I grew up in a movement most Americans have never heard of, and the ones who have heard of it usually cannot spell it correctly.

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The Society of St. Pius X — the SSPX — is a breakaway Catholic order founded in 1970 by the French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in response to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

 

In 1988, Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated four bishops without the mandate of Pope John Paul II. Rome declared all six of the men involved excommunicated the following day. The Society has, in the thirty-eight years since, operated as a parallel Catholic jurisdiction — with its own bishops, its own priests, its own seminaries, its own schools, and its own chapels in nearly every American state — while insisting that it is the last faithful outpost of a Catholic Church the Council has otherwise ruined.

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On July 1, 2026, the Society consecrated four more bishops without a papal mandate. On July 2, Pope Leo XIV excommunicated all six of the bishops involved, and extended the penalty to lay members who formally adhere to the movement — roughly thirty thousand American Catholics.

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I was raised inside all of it, from birth. I spent the first thirty years of my life trying to live faithfully inside a movement that my own conscience, over time, could not any longer defend.
 

Traddyland: Memoir of a Radical Traditional Catholic is the story of that formation, that struggle, and that exodus.
 

It is a book about a father who wept for six weeks in the summer of 1988. It is a book about a mother who tried to hold her family together across a schism Rome had already named. It is a book about the boarding school in Kansas that shaped four decades of American traditionalist Catholicism. It is a book about the bishop — Richard Williamson, later expelled from the Society for Holocaust denial — who sat at my family’s dinner table in Syracuse when I was fifteen years old.
 

It is not a book that leaves the movement its dignity intact. It is also not a book that leaves its own author’s dignity intact. Every serious memoir owes both, and this one pays both.
 

I was formed at the Society’s flagship school in St. Marys, Kansas. I attended school with Michael Goldade — one of the four bishops the SSPX consecrated on July 1 of this year. I have spent the last Six years writing this book, in the specific hope that it might help other men and women raised inside the movement to see what it took me a lifetime to see: that a Church can be honored better by staying inside her than by seceding from her in her name.
 

Newsweek quoted me in its July 11, 2026 story on the Pope Leo excommunications, where I described the human cost of what the movement is doing now.
 

Who this book is for
Anyone who has watched a family member disappear inside a movement — political, religious, ideological, therapeutic, or online — and who wants a careful account of how that happens, and what it costs to walk out.

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Anyone who is Catholic and trying to understand what the July 1 consecrations and the July 2 excommunications actually mean for the Church, for the traditionalist movement, and for the ordinary families inside it.

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Anyone who reads memoir seriously and wants to sit with a life honestly told, in the American register the form can produce at its best. You do not need to be Catholic to read this book. You need to be curious about the interior life of a family formed by a movement, and about what it costs one member of that family to walk out.

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Read the book

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The book is available on Amazon.

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Get Traddyland here 

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If the book — or any of the essays and podcast episodes on this site — moves you, the single most helpful thing you can do for the work is leave an honest review on Amazon when you finish. That is how memoirs like this one find their readers, one honest sentence at a time.

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Welcome to Traddyland.

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— Lou