A Protestant writes about the Catholic “authority conundrum” between RadTrads and “avant-garde” Catholics.

his arti­cle by Steve “Pur­ple” Hays at Tri­ablogue illus­trates well, I think, how Catholic internecine squab­bles are viewed from the out­side. Mr. Hays gets much right. (I don’t say that often.) He gets some oth­er things wrong, which is why I will quib­ble now and then. He begins:

There are Catholics who love love love love eccle­si­as­ti­cal authority—until they find them­selves on the wrong end of the author­i­ty whip they pro­fess to love. [Well, okay, “whip” is an over­state­ment.] They taunt evan­gel­i­cals with for­mu­la­ic ques­tions like, “What’s your author­i­ty for that inter­pre­ta­tion?” and “What’s your author­i­ty for the canon?” …

So long as eccle­si­as­ti­cal author­i­ty is on their side, they can nev­er speak too high­ly of the pope’s author­i­ty or ‘the Church’s’ author­i­ty. [Here we have to for­give Mr. Hays his scare quotes.] When, how­ev­er, the ground shifts under their feet and they find them­selves on the los­ing side of eccle­si­as­ti­cal author­i­ty, their love affair with papal author­i­ty or the Mag­is­teri­um cools to tem­per­a­tures approach­ing absolute zero.

Right. I could not have put that bet­ter myself. Mr. Hays has obvi­ous­ly been read­ing sites like 1 Peter 5, Life Site News, Cri­sis, and Rorate Cæli. Catholics are sup­posed to be the pope’s great­est defend­ers. But since Pope Fran­cis has been around, these peo­ple fre­quent­ly slan­der those who do defend the pope as “papalo­la­tors” or “Ultra­mon­tanists.” I’ve often asked why they don’t go all the way and just call us “Roman­ists” or “papists” or “mack­er­el snap­pers.” They sound pos­i­tive­ly Protes­tant and anti-Catholic in their rejec­tion of the pope.

So yes, those who reject the Catholic faith have paid atten­tion. They’ve not­ed your hypocrisy. You can’t shout “papal author­i­ty!” when Ratzinger is the pope and he’s reject­ed by lib­er­als, only to turn around and reject papal author­i­ty when Bergoglio is pope and he’s beloved of lib­er­als.

(Inci­den­tal­ly, there’s a lot of dreamy naivete in the lib­er­al love affair with Pope Fran­cis, but that’s apart from my pur­pose here. I’ve writ­ten about it many a time and oft. Here’s one exam­ple.

•••

Mr. Hays goes on:

Watch­ing Rad­Trads and avant-garde Catholics duke it out is kin­da like watch­ing the fight between fun­da­men­tal­ist Mor­mon polyg­a­mists and main­stream Mor­mons. With­in the Mor­mon par­a­digm, both sides are right and both sides are wrong. Out­side the Mor­mon par­a­digm, both sides are hope­less­ly wrong.

Sure; I don’t doubt that Mr. Hays thinks that Rad­Trads and “avant-garde Catholics” are both “hope­less­ly wrong.” But so do I—if what Mr. Hays means by “avant-garde Catholics” is what I think he means. And I would guess that 90% of all Catholics would say both are wrong too. I get the feel­ing that Mr. Hays would reduce pol­i­tics to the alt-right on one hand and “left­ists” on the oth­er, with­out regard for the fact that 90% or more fall between those extremes and loathe both. If by “avant-garde Catholics” Mr. Hays means what I think he means, these are peo­ple who are no less selec­tive about when to accept papal author­i­ty. They react­ed to Pope Bene­dict the way Rad­Trads react to Pope Fran­cis. But to do that, they had to (1) dis­tort Bene­dict the very way some today dis­tort Fran­cis; (2) par­cel off a sub­set of Catholic teach­ing they reject. Typ­i­cal­ly, the Rad­Trads reject (or dis­tort) the Church’s social teach­ing and the avant-garde reject (or dis­tort) the Church’s teach­ing on sex­u­al moral­i­ty, abor­tion, and homo­sex­u­al­i­ty.

But Mr. Hays will have to tell us what he means by “avant-garde Catholics.” Maybe he’s done so in a dif­fer­ent arti­cle that I don’t know about.

•••

“With par­don­able hyper­bole,” Mr. Hays continues—for indeed, there’s much of that—“we might say that for Rad­Trads, tra­di­tion ends with Pius X, but for avant-garde Catholics, tra­di­tion begins with Pius XII.”

Well, that’s com­pli­cat­ed. If I were to speak in gen­er­al terms, I would say that Rad­Trads extend “tra­di­tion” through Pius XII, and the avant-garde begin it with John XXIII. That’s a gen­er­al­iza­tion. Dr. Joseph Shaw, who heads up the Tra­di­tion­ist Latin Mass Soci­ety and com­plains about “Ultra­mon­tanism,” once cit­ed Pius XII on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment as though it was part of a tra­di­tion that Pope Fran­cis rejects. And these days, Rad­Trads have sud­den­ly fall­en in love with John Paul II because of Famil­iaris Con­sor­tio. They say FC rep­re­sents a tra­di­tion that Pope Fran­cis rejects in Amor­is Laeti­tia. Then you have wild folks like Tay­lor Mar­shall, who attacks all popes back to and includ­ing Pius XII. So per­haps for him tra­di­tion end­ed with Pius XI, or at least the ear­ly years of Pius XII. Pius XII became soft in his lat­er years, says Dr. Mar­shall.

And as for the avant-garde, there are impor­tant teach­ings of popes since John XXIII they reject alto­geth­er. Does Humanæ Vitae ring a bell? Or Ordi­na­tio Sac­er­do­tal­is? And Rad­Trads gen­er­al­ly loved Bene­dict XVI—except when he was writ­ing trou­ble­some social encycli­cals like Car­i­tas in Ver­i­tate. Even George Weigel, no Rad­Trad he, was trou­bled by that.

So this gets com­pli­cat­ed, but the con­sis­tent ele­ment is this: There are some who claim to believe in papal author­i­ty but only when it suits what they believe any­way. Oth­er­wise, the pope can go hang. Mr. Hays rec­og­nized that from his open­ing para­graph.

I should also men­tion here that there are parts of tra­di­tion going all the way back to the begin­ning that Rad­Trads hate but the avant-garde love. I’ve writ­ten about that too. Quote St. John Chrysos­tom or St. Thomas Aquinas on social jus­tice and the Rad­Trads get the vapors.

•••

“It’s espe­cial­ly iron­ic,” Mr. Hays con­cludes, “to see con­verts to Rome attempt to school cra­dle Catholics and even bish­ops, car­di­nals, and popes on true Catholi­cism.”

Sure. Some con­verts do this. I’m think­ing of Steve Ray in par­tic­u­lar just now, but there are oth­ers; his is just the name that popped into my head. And Ger­ry Matat­ics infa­mous­ly turned sede. But oth­er con­verts, like Mark Shea, make a prac­tice of lis­ten­ing to the bish­ops and defend­ing who­ev­er hap­pens to be the pope. At the same time, we have cra­dle Catholics like Steve Sko­jec rail­ing against bish­ops, car­di­nals, and popes who reject the Sko­jes­teri­um.

Mr. Hays is cor­rect in his main obser­va­tion, which is the hypocrisy of say­ing you accept the author­i­ty of the Church over here while you reject it over there. But it’s a bit more com­pli­cat­ed than his gen­er­al­iza­tions about Rad­Trads and the avant-garde would have it. They rep­re­sent maybe ten per­cent of all Catholics, and even that may be a wild over­state­ment. I would guess that most of the Catholics Mr. Hays knows are those who are vocal and get on the Inter­net. You might imag­ine such peo­ple know the faith bet­ter, but I would­n’t count on that either. I count on the Mag­is­teri­um to know the faith.

In any case, I thought the arti­cle an inter­est­ing case study of how the internecine squab­bles among Catholics appear to oth­er Chris­tians who reject the Church, as Mr. Hays does.