My first blog post ever published was in 2012. I was fresh out of grad school and teaching political science as a 26-year-old adjunct instructor at a community college in my hometown in West Michigan. Believe it or not, my profile on RateMyProfessor is still active.
I graduated from Loyola University Chicago in the Spring of 2011 after working as an intern for the Archdiocese of Chicago under Francis Cardinal George. At the time, I considered myself a typical conservative Catholic who admired Benedict XVI and George Weigel.
In June of that year, I wrote an article on the “rise of anti-Catholicism” in response to President Obama’s HHS contraception mandate. I sent it, unsolicited, to CatholicVote.org (CV) thinking it would be rejected. It wasn’t. They enjoyed it so much that I was invited to write for them on a part-time basis. Over the next 20 months, I blogged about cultural issues like homosexual “marriage,” abortion laws, and media bias.
Thomas Peters was CatholicVote’s most well known contributor at the time. He went by the moniker “The American Papist,” and was arguably the most popular Catholic blogger in the US. Steve Skojec wrote for CV as well. Thanks to his talents, he quickly earned a massive following and founded OnePeterFive not long after. Brandon Vogt and Elizabeth Scalia — both of whom have since joined Bishop Barron’s Word on Fire organization — as well as Fr. Dwight Longenecker took up space as well.
Before Francis and after Francis
During the Francis era, traditional voices started to emerge. Taylor Marshall launched his YouTube channel in 2013. LifeSite was also becoming a household name. Michael Matt of The Remnant and Dr. Peter Kwasniewski grew in status as well. Meanwhile, Louie Verrechio, John Vennari, and Fr. Gruner won favor with SSPX and SSPX-adjacent audiences
From 2013 until 2018, I wasn’t consuming Catholic content as much as I am now. I was in my late 20s and was considering attending Catholic University of America for PhD. work in political theory. I was also under the impression that I might have a vocation to the priesthood. I started attending an SSPX chapel in the early 2010s and went on multiple retreats with them to see if that was the case. I’ll refrain from sharing all the details of that period of my life in this article but suffice it to say, I was nothing more than a casual follower of the influencer world, though I knew I could do a better job than some of them.
Under Francis, it became normative for conservative and trad-leaning theologians and influencers to publish podcasts, write books, and issue public statements denouncing Francis for the many erroneous and blasphemous things he was saying. After I was hired at LifeSite in 2017, I wrote many of the headlines for those stories.
The collective message being send by the “industry” essentially mirrored that of Archbishop Lefebvre: Rome was preaching heresy, the Vatican was destroying Tradition, the Church is infiltrated.
Online and in-person events routinely platformed members from the various “clans,” though SSPX-affiliated priests and laity were typically held at arms length. Regardless, one still heard Lefebvre’s name mentioned. Many said he would likely be a saint someday while arguing that it would better if the SSPX was “regularized” so they could “help fight for Tradition from within the Church.”
Since its inception in the late 2000s, the online Traditional world has been dominated by persons who attend Indult, Ecclesia Dei, and conservative Novus Ordo parishes and who defend the positions taken by those respective groups as a matter of principle. This is now being directly challenged for the first time by Catholics who do not fall into these categories.
Post-COVID
Many people “woke up” to reality during COVID after their churches were closed and millions of Americans were forced to choose between their job or an experimental gene serum.
The late 2010s and early 2020s saw the emergence of new voices in the online world. The Avoiding Babylon podcast, Kennedy Hall, Timothy Flanders, as well as Gen Z and Millennial Catholics all launched podcasts. Archbishop Viganò and Freemasonry were common topics of discussion.
Hall grew in popularity in large part because he filled the void left by John Vennari, who passed away in 2017. Vennari was a known SSPX attendee. Hall became the “reasonable” SSPX’er who has served as an in-house “Lefebvrist” (a term he himself has used) for the larger Trad movement. He has often appeared on podcasts at Crisis and OnePeterFive along with Eric Sammons and the aforementioned Timothy Flanders.
Brian McCall, whose has a son who is an SSPX priest, took over the reigns for Vennari at Catholic Family News (CFN) in 2018 after Matt Gaspers, who attends an Indult, previously served as its editor. Gaspers eventually left in 2024 and CFN hired SSPX’er Murray Rundus to act as its managing editor. In full disclosure, I wrote for CFN during and after Gaspers’ tenure. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience.
Lines between SSPX influencers and non-SSPX commentators further became blurred with the launch of Pelican Plus in October 2025. Not only was Hall a founding member, but Flanders (Indult) and Kwasniewski (FSSP) were as well. McCall and Rundus jumped on board soon after, with McCall now serving as CEO. A canceled Novus Ordo priest named John Lovell serves as a sort of chaplain for the group.
A shift to the center?
To the untrained ear, it can be difficult to detect how SSPX’ers who have joined this coalition of FSSP, Indult, and Ecclesia Dei trads present a tamed down version of Archbishop Lefebvre. After all, such a claim is absurd on its face. Lefebvre frequently rebuked the Vatican and hardly ever had nice things to say about them. How can one ever dilute such a staunch prelate?
That question will be addressed below. For now, all that needs mentioning is that a sort of lowest common denominator avatar of Archbishop Lefebvre has been created by the mainstream Trad movement that treats him as a sort of mascot for the Latin Mass. This manifests itself when parties express a shared regret over the Society’s lack of “canonical” standing while lamenting how it was unjust for the archbishop to be “excommunicated.”
S.D. Wright of the WM Review has written about this phenomenon in the past, noting that Kennedy Hall specifically has presented a “sanitized” version of the Archbishop to his audience. Wright defines it as “a revisionist approach to Archbishop Lefebvre” that “paints him and his Society as a kind of ‘edgy version of the FSSP.’” You can read more about what Sean has to say on that subject here.
The result of this blending together of “friendly” and “sympathetic” non-SSPX’ers with those who attend the SSPX has been a shared mutual admiration for Bishop Athanasius Schneider.
Schneider has served as a diplomat between the Conciliar Church and the SSPX for years. He has visited their seminaries, praised their work, and has described Archbishop Lefebvre as a defender of the faith. In recent months, he has urged Leo to give his blessing for the upcoming consecrations. He has also said the SSPX wants to preserve Tradition, form priests for the Church, and that they have a great devotion to the papacy.
The Society has continually promoted Schneider’s remarks leading up to the consecrations. They have published news articles on them and have been sharing them on social media. The same courtesy has not been extended to the equally supportive comments of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. Perhaps more than anything else, this fact alone is a clear sign of the Society’s “shift to the center” in order to be more respected by, if not a part of, the larger traditional coalition.
A new order rises
Since the 2025 conclave, the mainstream Traditional movement has been directly challenged by an emerging group of Catholic voices on Substack, YouTube, and Twitter/X. Integrity Magazine was founded to be a vehicle to help amplify their voices.
The Dispatch
While it is undoubtedly true that Catholics who have been critical of the Trad “establishment” have existed for years, the more concentrated resistance effort that has grown over the past year has successfully forced long-ignored issues to be addressed, overdue conversations to be had, and taboo subjects to be discussed out in the open. In brief, the Overton Window has been expanded and the “old guard” does not seem to be happy about having their arguments and actions being called into question.
One tactic that has been employed with little to no effect by some persons is that their critics are “Sede Inc.” — an unoriginal play on the term “Trad Inc.” Another strategy has been to mock them as “retarded.” Others have ignored them outright.
While disagreements surely exist among those who comprise this Counter-Revolutionary movement, especially on subjects such as the vacancy of the Chair of St. Peter, the center of gravity of its members is far closer to the most mature thought of Archbishop Lefebvre, and not on the “sanitized” version that is often presented.
Archbishop Lefebvre
When one looks at the many statements the Archbishop made after Vatican II, it becomes fairly obvious that His Excellency said and did things that seem to contradict one another.
For instance, in the 1970s, Lefebvre spoke of the Conciliar Church being a “schismatic Church.” A decade later, he was meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger in an attempt to come to a practical arrangement so his Society could continue with Vatican approval.
What is often forgotten while discussing these subjects is that Lefebvre himself admitted after the consecrations that he acted imprudently in discussions during the 1980s. “I think I can reply that I have gone further than I ought to have gone,” he said of his dealings with Rome.
His Excellency’s most mature thought on the matter was clearly not to continue to seek the Vatican’s blessing but to shake off the dust from his feet and to only speak of doctrine should they come calling again.
“We should have no hesitation or fear, hesitation such as, ‘Why should we be going on our own? After all, why not join Rome, why not join the pope?’ Yes, if Rome and the pope were in line with Tradition, if they were carrying on the work of all the popes of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, of course,” he said at the time.
The Society’s leaders understood the principles inherent in these arguments. When long-time Lefebvre ally Dom Gérard Calvet, a French Benedictine monk, struck an agreement with the Vatican in 1988, then-SSPX Superior Fr. Franz Schmidburger rebuked him. “It seems rather contrary to the plan of Divine Providence that the Catholic Tradition of the Church be re-integrated into the pluralism of the Conciliar Church, as long as the latter dishonors the Catholic Church and scandalizes its unity and visibility,” he said.
In 2003, when the traditional priests of the Diocese of Campos came to an accord with the Vatican, Bishop Fellay denounced their about face, describing it as Tradition being put in a cage at the “ecumenical zoo.”
How many Traditionalists and SSPX faithful even know these quotations exist? Do they understand the principles involved? One senses that not many of them are aware of them, or of SSPX history generally. As Kennedy Hall oddly claimed in a recent podcast: “canonical regularization is not capitulation to liberalism or modernism.”
False friends who ‘betray’ tradition
As mentioned above, Sean Wright has detailed the sanitization campaign that has occurred to Archbishop Lefebvre. We focus on His Excellency not to imply that he alone was defending Tradition. But given his prominence, it is important to correct the record.
In his essay for the WM Review, Sean shared a quotation from the Archbishop warning SSPX faithful about collaborating with those who are “betraying” them.
“Instead of looking to their friends, to the Church’s defenders, to those fighting on the battlefield, they look to our enemies on the other side,” he said. “‘After all, we must be charitable, we must be kind, we must not be divisive, after all, they are celebrating the Tridentine Mass, they are not as bad as everyone says’ — but they are betraying us — betraying us! They are shaking hands with the Church’s destroyers. They are shaking hands with people holding modernist and liberal ideas condemned by the Church. So they are doing the devil’s work.”
Lefebvre also opposed what has since become known as Michael Matt’s “unite the clans” project.
“This is what causes us a problem with certain layfolk, who are very nice, very good people, all for the Society, who accepted the Consecrations, but who have a kind of deep-down regret that they are no longer with the people they used to be with, people who did not accept the Consecrations and who are now against us. ‘It’s a pity we are divided,’ they say, ‘why not meet up with them? Let’s go and have a drink together, reach out a hand to them’— that’s a betrayal! Those saying this give the impression that at the drop of a hat they would cross over and join those who left us,” he said.
On New Year’s Day in 2015, Bishop Tissier echoed those words when he said in a sermon that “bad friends” were seeking the “normalization” of the SSPX with the “Conciliar Church.”
It is therefore not possible for those who invoke the name of Archbishop Lefebvre to suggest that he would be in favor of the coalition that currently comprises the Traditional movement, which ardently seeks the insertion of the Society into what Fr. Schmidburger called the “pluralism of the Conciliar Church.”
The future of Tradition
What is taking place right now in the Traditional world is that the loudest voices who have enjoyed a privileged place in the movement are not only being disproven but supplanted by a growing group of Catholics who better understand the writings and arguments of Archbishop Lefebvre — as well as other Traditional clergy who defended the faith in the second half of the 20th century — and who grasp the true nature of the crisis in the Church and take the Catholic response to it.
In short, what is occurring right now is that the lines that were blurred over the past fourteen years are being un-blurred by a formerly silent majority that has finally decided to refuse to let persons who do not truly represent Tradition and who do not hold to the authentic Catholic position speak for them.
There are foundational theological arguments and key doctrinal principles that must be defended now and in the years ahead. That is why we fight — and it is because we are grounded in the truth that we will be victorious for Christ our King.
