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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   29146 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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I wonder at what point all those young, high-TFR, head-covering, Latin Mass-enjoying traditionalist Catholics I hear so much about just straight up break away from the church?

My prediction would be that Sedevacantism and similar movements continue to grow. As far as what the long term future of such movements is, I don't know.

My impression is that Eastern Orthodoxy is becoming a home for such people more than sedevacantism. Sedes are rare but noisy, similar to the dissident right.

The closest numbers I've seen is that the SSPX has about ten times as many worshippers on an average Sunday as every sedevacantist group combined- but in the anglosphere the numbers might be close to even between the two, and the SSPX is a decent plurality but still a minority of global traditionalists.

Roughly speaking, there's three big homegrown groups of traditional Catholics(what IRL tradcaths call themselves)- France, the USA, and Brazil, in roughly that order of size. Germany, the Phillippines, Ukraine, Mexico, etc have smaller groups that still exist and can periodically be notable, but those, and their suburbs like Canada and Belgium, are the big three. Sedevacantists are mostly a US thing, and the IRL ones are significantly likelier to tend towards the holocaust denying geocentrist end of traditional Catholicism than your regular SSPX or FSSP attendee(and there is a lot of overlap between the two). That trads are growing both demographically and from conversion doesn't mean that the sedevacantists are specifically benefiting much, they're probably a single digit percentage which doesn't cross pollinate with other traditional groups and some percentage of which are enclosed cults anyways.

In terms of what actual IRL tradcaths- the mainstream ones, that is- are going to do, well, there's a widely repeated conspiracy theory in our circles that the long term goal is to push every tradcath priest into the SSPX(which is not in schism right now but may or may not have been in the 90's) and then excommunicate everyone eventually. I don't personally think the current admin in the Vatican thinks that far ahead, but stuff like this is likely to confirm that theory and convince the IRL trads to dig in harder where we're at, on the theory that orthodox conservative but not particularly traditionalist leaders will throw their weight behind us when the culture wars, for lack of a better term, are hotter. There's some evidence behind this theory; certainly if stuff like this results in a schism, that schism will be lead by Robert Cardinal Muller, who had not been friendly to the Latin mass before Amoris Laetitia but certainly is now(and the very popular but less formally influential bishop Barron is also much more sympathetic to the Latin mass than he had been). Trads on our own getting pushed out will just lead to a bigger SSPX.

By the way, while traditional Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy compete for converts, there's not very much in the way of traditional Catholics leaving to become Orthodox; traditional Catholics mostly view Eastern Orthodoxy as having surrendered to the world in the way the current Vatican administration would like to do but hasn't been able to... over a thousand years ago. My impression is that former trads who leave either become more liberal(sometimes nonpracticing but usually not formally apostate) Catholics or join some kind of confessional Lutheran group with extremely conservative social views.

the SSPX(which is not in schism right now but may or may not have been in the 90's)

The SSPX was definitely in schism in the 90s and is probably still in schism right now. Per canon 751, "schism is the refusal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him." "Recognize and resist" is not submission.

It's messy.

traditional Catholics mostly view Eastern Orthodoxy as having surrendered to the world in the way the current Vatican administration would like to do but hasn't been able to... over a thousand years ago.

How is that? It seems to me that's what the Orthodox think about Catholics.

It goes both ways, man, and core membership tends not to switch back and forth much. Traditional Catholics in particular tend to see Humanae vitae as the clearest evidence of the church not having defected and look at Eastern Orthodox attitudes towards birth control as the opposite of that.

Presumably the stance on contraception is not a thousand years old.

Catholic doctrines on contraception can be traced back to ~100 AD. Whether or not Roman contraceptives worked(and iirc, it’s not a fringe position among academics to think they did), early church officials seemed to believe they did and needed condemnation.

I meant the Orthodox disagreement.

Oh, yes, that dates from about the same time as Humanae vitae. The tradcath view of orthodoxy surrendering to the world out of political expediency 1000 years ago is mostly based on divorce.

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