Traddyland Group

On Taylor Marshall, the SSPX, and 1 Corinthians 13

By Lou Massett

f I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And if I should have prophecy and should know all mysteries, and all knowledge, and if I should have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

— 1 Corinthians 13:1–2, Douay-Rheims

Dr. Taylor Marshall — the American Catholic apologist, YouTuber, and author of Infiltration — has spent much of the last decade defending the Society of St. Pius X in public. He has interviewed its priests, praised its schools, told his very large audience that the SSPX are the good guys in the story of the twentieth-century Church, and— until this summer.

On July 1, 2026, the SSPX consecrated four new bishops at Écône without a papal mandate. On July 2, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith declared the consecrators and the newly consecrated excommunicated latae sententiae and stated that the Society’s sacraments are illicit. On July 7, Taylor Marshall aired an episode of his podcast titled Did SSPX Enter SCHISM? He didn’t endorse the consecrations. He called them, in effect, imprudent. He suggested that both the Society and the Holy See had things to answer for. He asked his audience to keep praying for reunion. One could hardly call this an attack on the SSPX. He was measured, cautious, dare I say “deferential.”

For that measured hesitation — for the “sin” of not fully endorsing an act the Church herself had just declared schismatic — Taylor Marshall and his family have been dragged through the proverbial online “mud” for the last two weeks. Not by nameless trolls. But by very same Catholics he has befriend over the past few years. His wife and children have been attacked. This week he told his audience about it, in a way that suggests this has deeply unsettled him.

I am not here to defend Taylor Marshall. He doesn’t need me to defend him. Rather, what has happened to him this month is prime example of something I lived through , and something I have come to believe is the most spiritually dangerous feature of the movement I was raised in.

• • •

The bedrock.

St. Paul spent an entire chapter in his letter to the Corinthians, which was on of his most difficult letter constructing, because the church at Corinth was doing exactly what a certain kind of Traditional Catholic is doing right now — speaking in tongues, prophesying, arguing about who had the truer doctrine, competing for who was more spiritual, and forgetting the one thing without which none of it counts.

Charity is patient, is kind: charity envieth not, dealeth not perversely; is not puffed up; is not ambitious, seeketh not her own, is not provoked to anger, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth with the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

Think of the last time you scrolled the comment section under a video of a Catholic questioning the wisdom of an illicit consecration. What type of comments did you see from SSPX supporters? Were they kind? Were “puffed up?” Were they angry?

Paul’s teaching is a diagnostic instrument, and it is unforgiving. Even if you have all the doctrine right and can prove Vatican II was pastoral rather than dogmatic. If you can quote Denzinger from memory and trace apostolic succession on a napkin. Without charity, Paul says, you are nothing. Not “you are wrong.” Not “you are on thin ice.” Nothing.

• • •

The accusation the SSPX has made for fifty-five years.

The Society has argued, since 1970, that the post-Conciliar Church apes the true Church — that it has kept the outward forms of Catholicism (bishops, sacraments, catechism, hierarchy) but hollowed them of their substance. The word is apes. You can find it in Archbishop Lefebvre’s writings. You can find it in Bishop Williamson’s letters. You can find it in the pulpits of any SSPX chapel in the country on a bad Sunday.

It is a devastating accusation. To accuse another Christian body of aping the faith is to accuse them of the worst thing a Christian body can be accused of, which is being a lie in the shape of a truth. I have heard the accusation made a thousand times. I have made it myself. I no longer make it, for reasons I have spent a whole memoir explaining. But even when I made it, in my worst years, some quiet part of me kept asking the question every accusation of aping has to be tested against:

Are we sure it is not us?

Because there is a way of being Traditional Catholic that also apes the faith. Not the Mass — the Latin Mass is beautiful. Not the sacraments — the sacraments are real (except for confessions and marriages conferred by the SSPX); I have received them my whole life. What I mean is the charity that is supposed to run underneath the Mass and the sacraments — the charity that Paul says is the thing without which all of it is nothing. That is what a certain kind of Traditional Catholic apes. And the aping is very, very good. So good that the man performing it usually cannot see that he is performing it.

It looks like this. You do the rosary daily. You fast the Ember Days. You cover your hair in the chapel. You home-school. You sing the Adoro Te Devote from memory. You wear the scapular. You know that your family is on the right side of a war for the soul of the Church. And on the day some other Catholic — a public one, a well-known one, a Taylor Marshall — declines to march in lockstep with your view of what the war requires, you and hundreds like you swarm his social media accounts, mock his wife, and drag his children into it.

That is the aping of charity. It has all the outward forms of Catholic devotion and none of what Paul said we would be nothing without.

• • •

I know this because I grew up inside it.

I did not learn this by reading about it. I learned it by living it. My memoir Traddyland is, among other things, a catalog of what happens inside a community that has convinced itself charity is optional as long as the doctrine is intact. A few of the small moments I could not shake:

The eighth-grade boy — I call him Marty Doyle in the book — who arrived at St. Mary’s Academy my Junior year, made had a learning disability that landed him on the wrong side of our headmaster, Fr. Ramon Angles, and was told, on the walkway between the dorms one Autumn morning, I don’t like you. I want you oooouttt. He was fourteen. He was gone within a month.

The girl of about ninteen — my own sister Marie — who was shamed from the pulpit at a Sunday high Mass, by Fr. Angles, because she spent 15 minutes, some days earlier, at a young adult bon fire where beer was served and someone had the audacity to bring an acoustic guitar and play…clutch your pearls…rock music!!! Her name was called out, with others, before the entire congregation. Everyone in the pews knew whose daughter she was and were led to think ill of her.

The holocaust denying bishop — Bishop Richard Williamson, who counseled my adult sister, a young woman being beaten by her husband, to stay in the marriage for the good of her husband’s soul and her son’s soul. Her own soul, at that point developing a bruise the size of Rhode Island, was not on the list. That was upholding the faith.

The pastor of my family’s chapel in Syracuse who, when my father and my sister and my older brother had closed ranks against me for the crime of testifying honestly under oath about a family lawsuit, was asked by me, in writing, to mediate a reconciliation in the name of my recently deceased mother’s dying wish. He declined.

In Traddyland, students feared expulsion if they manifested a “bad attitude” which meant they took issue with Fr. Angles’ routine tempertantrums and favoritism. My sister was shamed from the pulpit for being at an innocous young adult gathering. I was made an informer against my best friend. A young woman was told to stay under her abusive husband’s roof for the good of everyone’s soul but her own. A priest refused to lift a finger to reconcile my family conflict because the losing party was insufficiently “traditional.” And these were not the extreme cases. These were Tuesdays.

That is what the mob descending on Taylor Marshall and his wife and his children looks like from the inside. It is not a novelty of the internet. It is not confined to the SSPX; every Catholic subculture has its version. But the SSPX in particular has spent a lifetime accusing the Church of aping Christ. I am here, as a witness who has lived it and left it, to say plainly: the movement has, in its worst moods, been aping Him back. Louder. In lace.

• • •

The Pharisee, in a cassock.

It is worth remembering that the men to whom Our Lord addressed His harshest words in the Gospels were not the whores, the thieves, the tax collectors, the Roman soldiers, the imperial administrators, the political radicals, or the disillusioned. They were the Pharisees. The men who knew the Law of Moses in every jot and tittle. The men who paid tithes on the mint and the cumin. The men who wore the phylacteries. The men whose religion was so scrupulous that they had, they thought, earned the right to look down on everyone else.

Christ called them whitewashed sepulchers. Blind guides. A generation of vipers. Children of hell, worse than the pagans they made proselytes of. It is not comfortable language. It is not language you find on the shelves of the Catholic bookstore. But it is language the SSPX faithful might sit with the next time they draft a comment attacking Taylor Marshall’s daughter for the crime of having a father who was insufficiently zealous.

The Pharisee is not the man with the wrong doctrine. The Pharisee is the man with the right doctrine and no love. He is the reason Christ was crucified. He is a permanent feature of religious life — of every religion in every century, but with a special affinity for our own, because our religion is the one that carries the heaviest doctrinal apparatus in the world and thus offers the Pharisee the largest field to display his mastery in.

The Pharisee in a cassock is the great enemy of the traditional Catholic movement. Not liberalism. Not Vatican II. Not Pope Francis. Not the Novus Ordo. The Pharisee. And every time a Traditional Catholic community fails to distinguish between defending the Faith and destroying the neighbor, the Pharisee has won another convert.

• • •

Why schism is a danger to the soul.

Schism does not begin with a broken sacrament. It begins with a broken charity.

It has always been the teaching of the Church that the two cannot come apart. St. Cyprian of Carthage, in the third century: He cannot have God for his Father who does not have the Church for his Mother. St. Augustine, in the fourth: Outside the Church, no salvation, because outside charity, no salvation. The Fathers were relentless on this point because they saw, over and over in the early centuries, that a Christian community could split off from Rome over some point of doctrine or discipline — often a point on which the schismatics were not entirely wrong — and could carry with it every outward sign of the true faith, and could still lose its soul. Because it had, in leaving, broken the bond of charity.

The SSPX has spent fifty-five years arguing that its bond with Rome is not broken, that its case is one of necessity, that history will vindicate it. That is a debate for canon lawyers, and I am not one. But the debate at the level of the faithful — the debate about what has happened to the ordinary man in the pew who has been formed by this movement for a generation — is a debate I am qualified to enter, because I was that man in the pew.

And the answer, at that level, is not ambiguous. A movement whose response to a public figure’s measured hesitation is to attack his wife and his children has a charity problem. A movement whose parish life includes public shaming, expelled children, blackmailed parents, weaponized confessionals, informants, and a bishop who counsels an abused wife to stay for the good of her abuser’s soul has a charity problem. A movement whose pastor will not mediate a grieving family’s reconciliation because the wounded party attends the wrong Mass has a charity problem.

And a charity problem, Paul says, is not a minor problem. It is the problem. It is the one problem that empties every other virtue of its meaning.

• • •

What Taylor Marshall’s month tells us.

Taylor Marshall is neither the first nor the last casualty of this tendency. Steve Skojec left the traditional movement over it. Bishop Athanasius Schneider has been called a Judas. When the enforcement wing of a movement begins to eat its own — its own scholars, its own priests, its own long-time defenders — a serious person has to ask what the enforcement wing is really defending. It is not, at that point, the Faith. It is the movement.

That the current target is Taylor Marshall does not make the target novel. That his wife and children are being included in the attacks tells us something very specific about where the movement’s soul is right now. If you love the SSPX — and there are many good priests and faithful families in it whom I love, and whom I have written about with affection — this is not the moment to defend it by attacking Marshall. It is the moment to defend it by exposing the hypocrisy of their behavior.

Because Paul does not give us a middle option. He says charity, or nothing. Sounding brass, or the real thing. The traditional movement has spent a lifetime insisting that Rome cannot have the sacraments without the true faith. Paul insists that we cannot have the true faith without charity. If the movement I was raised in wishes to survive its own worst hour — this hour, this July, this consecration, this campaign against a man’s wife and children — it will have to rediscover the bedrock. Not the Denzinger. Not the Consecrations. Not the pedigree of Archbishop Lefebvre. The bedrock.

Which is:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

I would rather stand in a pew next to a man whose theology I disagree with and whose charity is real than in a pew next to a man whose theology is impeccable and whose charity is a performance. I do not think Paul left me any other option.

Pray for Taylor Marshall. Pray for his wife and his children. Pray for the men and women writing the comments they will not want, on their deathbeds, to have written. Pray for all those connected to the SSPX, which has, in this hour, forgotten what it is for.

Charity never falleth away.