i. a summary of the impossible circumstance in the Roman Catholic Church at the time of the 2025 conclave

Part I: A Confederacy of Dunces: A tale of three tribes. only two are honest, only two are happy, only two are now entirely disenfranchised.

Part I: A Confederacy of Dunces

There are three primary hermeneutical divisions within Catholicism and one cannot grasp the current state of the church without grasping the reality of these three divisions and how they play off each other. They can be clarified succinctly by introducing two variables: (1) whether the Second Vatican Council was a break with tradition, and (2) whether the Second Vatican Council was good.

1. Liberals think the Second Vatican Council was a break with tradition and that it was good.

2. Conservatives think the Second Vatican Council was not a break with tradition and that it was good.

3. Trads think the Second Vatican Council was a break with tradition and that it was bad.

From this basis, one can begin to comprehend the three unhappy alliances that define church dynamics between these tribes. When people speak of a civil-war in the church they aren´t wrong, because Trads don´t really have a place in the church. Yet, I include them because they do play a significant structural role and one that is likely only going to increase in the future.

3 Alliances: Intellectual, Spiritual, and Political

Intellectually, due to a minimal adroitness in pattern recognition, Trads and Libs are uncomfortable bedfellows, really more like a couple in late stage lesbian bed death. They don´t touch each other, but don´t mind abusing the other to prove their points against someone they truly despise: conservatives. Trads like that libs, more than anyone, prove the point about the rotten fruits of the council. And Libs like to use Trads—who are also living proof of a rupture because they wont adapt— as a cudgel against the conservative cause and claim to integrity. Libs think that Trads prove real fidelity to tradition would look like the SSPX, a reductio ad absurdum of sorts that helps them silence conservatives to push for their next “reform.” Intellectually, the conservatives present the real threat to Trads and Libs. If conservatives are right, then the Libs have abused the true meaning of Vatican II, and the Trads have needlessly opposed the working of the Holy Spirit in Sacred Tradition and, in most cases, gone to the grave extent of being disobedient in opposition to the spirit.

And the catch here is that conservativism as a movement sold itself originally as the cutting edge of academic theology, i.e. nouvelle theologie as articulated in the theological journal communio. Full of pride, they proclaimed themselves more refined than their neo-scholastic forebearers, on the back of the claim that they were now able to incorporate ´history´ and ´experience´ into principled theological reflection. Yet, this speculative adulteration of thought with ‘experience’ and ‘history’ proved over time to be nothing other than a smoltering oven for iron principle. And over a half century after the triumph of this theological style, the intellectual credibility of the conservative movement itself is totally shot.¹ Even at the popular level, it´s been equally bad, as the supposedly erudite ‘hermeneutic of continuity‘ failed to distinguish itself from an epithet called ‘popesplaining‘ in the world of conservative influencers and apologists.

Spiritually, in contrast, Trads and Conservatives are distant and deeply dysfunctional blood relatives. Spiritual relatives because both in theory wish to attach themselves to the unchanging faith, with Conservatives latching onto a traditional notion of obedience at the expense of traditional orthodoxy, and trads the inverse. One cannot choose both given the current situation in the church. Choosing either horn of this obedience or orthodoxy dilemma comes with a severe cost. Orthodoxy without obedience makes the trads dour and prideful, and obedience without orthodoxy makes the conservatives superficially optimistic and dull. So like the previous pair, trads and conservatives usually keep their distance—they tend to find the other misinformed but of good intent—but there is some friendly concord between them even beyond joining to “fight the libs.” There are also some para-church organizations that accommodate both, whether pro-life, homeschool groups, scouts, etc. It´s the liberals that present the real spiritual threat to both of these groups. Libs set themselves—against the trads—in favor of a spiritual “tradition” that can do about-faces and— against the conservatives— in favor of a council they say meant to break with “tradition.”

The kicker here is that the liberals sold themselves as putting spiritual vitality and freedom before all else. And today they enjoy trying to suppress the organic growth of traditional and to a lesser extent conservative Catholicism, while its an absence of spiritual vitality itself, not intellectual rigor, not political clout that plagues the liberals.

Finally, politically, Liberals and Conservatives ignore their mutual disdain for each other to fend off a common arch-enemy: Traditional Catholics. In fact conservatives and liberals, if they agree about anything, it is that traditional Catholics should be disenfranchised from the church for rejecting Vatican II. Conservatives display their hypocrisy here in tolerating liberal heretics and clutching pearls judiciously condemning trad schismatics and sedevacantists. The reason trads aren´t allowed in any of the halls of power—not in the episcopacy, only hidden in the priesthood, not on theological faculties—is that they want to shut down the entire post-conciliar game, and would do so if they had the chance. Any Trad would condemn Vatican II and the Novus Ordo.

And the great contradiction of the Trad ideology is that none of these three groups believes itself to so desperately need the institution to thrive as Trads, yet they suffer a near total absence of institutional support. And this contradiction or chasm in the foundation of post conciliar traditional Catholicism hampers the movement a great deal overall with bad vibes and frustration, if Trads do demonstrate palpable intellectual integrity and spiritual vitality.

In sum, the Roman Catholic Church today is marked by three warring tribes that seem to enjoy shooting themselves in the foot just as much as attacking each other. Each of these tribes has catastrophically failed to live up to its raison d´etre: Liberals are spiritually dead, Conservatives are intellectually dumb, and Trads are trained political losers (i.e. complainers!). The circumstance is beyond absurd. Yet these dynamics were stretched to the extreme the past 12 years, where the Libs finally got the green light to pursue their spiritual death drive, and this ruined the conservatives ideologically speaking, which only turns conservatives with increasing severity to exclude trads politically, because Trads are the only ones positioned to point out the extent of the intellectual defeat. And no one has sought to make sense of this dynamic at a broad general level. And from a vantage point where no one is spared vicious critique. And that´s exactly what I´m offering here: A general analysis that shows why there´s no real winners at the end of Pope Francis´s Pontificate and then a look into the future based on the state of the playing field.

NEXT—»Part 2: The Intellectual Drift from 2013-2025 under Pope Francis

Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre a man who did all he could to stop the establishment of the confederacy. And yet, his indecision or bi-polarity regarding the Papacy still haunts the Trad Tribe to this day.

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Part 3: The Political Shift from 2013-2025

Part 4: Future Predictions for the Tribes and Leo XIV

1. case in point… our “intellectual” star bishop is unable to answer a simple question without falling into heresy (indifferentism). A question which any catholic schooled in the Baltimore Catechism could answer with ease in a sentence or two 60 years ago. how the mighty have fallen.