Traddyland Group

On the salvation the SSPX promised us, and the generation it lost

By Lou Massett

The revolution devours its children.

— Jacques Mallet du Pan, 1793

I put those words at the front of Traddyland because they are what I have watched happen, in my own lifetime, inside the Traditional Catholic revolution I was raised in.

Mallet du Pan wrote them in 1793 to describe what was happening to his friends. The French Revolution had promised to save France from itself. Within four years it was killing the people who had led it. Mallet du Pan watched from Switzerland and named the mechanism: whatever the revolution had gone to save, in the end, it consumed instead.

Two hundred and thirty-three years later, in a much smaller theater and to less obvious historical consequence, a Traditional Catholic revolution has been running the same play on my own generation. This is not an analogy I make lightly. It is a claim about what has actually happened to the children of the Society of Saint Pius X, on the ground, in the last thirty-five years. I am one of those children. Most of the others are gone.

•  •  •

The whole point of Traditional Catholicism was salvation.

Every family at St. Mary's Academy — every family in Bridgeport, every family at Winona, every family in Hampton and Ballarat and Post Falls and Menzingen — was there for the same reason. The Latin Mass. The old catechism. The old moral theology. The old certainties. The SSPX said, without embarrassment, that outside the true Faith there is no salvation, and that they were the last reliable custodians of that Faith standing after the Second Vatican Council. That was the sales pitch. That was what our parents came for. That was what my parents came for. That is what they surrendered their televisions and their neighbors and their extended families and, in some cases, their reputations for.

Now count the children.

Almost none of us are still in the SSPX. Not the smart ones. Not the loud ones. Not the pious ones. Not the ones our parents were proudest of. A generation of children raised, at extraordinary cost to the families that raised us, on the exclusive promise of salvation — has, on the whole, walked out the door.

Some to atheism. Some to nothing much. Some to other churches. Some to mainstream Catholicism at arm's length from the movement of our childhood. A handful who stayed and who I love and who did not deserve the pattern the rest of us lived. But of the boys I sat next to in Fr. Angles's classroom in the early ninties, the ones I would have picked at fifteen as the future of the movement — most are gone. Of the girls I knew from those years, more are gone still.

This is not an argument. This is a demographic fact about a small, very intense religious community. The Revolution that promised us salvation has, in one generation, driven us out of the Church.

•  •  •

A document arrived in my inbox this week that I want to tell you about, because it is what "devours its children" looks like when a specific woman writes down the specific mechanism.

Dr. Marisha McAuliffe and I did not know each other well. We were students at St. Mary's Academy in Kansas at overlapping points in the late eighties and early nineties. Same buildings. Same priests. Different friends. She is Australian; her family joined the SSPX at the Hampton chapel outside Melbourne in 1983, when she was ten. Mine was in Bridgeport, New York, doing more or less the same thing at more or less the same time.

She wrote a thirty-page submission to the Victorian Inquiry into Cults and Organised Fringe Religious Groups. She has asked, in writing, that it be made public. She has furnished police records, footnotes, links, and — the reason I am writing today — the name of Fr. Ramon Angles, in an Australian government submission, in July of 2025, on the other side of the world from where I sat at fifteen and watched the same man teach the same catechism class to a room of American boys.

Marisha is one of us. She was promised the same thing we were: salvation, in exchange for the loyalty and the docility and the isolation of her whole adolescence. What she got instead, starting at fourteen or fifteen, was a Louisiana-born priest in his fifties who ordered her weekly into his bedroom on the chapel grounds under the doctrine of the Fourth Commandment — disobey a priest and it is a mortal sin — and who sat her on his knee and touched her and told her, when she avoided him, that she was hurting his feelings, which was also a mortal sin.

That is what the promise of salvation had, in her tenth-grade year, actually delivered. That is what "devours its children" looks like when you refuse to romanticize it.

She holds a PhD in Architecture and Cognitive Science. A graduate diploma in Maxillofacial Surgery. A postgraduate certificate in learning and teaching from Oxford. Senior academic appointments in Australia, New Zealand, India, and now Vietnam, where she lives with her husband. She has spent a lifetime earning the right to be believed when she says out loud what happened to her. She should not have had to.

•  •  •

Two names in her submission stopped me cold.

The first is Angles. Fr. Ramon Angles is the headmaster at the center of Traddyland. He is the man who explained to me, once, over spaghetti, that Hitler had been misunderstood. Marisha's submission confirms — from Melbourne, from the Australian side of the ocean — that Angles had a history at the Hampton chapel before he was moved to Kansas. That his transfer to St. Mary's followed allegations against him in Australia. This is not a moral panic about a man I disliked in the eighties. This is the paper trail of a career.

Two continents. Three moves. A career.

The second is the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. She cites the 2023 KBI clergy-abuse report — 41,265 pages of records, 137 interviewed victims, 188 clergy identified. That is the number that made the news. It is the diocesan number. It is not the whole number.

•  •  •

Here is what I want the reader to hold in mind all at once, because I think it is easier to look away when you take these one at a time.

In 2019 the Kansas Bureau of Investigation opened an inquiry into clergy sexual abuse across the state. Not one diocese — every one of them. The Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas. The Diocese of Wichita. Salina. Dodge City. And — for the first time in an American state investigation of its kind — the two Society of Saint Pius X communities that operate in Kansas outside the ordinary Catholic hierarchy. The diocesan portions took years to work through. The 2023 report I referred to above, the one with 188 clergy in it, is the diocesan report. It is not the SSPX report. The SSPX portion is separate. And it is not done.

It is in year seven.

While that has been going on in Kansas, a French court, in June of 2023, sentenced Fr. Pierre de Maillard — an SSPX priest — to twenty years in prison for the rape and sexual assault of twenty-seven minors. Sixteen boys. Eleven girls. All between twelve and fifteen years old. Some of them siblings. Some of them abused in their own parents' houses. Two years on, the French press is still describing him as one of the worst serial clerical abusers the country has ever prosecuted, and I do not need to tell you that is not a small thing to be told, in France, about a Catholic priest. He is not the only SSPX priest in a French cell right now. Fr. Christophe Roisnel is serving nineteen years for rape and torture. Fr. Arnaud Rostand has admitted a fifteen-year pattern of sexual misconduct with minors across France, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States. De Maillard is only the loudest.

Marisha's document is not a court file. It is not a police charge. It is a woman with a doctorate, writing what she can no longer stand not to write, asking a democratic government to look at it.

The French have already handed down a verdict. The Kansans are seven years into an investigation. The Australians — this week, this month — are at the stage where a survivor sends a document to a legislator and hopes.

Three countries. One institution. Three national enforcement systems catching up to the same evidence at three different speeds. Whatever this is, it is not a bad memory from one boy who went to one boarding school in Kansas. It is the mechanism, running.

•  •  •

I want to come back, now, to the thesis. Because the point of this article is not the sexual abuse. The sexual abuse is the loudest evidence, and the most legally actionable, but it is not the whole of what I mean by the Revolution devouring its children. It is only the sharp end of it.

The whole of what I mean is this. My generation was promised salvation. It was promised salvation on the specific theological ground that only the SSPX still had it. Everything else — the family isolation, the homeschool bubble, the disowning of children who left, the counseling of abused wives to remain in violent marriages for the good of their husbands' souls, the shaming of teenage girls from the pulpit over the length of a skirt, the transfer of accused priests across continents rather than the reporting of them, the doctrine of absolute obedience to the priest under pain of mortal sin — all of it was justified by the salvation clause. It was the trump card. It was what made the cost worth it, in our parents' minds, and eventually in ours.

And then the salvation did not arrive.

Or rather — and I want to say this carefully, because I still believe in the sacraments, and I still go to Mass, and I am not writing this to lead anyone away from Christ — what arrived, in the lives of the children of the movement, was very often the opposite of salvation. Trauma arrived. Isolation arrived. Broken families arrived. Suicidal ideation arrived, for many of us, in the late teens and twenties, at rates I do not think I could name without weeping. Abused wives arrived. Divorced daughters, disowned by the parents who had loved them, arrived. Kansas Bureau of Investigation files arrived. French court sentences arrived. Marisha McAuliffe, at twenty, homeless in a women's shelter in Adelaide with police protection, arrived.

And in the private ledger that I keep in my own head — the one that no reporter has yet asked me about — the loss of faith arrived. Over and over. In classmate after classmate. In sibling after sibling. In friend after friend. The Revolution that had promised to save our souls has, in a great many of our cases, driven them out of the Church entirely.

That is what Mallet du Pan named. That is what "devours its children" means when a Traditional Catholic writes it two centuries later on a porch in Bridgeport, New York.

•  •  •

Marisha's document does not end at testimony. Its last section is a list — long, itemized, and specific — of things she is asking the Parliament of Victoria to do.

The removal of religious exemptions from Victorian child-protection statutes. The recognition of coercive institutional control as a form of abuse in its own right. Mandatory reporting for clergy, with no privilege carve-out. Independent secular oversight of religious homeschooling. Legal protection for adult children whose religious communities counsel their families to sever contact after they leave. Financial and psychological transition support for people leaving high-control religious groups. Whistleblower protection. And the extension of Brodie's Law — Victoria's anti-bullying statute — to explicitly cover the institutional use of shame and fear as instruments of control.

It is not a list a serious legislator can wave off. It reads like what it is: a document a woman with a doctorate writes when she has stopped hoping and started drafting.

•  •  •

Three things I am asking American readers to do.

One. Read her submission. It is public. She has asked for that, on purpose. If you read Traddyland and wondered whether the story I told was mine alone or the shape of a movement, Marisha's testimony will settle that for you in about an hour.

Two. Push on the Kansas file. Seven years in, five hundred cases mentioned informally, no prosecutions filed. Kansas needs statute-of-limitations reform. So do most other states. That happens when constituents make it politically expensive to keep letting it drift.

Three. If you were one of us — one of the kids raised inside this promise, in the eighties or the nineties or the two-thousands, in Kansas or Melbourne or Bridgeport or anywhere else the Latin Mass was said in the little chapel with the folding chairs — write me back. I would like to know how many of us there really are. I would like to know where you landed. I want to know if the salvation arrived, in your case, or if what arrived was something else.

•  •  •

I am not writing this to persuade the SSPX faithful to leave. I know how that reads from inside the pew. If the movement of my childhood is where you have, in adulthood, found God — I am not asking you to give it up.

I am asking you to look at what happened to us. The children of the same movement, one generation on. And to ask whether the promise you were given about the salvation of souls has been, in our lives, delivered — or whether the Revolution has, quietly, in its own smaller theater, been doing what all revolutions eventually do.

Read her.

Believe her.

Count the children.