Editor's note: An earlier version of this essay was less precise than it should have been about the current institutional status of one of the classmates paraphrased below. The passage now reflects that he attends Mass in a diocesan parish. The essay's diagnosis of the formation he continues to carry is unchanged. On the exodus from radical traditional Catholicism, the light outside, and what it costs to describe the sun to the men still watching the wall.

Louis Massett

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

In the seventh book of Plato’s Republic, Socrates asks Glaucon to imagine a group of prisoners chained in a cave, facing a wall, watching the shadows cast by figures passing behind them in the light of a fire they cannot see. The prisoners have been chained this way from birth. They have no experience of any other reality. To them, the shadows are reality — the moving forms on the wall are, so far as they can tell, the whole of what exists.

Then one prisoner escapes. He turns around, sees the fire, is led out of the cave, and stands in the sunlight for the first time. He sees the objects that had been casting the shadows all along. He comes to understand — painfully, over time — that what he had believed was reality had been, for his whole life, a projected version of it. The shadows were not lies. They were partial. They were derivative. They were the reflection of the real thing.

He returns to the cave to tell the others. They do not believe him. What he is describing does not match what they can see.

The turn

I have been thinking about that allegory for the last few months, because I am — I have come to see, over the years — the man in the allegory who turned around.

I did not turn easily. Nobody does. The chains that hold a person facing the wall are not, in the ordinary case, made of iron. They are made of the people you love. Your father. Your mother. Your siblings. The priests who baptized you and heard your first confession and taught you your first prayers. The classmates who prayed the Rosary next to you every morning of your childhood. The friends whose weddings you served at. The neighbors whose homes you slept in when your own was too intense. When those people all face the same wall, and see the same shadows, and describe the shadows to you as reality from the moment you can speak, the turn is not something you make in an afternoon. It is something that happens slowly, over years, and it hurts every step.

I have felt that wound. To turn around is to see, for the first time, that the people who loved you most — the people whose love was the deepest and most formative thing in your life — were themselves facing a wall. It is to grieve, at the same moment, both what they gave you and what they were unable to give you. It is to love them more, and to see them more clearly, and to be less able than ever to sit next to them without wanting to point at the light behind their heads.

What I saw, when my eyes finally adjusted, was one word.

Charity.

The sun is charity. God loved us into being. Our parents’ love, however imperfect, called each of us into existence. Our love for our families, our friends, our Church, is what makes any of this worth living for. Christ Himself, asked to name the greatest commandment, gave two — and both of them were about love. Charity is not one virtue among the virtues. Charity is the substance from which the other virtues are made. It is, in the theological tradition I was raised inside, the fruit of the Holy Spirit and the form of every other supernatural gift. Faith without charity is empty. Hope without charity is despair. The Rosary said without charity is beads clicking against a pew.

And what I have come to see about the movement I grew up in is that it replaced charity with correctness. It replaced love with vigilance. It replaced the family table with the argument at the family table. It replaced the Church with a faction.

The shadows speak

I do not have to argue this diagnosis in the abstract. I can show it. In the weeks since the book came out, the response from members of the movement — from friends I have known since childhood, from classmates I once loved, and from members of my own family — has been the diagnosis speaking in its own voice.

A member of the SSPX laity wrote to me privately, a few weeks after the book was published:

“It’s not so much the book as the public defamatory posts on Facebook towards members of the SSPX. It’s one thing to disagree with the SSPX position, it’s another to publicly tear down its members and laity (many of your family and friends) with your opinions and to make unfair/untrue inferences about our character.”

Read that sentence carefully. What is under attack, in the sender’s telling, is not the substance of the argument. It is that the argument was made publicly. The wound named is not that the book is wrong. The wound named is that the book was written. The premise underneath is that a member of a family — even one who has lived his own exodus — owes the movement his silence.

A former classmate, a man I once loved, wrote in a public thread:

“Your problem is your pride… Tying Williamson to the SSPX in this circumstance is not true.”

Set the second sentence aside for a moment. It is factually incorrect — Richard Williamson was consecrated a bishop by Marcel Lefebvre on June 30, 1988, at the Society’s own seminary in Écône, and served as a bishop of the Society for twenty-four years before the Society expelled him in 2012 for reasons that had nothing to do with the case in question. The historical record is not ambiguous. Set it aside anyway.

Look at the first sentence. Your problem is your pride.

The friend’s diagnosis is not that my argument is wrong. It is that I have the wrong interior disposition for making it. The book, whatever its content, has been read as evidence of my pride. Pride, in the movement’s telling, is the sin of someone who has left. It cannot be the sin of someone who has stayed. This is a form of theological reasoning I recognize from my own childhood: the movement’s own righteousness is presumed; what needs diagnosis is the soul of the one who walked out.

Another classmate — a man I had known since we were boys at the same Society school, whose family had shared meals with mine, whose wedding I remember — sent me a note that read, in full:

“You’re dead to me. If you’re dying in a ditch, don’t call me.”

Read that second sentence twice, because it is the one that is doing the work.

We were both taught, at the same schools, from the same catechism, that visiting the sick and the dying is one of the seven Corporal Works of Mercy — the concrete form charity takes when it acts on the body of another person. Christ Himself, in Matthew 25, said that on the last day the Son of Man will separate the sheep from the goats on precisely this ground. Whatever you did to the least of these, you did to Me.

My classmate — a serious, practicing, formed Catholic who could have named the seven Corporal Works as fast as I have just named one of them — chose, in his note, to identify the specific work of mercy he was declining to perform. He did not merely say we were no longer friends. He said that if I were in a ditch dying, he would not come. He would not attend me. He would not, in the language of Matthew 25, do it to Christ.

That is the piece that ought to stop the reader cold. Not the fury. Not the severance. The precision of the refusal. The classmate has, in one sentence, told me exactly which Christian obligation the ideology has excused him from performing on my behalf. The movement, having replaced charity with correctness, has arrived at the position that even the corporal ministry to the dying can be withheld from someone whose theology it has disapproved.

That is not Catholicism. It is not even a serious human friendship. It is the ideology, speaking through a man I once loved, in the specific vocabulary of the tradition we were both formed in — telling me which sacred obligation it has now permitted him to set down.

And then, in a public comment thread on Facebook, my own older brother wrote about the book, and about me:

“The author of this tripe is my younger brother who has dishonored his family. Please pray for this poor soul!”

The author of this tripe is my younger brother.

I want to sit with that sentence, because it is the diagnosis of the whole essay in a single line. The word brother is present, but only as identification — the way a police report identifies a suspect. What surrounds the word is not warmth. It is tripe. It is dishonored. It is poor soul, said not in sorrow but in dismissal. The affection has drained out of the word. The relation has been demoted, in the writer’s own hand, from brother to object of correction.

This is what phariseeism sounds like when it has finished replacing charity with vigilance. It is not the shouting man on the internet. It is not the theological argument in the comment box. It is the classmate refusing the Corporal Work of Mercy to a dying man. It is the brother, in a public thread, using the language of family only to place his own blood inside a category of error. The love has not left the sentence because the writer stopped being able to love. The love has left the sentence because the ideology demanded the sentence more urgently than the love did.

The devil, my old professor at St. Mary’s used to tell me, does not need to make you an atheist. He needs to get behind you and push. Into scrupulosity. Into self-righteousness. 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 — and with the members of your own family.

The four sentences above are that push. Not the theological arguments in them. The relational posture underneath them. In each one, the writer has produced a sentence about a person he was formed to love, and the sentence has arrived without the love in it.

That is what the ideology does, over time, to the people who stay inside it. It is not that they cease to feel love. Many of them — my brother certainly among them, my classmate almost certainly among them — love me still, in the ways they know how. It is that the practice of the ideology has crowded the love out of the practice of the friendship, and out of the practice of the family. The wall is what they can see. The shadows are what they can describe. And someone who has turned around, and is standing behind them trying to describe the light, has become — in the mechanics of the ideology — an object of correction rather than a brother, a subject of severance rather than a friend.

What I want, and what I cannot make happen

The last thing worth saying is the hardest.

Part of me wants to free the people I love from the shackles. To turn their heads gently, one at a time, and let them see. My father is still in the cave. Several of my siblings are still in the cave. Old friends from St. Mary’s are still in the cave — including, apparently, one who has told me not to call him from a ditch. I would give a great deal to reach behind each of them and turn their heads, and let them see the sun for even a minute, and let them understand that what they have been describing to each other for four decades is a shadow of a reality that is more beautiful, more merciful, more expansive, and more Catholic than the version they have been given.

I cannot make that happen. Nobody can. The prisoner who returns from the sunlight, in Plato’s telling, is not believed. In the darker versions of the allegory, he is killed. Christ Himself, when He came out of the sunlight and back into the cave, was crucified by the men who could not see what He was pointing at.

All I can do — all any of us who has left the cave can do — is stand in the mouth of it, and describe the sun, and hope that someone hears me over the sound of the shadows on the wall.

And if any of them ever finds himself in a ditch, they should know: I will come.

I have also written a companion piece to this essay, on the specific theological problem the Society of St. Pius X cannot solve by being right. If this piece is the testimony, that one is the argument. It is called Plato’s Allegory of Coca-Cola, and it is up next.

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Louis Massett is the author of Traddyland: Memoir of a Radical Traditional Catholic, now available on Amazon.

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