Traddyland Group

On the piety of the Society of St. Pius X, the sympathy it inspires in serious Catholics, and the deadly sin their piety cannot overcome.

By Louis Massett

Mick Jagger opens the Rolling Stones song by asking the listener to guess who is speaking. “Please allow me to introduce myself,” he sings. “I’m a man of wealth and taste. I’ve been around for a long, long year. Stolen many a man’s soul and faith.” The song’s first two verses catalog a long résumé — Christ’s crucifixion, the death of the czars, both world wars — and then, in the chorus, Jagger asks the listener the question the song is really about:

But what’s puzzlin’ you Is the nature of my game.

The point, in the song, is that the devil is not primarily what we expect the devil to be. He is not a figure with red horns and a pitchfork tempting the reluctant to obvious sin. He is a man of wealth and taste who convinces us of one obvious thing about him and then, quietly, at our backs, is doing something else entirely. I have been thinking about that verse for the past week.

What my former SSPX professor told me

When I was in the seminary, one of my former SSPX professors told me something about the devil that has stayed with me ever since.

If the devil cannot impede your spiritual progress from the front, he said — if he cannot slow you down by getting you into obvious habits of sin — he will get behind you and push you.

He will push you into scrupulosity, so that you spend the rest of your life checking on the state of your own soul instead of loving the neighbor in front of you. He will push you into self-righteousness, so that your fidelity to the Rosary and your love of the old liturgy become the ground on which you look down at the Catholic in the next pew. He will push you into phariseeism — into the exact spiritual disease Christ named as the single most dangerous form of religion in the New Testament. The disease of the men who kept the Law of Moses to the letter and used their fidelity to it as a warrant to demand His crucifixion.

The devil does not need to make you an atheist. He needs to make you sure — quietly, in your bones, without ever putting the sentence into words — that you are better than the Catholic in the next pew.

This is what has happened, over four decades, to the Society of St. Pius X.

What it looks like when it happens

Al Van Auken was a distant cousin of my father’s and one of the first men in our orbit to join the Society. He came into it with the particular hunger of a boy who had lost his mother young. He was, as I have written in the book, the son of a mother who had died when he was five and a father who had never recovered. When my father found the Society, Al followed him in with the fervor of an orphan finding a home.

Al was, by every visible measure, exactly what the Society said a good Catholic man ought to be. He read the literature. He opposed the Modernists. He fought for the true Mass. He refused to attend the Novus Ordo. He was, in the ordinary sense of the word, devout.

He also destroyed his marriage doing it.

His wife Judy had, over the same years, been drawn to the charismatic renewal that was reaching Catholic households in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That difference of temperament — she found grace at healing Masses, he found it at the Latin Mass — became, under the influence of the Society’s teaching, no longer a difference of temperament but a difference of side. When their daughter’s First Communion arrived, Al refused to attend, because it would be celebrated at Judy’s Novus Ordo parish. His seven-year-old walked into her most important sacramental day without her father, because the pew he would have had to sit in was, in his reading, theologically wrong.

One night that summer, Judy asked Al whether he loved her anymore. He answered with a line that could have come directly from a Lefebvre pamphlet.

“How could I love a Modernist?”

Read that sentence twice.

A husband — in an American Catholic marriage, in the late twentieth century, in a family that presented itself as the last outpost of authentic Catholic devotion — could not answer the question of whether he still loved his wife with any word other than a theological category she had come to occupy in his mind.

Judy left him shortly after, with their children, fearing for their safety. My own family, including my father, found her departure unthinkable. Nobody in the family, as far as I could tell at the time, found the First Communion unthinkable. That asymmetry was its own warning, and none of us knew how to read it.

It was the first case in our orbit of the radicalism producing the kind of domestic ruin it was supposedly a bulwark against.

It would not be the last.

That is what phariseeism produces when the devil has been pushing from behind for long enough. Fidelity to the Rosary becomes the credential. Devotion to the old Mass becomes the certificate. And both begin to function as authorizations for a level of contempt — quiet, private, applied first to the people closest to you — that Christ Himself, in every scene where He addresses the Pharisees, described as the specific spiritual danger of religious observance.

Why serious Catholics have sympathy

I do not blame the many good Catholics who have sympathy for the Society. The sympathy is real, and it is grounded in three observations I do not think are wrong.

First, the perception that progressive priests and bishops get away with worse behavior. When the abuse-cover-up story broke over the mainstream Church in 2002, and then again in 2018, and continues to unfold now — and when the modernist branch of Catholic academia has protected men whose theological deviations dwarf anything the traditionalists are accused of, while a diocesan pastor gets defrocked for preaching against gay marriage in a homily — ordinary Catholics look at the asymmetry and conclude, with reason, that Rome punishes the traditionalists more harshly than it punishes anyone else. This perception has some evidence behind it. It also has some counter-evidence. But it is not an unreasonable position.

Second, the Society and its parishes offer things that many mainstream American Catholic parishes have visibly failed to offer. Reverent liturgy. Old, tested catechesis — the Baltimore Catechism that shaped my mother and every Catholic mother back to Trent. Large families. Homeschooling networks. Children who can serve a Latin Mass by age eight and read Aquinas by fifteen. Priests who preach against sin, against hell, against damnation, and against the lukewarmness of the age. Sisters in habits. Men in coat and tie. The old marks of a Catholic culture that once existed everywhere and now, in the SSPX parishes, still exist.

I am, as I have written elsewhere, not blind to any of this. I love the Latin Mass.

Third, during the COVID lockdowns, a great many young Catholics — Gen Z especially — watched their diocesan parishes close, their bishops accept public-health directives, their sacraments become drive-through affairs behind plexiglass. And they watched the SSPX chapels keep their doors open, keep the Mass going, keep the confessional running. To a young Catholic who had grown up in a Church that had shrunk in every measurable way for their entire lives, the Society looked, in those months, like the only place in the country that still believed the sacraments mattered.

That impression was profound. It has not left the generation it formed.

Why the impression is an illusion

Let me name what the impression missed.

The Society did not, in fact, keep its doors open because it loved souls more than the bishops did. It kept its doors open because its institutional identity requires it to be seen as an exception to Rome — even in matters as pedestrian as pandemic-era public-health prudence. Its refusal to close was not evidence, on its own, that its clergy loved souls more. It was evidence that its clergy had, and have, a strong institutional incentive to distinguish themselves from the bishops on any question the bishops were willing to answer with restraint.

This is worth naming plainly.

Radicalism in the practice of a religion is not the same thing as sanctity in the practice of a religion.

Every religion has its radicals, and every religion’s radicals mistake their willingness to break with the mainstream for evidence that they alone have kept the faith. Radical Islam demonstrates spectacular zeal in the practice of its own beliefs. It also produces suicide bombers, and no one — not the sympathizers, not the young men and women drawn to the movement’s certitude — mistakes the intensity of the practice for the sanctity of the practitioners.

Zeal without charity is not evidence of sanctity. It is evidence of the human capacity to mistake commitment for holiness.

The Society, in its openness during the lockdowns, did not distinguish itself as more holy. It distinguished itself as more oppositional. Those are not the same thing. And the young Catholics who took the sacramental heroism at face value are the same generation whose parents will, over the next decade, wonder how their children were formed into a certainty that could not, in the end, sit at a family table with a Novus Ordo cousin.

The deadly sin

The Society of St. Pius X practices, in many respects, what any serious Catholic ought to admire. The Rosary. The Mass. Marian devotion. Catechetical rigor. Large families. Habited sisters. Cassocked priests. Reverence in liturgy. Doctrinal seriousness. If those things were, by themselves, sufficient for sanctity, the Society would be the holiest institution in the American Church.

They are not sufficient. And the reason they are not sufficient is that the deadly sin of the movement — the sin the movement’s outward practices cannot cancel, the sin Christ Himself named as the specific danger of religious observance — is pride.

Pride at scale is phariseeism.

Phariseeism produces the priest who tells his students it is holy to kill the followers of another Catholic priest. Phariseeism produces the bishop who consecrates four other bishops in defiance of the Pope and describes the act as fidelity. Phariseeism produces the family that stops speaking to the sibling who has embraced the Novus Ordo. Phariseeism produces the schism that on July 1 became visible to the world.

This is the devil in the details. This is what my professor was telling me about, forty years before I understood it. If the devil cannot slow you down from the front, he will get behind you and push you into a certainty about your own fidelity so pure that it will, without ever asking your permission, replace charity as the ground of your relationship with the rest of the Church.

The Society did not earn its excommunication by loving the old Mass. Excommunication is not the wage of reverence. The Society earned its excommunication by concluding, over decades, that its own reading of the Faith was a firmer ground of Catholic communion than the promise of Christ to His Church — and by acting on that conclusion, twice, in a single lifetime.

“Please allow me to introduce myself,” Mick Jagger sings. “I’m a man of wealth and taste.”

The devil, my professor was saying, is not always where the reverence isn’t.

Sometimes he is behind it, pushing.

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Louis Massett is the author of Traddyland: Memoir of a Radical Tradtional Catholic. Available now on Amazon! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H4XPJWC8?ref_=cm_sw_r_ffobk_cp_ud_dp_Y3N2C1H771A3R5NGJ27G_1&bestFormat=true