Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.

Pope Benedict XVI wrote these words in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est. It was the core of his theology, but he often boiled this profound truth down to a simple German phrase: Freundschaft mit Jesus.

Friendship with Jesus. It was, I think, the thrust of his entire pontificate. And despite what some claim, Pope Francis, and now Pope Leo, have spent their papacies trying to lead us to that exact same place: an encounter with a Person that changes your life.

For a long time, however, I struggled to see that distinction.

I spent years deeply embedded in the traditionalist movement. I wasn’t just a casual attendee; I was a long-standing Master of Ceremonies for one of the largest Traditional Latin Mass communities in North America. My life revolved around the sanctuary. I spent my weekends training priests and servers around my diocese on how to play their various roles—mostly good, well-meaning men who were eager to recover the heritage of the Church—in the choreography of the 1962 Missal.

I loved the work. I loved the silence, the precision, and the undeniable aesthetic beauty of the ancient rite. But over time, the view from the altar rail began to change. I started to notice a corrosive spirit that was intrinsic to the whole operation, hiding in plain sight. And that my own faith had drifted far from anything resembling a Freundschaft mit Jesus.

I didn’t back away because I stopped loving the liturgy. I left because I realized I was losing my peace and that I certainly was not friends with the Lord in the way we are called to be.

The Diet of Dissent

It started with what I consumed. In those days, I was a devotee of all the “right” blogs. My morning routine wasn’t complete without checking Fr. Z, The New Liturgical Movement, or Rorate Caeli. These and many other sites like them were my window into the Church, and eventually, they became the lens through which I judged everything.

When you live on a steady diet of ecclesiastical crisis, you start to view the Church not as a mother, but as a battlefield.

I see this dynamic playing out on a larger scale today. I was particularly concerned recently to see the popular Catholic YouTuber Matt Fradd platform Dr. Peter Kwasniewski and Bishop Athanasius Schneider, referring to the first as one of his favorite guests ever.

And that is the crux of the difficulty. The intellectual core of the traditionalist movement is not composed of villains; they are often quite intelligent, articulate, and charming. Dr. Kwasniewski seems like a guy I would want to share a beer with. But the ideas being advanced by his sort are leading people into a spiritual dead end. We are told we can sit in judgment of the Pope and construct a parallel magisterium based on a romanticized snapshot of a specific era. They treat Tradition like an ecclesial onion, constantly peeling back layers to find a “truer” form in the past, forgetting or ignoring Newman’s insight that true doctrine develops and matures over time rather than calcifying.

The Weight of the World

This constant intake of crisis led to a strange theological distortion. In theory, I believed in Divine Providence. But in practice, I often got the sense that the salvation of souls was entirely—or at least predominantly—up to us, and that God and His actions were somehow secondary in that equation.

It was as if Christ’s concern for each soul and the state of the Church was a fragile glass sculpture that would shatter if we didn’t hold it together. We acted as though God had fallen asleep at the wheel, that the Holy Spirit was on vacation for Vatican II, and that it was up to us to put things right. A friend recently referred to it as “functional atheism masked as zeal.” We were so busy trying to save the liturgy that we forgot that the Church belongs to Christ, not to us. We forgot that the Holy Spirit is the protagonist of history, not our own restorationist projects. We had convinced ourselves that we were the faithful remnant, the last line of defense, when in reality we were just building a bunker.

Once I stopped trying to manage the Church’s crisis and started listening to His voice, I couldn’t stay in that bunker anymore. My friendship with the Lord flourished the moment I finally got out of my own way. I can’t help but think that if the loudest voices in that world were to listen to that same constant internal nudge, they too would find their way to a different, more peaceful path.

The Rome Conference and the Piazza Navona

I remember a specific moment when the disconnect became undeniable.

I had traveled to Rome to attend a major liturgical conference. It was a gathering of the “glitterati” of the traditional movement; everyone from the aforementioned liturgical expert to Cardinal Burke was in attendance.

Inside the conference hall, the atmosphere was electric. We listened to rich, scholarly papers on the history and challenges facing the Roman Rite. I felt a renewed sense of being a guardian of a great treasure. But then the sessions broke, and we moved outside.

I remember sitting in the Piazza Navona, surrounded by the architecture of Rome, having lunch with friends and colleagues. Almost immediately, the conversation shifted from the beauty of the liturgy to the “problems” with the hierarchy. The high theology evaporated, replaced by gossip, sneering at the “modernists,” and a pervasive cynicism about the Holy Father.

It struck me then: we were “experts” in worship, but we were novices in charity. We could debate the finer points of a rubric, but we actively struggled to find even a few nice words for our spiritual father, between bites of whatever Roman delicacy we were enjoying.

Benedict XVI’s Vision and Collateral Damage

It is helpful to remember that Pope Benedict XVI’s goal was never intended to create two separate visions for the Church. His hope, expressed in Summorum Pontificum, was for a “mutual enrichment” between what were two expressions of the same Roman Rite. And for many families and well meaning faithful I think this vision offered a much-needed sense of stability and reverence. At least in my case, the attraction to the ancient liturgy was rooted in a sincere desire for a solid spiritual foundation.

However, over time, and in my experience almost universally, it led to significant practical challenges. The communities that formed around the Traditional Latin Mass began to foster a distinct subculture—one that, in many cases, brought with it a reflexive suspicion of the hierarchy and a growing reliance on a parallel network of books, blogs, and social media critics.

My focus here is not on the faithful person in the pew, for whom the liturgy should be a source of peace, but on the intellectual framework and individuals that have used the liturgy to justify a dissent. I still have a deep respect for the Traditional Latin Mass, and I understand firsthand the turmoil that was felt when the Church indicated that a certain path is being restricted for the sake of a wider unity. It is a difficult transition to set aside something that has been a source of grace. Yet, the task for all of us remains the same: to ensure that our love for the liturgy never becomes an obstacle to our unity with the Body of Christ or our own personal holiness.

The Scandal of Obedience

This is where the rubber meets the road. In the face of a deep seated traditionalist mindset, I had to confront a hard spiritual truth: Obedience to legitimate authority—even when you are convinced, or even have airtight reasoning, to suggest that authority is misguided—is a surer path to holiness than being “right.”

The Second Vatican Council speaks clearly about the “religious submission of mind and will” (obsequium religiosum) that we owe to the Supreme Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra. This isn’t just a pious suggestion; it has practical implications for how we live.

In our circles, however, the response to this call for submission was rarely to actually submit. Instead, the response was to wait for someone to write a book or a pithy article, so we could rest our consciences. Traditionalists have generated volumes trying to define the exact contours and limitations of that obedience. They scrutinize canon law and Church history like lawyers looking for a loophole in a contract, desperate to find a reason why this specific instruction or Motu Proprio does not apply, can safely be ignored, or should even be actively resisted.

Certainly the Magisterium has limits. But if we are being honest, most traditionalist objections are not really about the Pope exceeding his authority. They are about us not liking what he has said. It is far easier to argue about the limits of a Pope’s power than it is to surrender our own will to the path he has set.

So without realizing it, I often prayed from the standpoint that I already had all the answers, or at least that they were to be found in the library of “important” books and blog posts to which I could refer, when I didn’t. I would often pray: “Lord, please open the Pope or Bishop’s eyes to see what I so clearly see.”

But that is not the prayer of a saint, is it?

The saints constantly found themselves subject to superiors who were less holy, less intelligent, or less prudent than themselves. They didn’t resign themselves to the situation with bitterness; they tried to see it through the lens of God’s permissive will. They understood that by submitting to a situation they would not have chosen, they could gain far more merit than they could have imagined. They realized that God could do more with their humble obedience than He could ever do with a heart attached firmly to a pole of pride.

The Sorrow of Dissent

I think this tragedy can be illustrated by the unfortunate case of Alcuin Reid. Reid was a titan of liturgical scholarship. I admired him greatly. But when the authority of the Church came into conflict with his vision for his traditionalist monastery, the temptation to pride was too strong. There are, of course, details about his situation I don’t know, but his illicit ordination shows that you can be a leading expert on the right worship of God but be so blinded as to somehow find a “right” to priestly ordination in one’s conscience.

We saw a similar spirit during the Amazon Synod. When the “Pachamama” statues were stolen and thrown into the Tiber, the reaction across the movement was telling. Anyone who scrolled through the comment boxes on Facebook or read the popular traditionalist blogs would see this treated as a heroic victory. Taylor Marshall eventually bragged about funding and promoting the stunt.

I suspect that for Pope Francis, seeing that act—and seeing the applause it generated from our corner of the Church—was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In my mind, that moment paved the road straight to Traditionis Custodes.

The Unfinished Building

One of the hardest pills to swallow was admitting that Vatican II is not a failed project; it is simply still—yes, still—a largely unrealized one.

In our movement, we spoke of the Council as a disaster that needed to be erased, or at least severely circumscribed. Pope Leo recently started a wonderful new catechesis series on the Council, reminding us again that the Church has not yet fully unwrapped the gifts contained within.

We are impatient. We look at the construction site, see the debris and the scaffolding, and assume the building is ruined and that a sort of restoration is the answer.

In one of his appearances on Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr., Fulton Sheen spoke about the turbulence shaking the Church. He didn’t despair. Instead, he reminded us that we are living in a time of necessary “ferment.” He argued that the “leaven” of the Council was still working its way through the dough of the Church. Sheen said:

We are at the end of Christendom. Not of Christianity, not of the Church, but of Christendom… The Church is not dead, only our previous way of doing things.

He understood that God was permitting this difficult time of confusion not to destroy the Church, but to purify it. The leaven causes the dough to rise, but the process is messy and slower than we would like.

Christ and His Church

When Pope Francis did issue Traditionis Custodes, restricting the Latin Mass, I was initially angry. It felt heavy-handed.

But as I stepped back, I had to admit that his central diagnosis was spot on. He warned that the ancient rite was being used to fuel a parallel church and a rejection of the Second Vatican Council. From my vantage point in the sanctuary and the social halls of some of the traditionalist elite, that is exactly what was happening.

Again, we cannot claim to be faithful Catholics while refusing to follow the consistent instruction and trajectory that the recent Vicars of Christ have set for the Church. Lumen Gentium reminds us that our submission to the Pontiff’s ordinary magisterium must be sincere, adhering to his decisions “according to his manifest mind and will,” which may be known “either from the character of the documents, from his frequent repetition of the same doctrine, or from his manner of speaking.” When the Popes repeatedly indicate the path forward, we cannot hide behind legalisms to avoid walking it.

A priest friend is fond of saying that a lot of traditionalist thinking forms a sort of “double wrongness”. It is worse than an absence of truth; it is a distortion of the truth that appears as an angel of light. It looks like the faith, it sounds like the faith, but it lacks the vital link of obedience that makes it the Catholic faith. St. Joan of Arc, an uneducated peasant girl who faced judges far more learned than herself, helped cut through this with a single sentence at her trial:

About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they’re just one thing, and we shouldn’t complicate the matter.

I think we have severely complicated the matter by trying to have a God and a religion without hearts that are united to His visible Church. In doing so, we risk becoming a simulacrum of the truth rather than its defenders.

In traditionalist circles, the standard response to these words will likely be to dismiss me as naive or ‘hyperpapalist.’ But I have come to believe that when we prioritize our own sense of correctness over communion, we risk losing our place within the living heart of the Church. It’s a hard lesson in spiritual balance: one can stray from the path just as easily by veering too far to the right as to the left.

The Church and the grace she offers are not exclusively “on tap” where we think it is. God’s mercy is bound to the sacraments, but it is not bound by them. God is still in control and knows what He is doing and permitting. He is not limited by our fears, and He is perfectly capable of caring and even saving those we think are being “led astray” by the current situation in the Church. Newman reminds us in his meditation on Providence, that we must trust the Architect even when we cannot understand the blueprint:

Therefore, I will trust Him… He does nothing in vain. He may prolong my life, He may shorten it; He knows what He is about.

God knows what He is about, and He can take care of His Church and flock without our permission to intervene.

Disappearing into the Mission

There is a seductive comfort in believing you are the smartest or at least one of the most well informed people at mass —that you possess an authority of how things ought to be.

For years, my participation in the liturgy was less an act of surrender and more a rigorous inspection. But as I began to let go of the need to “fix” the Church, I realized that my obsession with the scaffolding had actually prevented me from entering the building. I had largely mistaken my love for a form of the mass for a love and authentic relationship with the Author of the faith. Stepping away from the traditionalist approach wasn’t a surrender of my principles; it was a surrender of my pride. It was the terrifying, beautiful moment of realizing that I didn’t need to save the Ark; I just needed to get inside and trust the One who steers it through the storm.

So, what does life look like on the other side?

These days, I attend a small, rural parish with my wife and kids. It’s a different world from the high altar to which I was accustomed. Most of the people here have never attended a Traditional Latin Mass; many probably don’t even know it exists. The choir loft isn’t pumping out Palestrina or Gregorian Chant.

I admit, I’m still a bit of a recovering traditionalist. I still wince occasionally at a clumsy transition, or a rubric that is dismissed.

But stripped of the role, the title, but most importantly the culture, identity, and reasoning with which I was so used to surrounding myself, I’ve been forced to confront the core of it all: Freundschaft mit Jesus. Friendship with Jesus. Friendship with the Lord.

And that focus has changed me. It is bringing my heart into alignment with the mind and heart of the Church—not the Church I wanted to build, but the Church as she actually exists.

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Image:”Praying woman hands” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by ThiênLong