It’s Not About the Mass, or the Latin, or the incense—It’s the Faith…
There is a very specific voice reserved for so called “Traditional” Catholics, and you have heard it. It is the voice of a hospice volunteer speaking slowly to a man who still thinks it's 1958. Bless their hearts, they just like the smells and bells. So attached to their little routines. So “rigid.” It is the tone you'd use on a grandfather who still asks the paperboy to come by, unaware that both the paperboy and print journalism died sometime around the Clinton administration. The felt-banner brigade has diagnosed us, charitably, as a support group rather than an argument. We are not objecting to anything, you understand. We are simply grieving, and grief, as everyone knows, responds best to being condescended to by a diocesan Synod Synthesis Coordinator with a laminated badge.
This diagnosis is convenient, because it means nobody ever has to answer the actual argument—you cannot refute a mood. You can only pat it on the head, hand it a tambourine, and steer it toward the folk group's rendition of "Table of Plenty."
So allow us to say this slowly, in small words, so it survives translation into committee-speak: our issues were never about the pipe organ.¹ It was never about lace, Latin, or which way the priest is facing, delightful as all three are. It is about the fact that the Faith is supposed to be a given thing—received whole, like an inheritance, not a group project graded on a curve. For sixty years, an increasingly confident clerical bureaucracy has treated the Deposit of Faith the way a Silicon Valley product team treats a legacy app: sunset the old features nobody asked to keep, ship the update, and reassure the users that this is, somehow, the same product.
Consider the tour. In Germany, the Synodal Way spent years in solemn, well-catered debate over whether the Church might bless what she has called sin since roughly the Sermon on the Mount, whether Holy Orders could be recalibrated by committee vote like a homeowners' association bylaw, and whether two millennia of sexual morality were perhaps just an unfortunate translation issue that the right working group could quietly fix.² Nobody involved described this as organic development in continuity with Trent. They described it, beaming, as finally catching up—as though the Nicene Creed were a piece of enterprise software overdue for a patch. In Switzerland, assorted dioceses ran the same experiments with the same enthusiasm and somewhat better cheese.³ In New York, a Jesuit has built an entire media apostolate on the premise that the Church's teaching on homosexual acts is less a truth to proclaim than a branding problem to manage, and was rewarded for the effort with a seat at the table rather than a stern letter.⁴ And presiding over the whole itinerary, the Synod on Synodality's final report performed the impressive trick of using the vocabulary of continuity—"discernment," "accompaniment," "walking together"—to bless a process engineered from the outset to arrive somewhere the vocabulary of continuity was never going to get you honestly.⁵ Had any of this been proposed outright in 1965, there was already a pope with a document ready to go.⁶ St. Pius X did not merely predict this movement. He filed the paperwork on it in advance, alphabetized, with footnotes.
Notice what actually unites all of this, because it is not liturgy. A perfectly ordinary Novus Ordo parish that still believes that sin exists and the Eucharist is God is not our enemy; it is our ally, badly dressed. Our objection is to the machine that keeps producing serious, credentialed, mitered men who survey two thousand years of settled moral and doctrinal consensus and announce, with the confidence of a man discovering fire, that the question has become unsettled again—precisely now, precisely in their tenure, and precisely in the direction the editorial board of the New York Times already occupied. It is remarkable how often "the Holy Spirit is doing something new" turns out to mean something the Spirit was, coincidentally, already saying on MSNBC. Funny how the Spirit never seems to get around to revising Church teaching on usury, or almsgiving, or fasting—anything that would cost the reformers something. The Spirit, we are assured, is fluent in absolutely every opinion currently fashionable among tenured faculty at Fordham, and in none whatsoever that would require them to give anything up.
We stand accused of freezing the Faith at Trent, as though Trent were a grudge we nurse like a bad breakup. We would happily settle for freezing it at Nicaea. Honestly, we'd take any fixed point at all, rather than watching it get re-litigated every time a new synod convenes with a fresh supply of breakout sessions and a bigger banner. The whole quarrel comes down to this: we think the Deposit of Faith was, in fact, deposited—handed over complete, to be guarded, not curated like a rotating museum exhibit that swaps out the uncomfortable pieces.⁷ The other side appears to believe it is a living document in the loosest American-constitutional sense, meaning it means whatever the currently assembled quorum of credentialed people needs it to mean this quarter.
And here is the detail that gives the whole game away: ask a Synodal Way enthusiast to name one moral teaching that could never, under any future synod, be revised. Watch the answer dissolve into fog about "discernment" and "the sensus fidelium," which on inspection turns out to mean whatever opinion poll the diocesan communications office most recently commissioned.⁸ Ask a traditionalist the same question and you'll have an answer inside of ten seconds, because we start from the premise that some things are simply not ours to revise, majority vote or no majority vote, synod or no synod. That is the entire dispute. It was never about candles, and it was certainly never, ever about the felt banners—though if we're being honest, somebody really should have “revised” those in a fire-pit with gallons of kerosene.
So no, we are not nostalgic. Nostalgia is wanting your childhood back. Many of us weren't alive for Trent, the Council, or most of the last century's fights, so we can hardly be pining for them. What we want is the thing the Apostles received from Christ Himself, the thing the Fathers bled to defend against Arius, the thing the Scholastics systematized with more rigor than any synod has managed since, the thing entire councils convened specifically to protect—handed on intact, not workshopped by a facilitator with a talking stick and a PowerPoint titled "Journeying Together." Call that attachment if it flatters you. We call it fidelity. We'd recommend trying it sometime, though we understand it tests poorly with the demographic you're desperately trying to retain—right up until the moment they stop showing up altogether, at which point, we suspect, someone will convene a synod to discuss it..
General Sourcing
The liturgical question is real and important, but it is downstream of the doctrinal one, not a substitute for it.
Cf. the German Synodal Way's resolutions on sexual morality, priestly formation, and the diaconate, 2019–2023.
See reporting on Swiss diocesan pastoral experiments regarding blessings and lay ministry roles during the same period.
Fr. James Martin, S.J.'s Outreach ministry and related commentary on Church teaching regarding homosexuality.
Synod of Bishops, Sixteenth Ordinary General Assembly (SG-9), Final Report, October 2024.
St. Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), on the Modernist method of doctrinal evolution by "vital immanence."
Jude 1:3; St. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium, on the rule of quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus.
On the proper theological sense of the sensus fidelium as requiring union with the Magisterium, not polling data, see Lumen Gentium §12 read in continuity with prior tradition, and critiques thereof by traditional commentators.
