260 "Since Christ died for all, and since all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partakers, in a way known to God, of the Paschal mystery."62 Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved. It may be supposed that such persons would have desired Baptism explicitly if they had known its necessity.

1261 As regards children who have died without Baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed, the great mercy of God who desires that all men should be saved, and Jesus' tenderness toward children which caused him to say: "Let the children come to me, do not hinder them,"63 allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism. All the more urgent is the Church's call not to prevent little children coming to Christ through the gift of holy Baptism.

So basically, adult non-believers who served God to the best of their ability and who would have hypothetically desired baptism had they known of its necessity get to go to Heaven, and unbaptized children get a big question mark plus a "I really hope God has a way to save these guys."

The way out I see for tradcaths, is simply asserting that Muslims and Jews either did know of the necessity of baptism and rejected it, or that they didn't try to seek truth and do the will of God in accordance with their understanding of it, because if they had, they would have found the Roman Catholic Church and Jesus.

So basically, adult non-believers who served God to the best of their ability and who would have hypothetically desired baptism had they known of its necessity get to go to Heaven, and unbaptized children get a big question mark plus a "I really hope God has a way to save these guys."

Funnily enough that's basically the opposite of the Mormon view. We believe that babies that die are automatically saved, meanwhile we perform proxy baptisms for the dead, and those dead need to accept the baptism from the other side for it to be of any use. I.e. those who would have accepted the gospel and been baptized if they had been given the opportunity can still be saved, but it still requires an actual proxy baptism to be performed for them by the living.

I'm not sure to whom you are referring by this.

We are clearly talking about online Warhammer Catholics, who really want to believe that racism and bigotry are compatible with teachings of the church, while the modern church as a whole rather strongly disagrees.

Typical example.

Yes, Mr. Morlock is professing Catholic who for some reason was not listening to his well trained priest when he was explaining to him that racism is wrong.

And Morlock's not even a crusader-PFP-tradcatholicism-is-my-identity type, from what I can tell. N=vibes but I get the sense that some form of integralism is pretty popular in those corners despite being (at least in the more hardcore varieties) contrary to church teaching and potentially even doctrine in 2026.

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