Traddyland Group

I was raised inside one of the patterns this country is now living with at scale.

For four decades, my family was part of the Society of St. Pius X — a breakaway Catholic sect that operates in the seams of American institutions, outside the authority of Rome and off the radar of most Americans. We did not become extremists overnight. We became people whose love of an old, beautiful thing — the Latin Mass, the catechism we had been taught as children, the unshaken family table — slowly hardened into a conviction that everyone outside our small circle had lost the Faith, lost the country, lost their way. The hardening was not loud. It was not, in any single moment, deliberate. It happened over evenings, over Sunday sermons, over conversations at the kitchen table that began with a concern for the Church and ended with the conclusion that nobody at the next parish over could be trusted.

This is what I have been writing about for four years. The book is called Traddyland. It is a memoir. It is the story of one son, one family, and a long road back from a faction.

The reason I am publishing it now — and the reason I am writing this letter to you on this website — is that the pattern I lived inside on the right is now visibly running on the left, on the right, and inside almost every household in this country I love.

I want to be specific about what I am claiming.

I am not claiming that the right and the left are morally equivalent on every question. They are not. I have my own views, and so do you. I am claiming that the spiritual disease that the right and the left are currently producing in their most committed members is the same. It is the conviction that one’s tribe holds the truth and that the people outside the tribe are not really the kind of people you can sit across a table from. It is the conviction that the cause is so important that almost any means in service of it can be rationalized. It is the conviction that any disagreement from inside the tribe is a betrayal, and any agreement from outside the tribe is a trap.

I have watched my own father give the rest of his life to that conviction. He is now in sedevacantism — the position that the man currently on the Chair of Peter is not really the Pope at all. The Pope is, in his framework, the proof that he was right to give up on the broader Church. I watched my mother, on one of her last calls with me before she died, beg me to “fight” — for an election she believed had been stolen, for a Latin Mass she believed was being persecuted, for a country she believed was lost.

I have also watched, in the same years, friends on the left of me sort the people they disagreed with into a single category of contempt — racist, fascist, irredeemable — and reorganize their lives around defending a small ground of certainty against everyone outside it. The certainty does not match the politics. It is the same certainty.

The book describes what this did to one family. The Epilogue describes what I see it is now doing to the country. What I see, watching America and the Catholic Church in the spring of 2026, is the same fevered suspicion, the same reflexive search for a hidden enemy, the same conviction that everything is at stake and any tool is justified. The Catholic Church is sliding toward schism. The United States is sliding toward civil war. I have lived inside that spirit. I know how quickly conviction curdles into contempt. I know how easily defending what is right becomes a license to destroy what is most precious.

I did not write Traddyland because I think the Society of St. Pius X is the worst thing in American religious life. I wrote it because the SSPX is the version of this pattern I happen to know from the inside — the eighth-grade religion classroom in 1988, the Bishop Williamson dinner table in 1985, the union hall in Syracuse, the Spanish priest in Kansas — and because the lessons of that childhood map, more closely than I ever wanted them to, onto what I see in my own time.

In the Traditional Catholic world of my youth, faith was the supreme virtue that eclipsed all others. Rome itself had become the great betrayer. If we do nothing, all will be lost became the unspoken war cry. We gave no quarter. We were willing to shatter relationships with family and friends because the cause felt too holy to compromise. Faith without charity became a dangerous, clanging cymbal. It became about being right, about being better, about the exaltation of self. Untempered by love, it veered into madness. And it altered the course of my life and the lives of everyone I loved.

The same machine, on a different fuel, is running the country now.

The last chapter of the book is, in the end, a confession. I had become what I opposed. I was the radical. I was the divider. The book is what came of finally seeing it.

A closing word — what the good is, and what the good is for

I do not think the answer to the pattern I have described is more arguments. I think the answer is smaller than that and older. I think it is a return to a very old Catholic understanding of what the good is and what the good is for.

At the core of any moral life, before any political question or theological dispute, is a claim about existence itself. God is the author of life. We are, each of us, creatures made — ideally — from the love that two people express to one another. That is not a sentiment. It is the metaphysical shape of what a human being is. We are social creatures. We are made from love and we are made for love, and there is no fully-formed human life outside of relationship.

Underneath every question of ethics is a claim so simple it can be missed. Being is better than not being. Existence is better than non-existence. That is the binary from which morality actually flows. Every good act extends being. Every act of charity, every act of forgiveness, every act of patience with a person who has become hard to love, is an act that makes more life possible in the world — more relationship, more communion, more of the shared existence God gave us to hold on to and to hold up.

The perfection of being — the fullness of what it is to exist as a human person — we experience as happiness. We are, all of us, happiest when we share our lives together in a way that fulfills the existence of the people around us. To have family. To have friends. To have people who love us, and to be numbered among people we love in return.

Life without that is tragic.

That is what the ideology I grew up inside was slowly costing my family. Not, in the end, our theology. Our communion. The relationships that hold the being of one person to the being of another. Every argument that ended in silence. Every phone call that went unanswered. Every holiday table with one more empty seat than the year before. Those were not just losses of relationship. They were losses of existence — small subtractions from the shared life we had been given.

The road back is not, in the end, a road back to being right. It is a road back to being together.

What I would ask of you

If you are reading this on traddyland.com, you probably came here because of something in the news — the July 1 SSPX consecrations, the FBI Richmond memo, the recent Cruz remarks, the death of Charlie Kirk, the lawsuits and the schools and the fractured families. Whatever brought you here, please know: the book is not a polemic against your side. It is, if it works, a description of the pattern that is hurting all of us. I wrote it for the people inside that pattern who do not yet see it. I wrote it for the people around them who do not yet know how to call them home. I wrote it for the country and the Church I will leave to my children.

If you can, read it. If you do, leave an honest review. If it lands for you, send a copy to someone you love.

And — whatever you do, on the left or the right — refuse the certainty that says the people you disagree with are not worth sitting across a table from. Being is better than not being. Being together is better than being right.

Father, that they may be one.

— Louis Massett author of Traddyland: Memoir of a Radical Traditional Catholic https://a.co/d/03ZNAvVz