The Corruption of the Best Is the Worst: When Obedience Becomes the Devil's Tool

"Satan’s masterstroke": laying hands on a great virtue and twisting it into a weapon of spiritual suicide and bureaucratic euthanasia

The father of lies has every reason to try to stop this Mass.

On September 9, 2023, I delivered the following lecture in Bozeman, Montana. A video of it has been posted at YouTube (also embedded below), and you may listen to the audio here via the voiceover feature. The full text below, with notes, is a Tradition & Sanity Exclusive for paid subscribers.

New situations and responses in Church history

A key insight for me was realizing years ago that every century of the Church brings with it something fundamentally new—something that has not been seen before and that has to be dealt with on its own terms. Not that we ever face any situation for which we entirely lack the principles to deal with it, but that there is no exact parallel to the new situation, some sort of easy equivalency that would permit a formulaic response. For example, when Arianism arose in the fourth century and spread like wildfire, including among the episcopacy, the Church was facing a new state of emergency and had to respond accordingly. Humanly speaking, it was a close call; as St Jerome famously said, “The whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Arian.” But equally new was the sudden and violent arrival of Islam, which swept away many of the most ancient, even original, Christian communities in North Africa and Asia Minor. Another unwelcome novelty was the so-called “pornocracy” of the Dark Ages, when the pope’s chair in Rome was bought and sold by fornicators. Then there was the Great Western Schism, when at one point three rivals claimed to be pope, and each had substantial backings of cardinals, bishops, and secular rulers. The Protestant Revolt, too, though it was prepared for by a couple of centuries of rumblings, burst on to the scene as something unprecedented in the severity of its rejection of the Catholic tradition and its rapid multiplication of man-made doctrines. Church history is nothing if not full of surprises, of hair-raising crises, razor-thin escapes, devastating tragedies, and altogether unexpected resurrections.

I maintain that the crisis after the Second Vatican Council is precisely one of these fundamentally new situations: “The whole Church groaned, and was astonished to find itself modernist.” Indeed, this crisis is greater than any that came before, because, to use Pope Pius X’s exact phrase, “modernism is the collection of all heresies” (omnium haereseon conlectum), and this modernism, in a soft and elegant form, though sometimes also with the jackhammers of iconoclasm, established itself in all the seats of learning and power. The age we are passing through is characterized by an incredibly arrogant rejection of centuries of Church tradition, of historical rites, customs, monuments, laws, even settled dogmas and morals, called into question not by raving wild-eyed reformers at the margins of civilization but by cardinals, bishops, and even popes, let alone countless sympathizers at every level of the Church.¹ So great is the rupture that occurred in the sixties and seventies, for those who experienced it or who have studied it subsequently, that there are still days when one can find it hard to believe that the so-called “liturgical reform” actually happened or could have happened; for it should strike any calm observer as the most freakish betrayal of Catholicism’s essence in the entire history of the Church. It’s almost too shocking to comprehend. The scale of the disaster beggars the imagination.

This is also why neo-Catholic coping mechanisms like “there’s always confusion after a council” or “we’ve had rough times before” are so weak and unconvincing. We have not been here before. We are in terra incognita, in the fearful unknown. We can’t always interpret what we encounter with reference to ancient paradigms, because it doesn’t always align. Sometimes we have to figure things out for the first time. There is a first time for every major error in Christian history, and the error of our day—the rejection of tradition as good, right, normative, trustworthy, and providential—is an error that never existed before in this naked, austere, unmitigated form. As a consequence, our crisis raises questions about authority and obedience, for the simple reason that the revolution that took place and continues to dominate was initiated and consolidated by so-called “authorities” who claimed the unquestioning allegiance or obedience of all subordinates.

Just as every earlier major crisis in Church history led to the clarification of certain hitherto ambiguous or underdeveloped concepts, so too our crisis will eventually lead to—and indeed has already begun to produce—a far better, more nuanced, realistic, transfigured understanding of Church authority (especially the nature and limits of the papal office) and the corresponding virtue of obedience. There will come a time when the laity and parochial clergy will no longer be expected to swallow unsatisfying and self-injuring absurdities for breakfast while an abusive clericalism consumes the Church’s inheritance and replaces it with nothing of value. The question of the relationship of authority to obedience is central to our present situation and that is why I have chosen to address it tonight.