Restoration, not LARPing

When I retire from the news profession, I will cancel my X-formerly-known-as-Twitter account and pick five to ten Substack accounts to read instead. For now, though, I look at X to find rumours of the latest breaking stories. This means, of course, that I am exposed to a level of scurrility that would awe 18th century London pamphleteers. I also see a lot of nonsense written about Catholics who love the Traditional Latin Mass.

O that the Muses would give me the skill to find the golden note between gross generalization and the overly particular. To illustrate what I am going to say, I'm afraid I'm going to have to single out a personality, and it is the ex-proprietor of OnePeterFive, Steve Skojec, for accusing Catholics who love the Traditional Latin Mass of "LARPing." Here is one thing of many things Skojec has written about "traditional Catholicism" based on his experience in the United States, a point I'm going to address right away: 

It is, in some respects, a long-running Live Action Roleplay — a LARP — in which participants act out what they think Catholicism looked like in “the good old days” while perpetually running down any kind of Catholicism (or Catholic who practices it) that isn’t traditionalism. But it is essentially an affectation; an attempt to reconstruct and live within a historical context that no longer exists.

I resist this gross cartoon of Catholics who love the Traditional Latin Mass.

I do not know how many Catholics habitually attend the Old Mass, let alone how many take an active part in social events before and after it. However, I do know that these Catholics exist worldwide. In the past 15 years I myself have attended the TLM in the USA (Front Royal, VA; Washington, D.C.; South Bend, IN); in Canada (Toronto, ON); in England (York, Birmingham, Cambridge, London); in Scotland (Edinburgh, Glasgow, Motherwell, Dundee); in Spain (Barcelona); in France (Chartres Pilgrimage); in Poland (Kraków and Wrocław); in Belgium (a desperate drive to who-knows-where), and in Italy (Rome, Florence). And my own travels are only a very small part of a snapshot that should encompass the whole world, with a particular focus on France.  

But based on my experiences (which I believe are geographically broader than those of Mr Skojec), above all 15 years of assisting at the archdiocese-approved Edinburgh TLM, I can safely say that traditional Catholicism in Canada and in Europe, at very least, is a natural development from the traditional Catholicism of the pre-conciliar era. It was not scribbled on the back of a napkin, as it were. Stubborn individual or families or communities simply refused to give up the Old Mass and the Old Morality. Then, at first very gradually and then (thanks to Summorum Pontificum) more rapidly, converts to Catholicism and Catholic "converts to Tradition" grafted themselves onto their local TLM communities. 

Although my husband and I have formed friendships in the TLM communities in Rome and Toronto, I would be cautious about making too many claims for Catholics who love the Traditional Latin Mass (and the Traditional Catholic Morality) outside Edinburgh. It is possible that there are Catholic men in Florida, to pick an American state at random, who wear monocles and tweed suits in roasting-hot July, proclaim aloud that women should dress in the fashions of first century Judea, and display themselves in coffee houses reading The Napoleon of Notting Hall. I have not met such men myself, however. 

Naturally I have met a good number of Catholic men who wear tweed suits and woollen pullovers from September until May because I live in the United Kingdom and that is what men here wear when they want to look smart and feel warm. It never ceases to annoy me when people who think they dislike Catholics who go to the Traditional Latin Mass sneer at tweed. Anyone who lives somewhere cold and damp should look into tweed. It certainly looks nicer, and degrades faster in the landfills, than Gore-Tex or polyester, or whatever tweed's detractors think men should wear instead. 

But to return to Skojec's dismissal of traditional Catholicism, I challenge the idea that the historical context to which Catholics who love the Traditional Latin Mass aspire does not exist. Although, for example, marriage is greatly out of fashion among the traditional British working-class, devout Catholics of the traditional British working-class still do marry. By 2021, just over half of the children born in England and Wales were born out of wedlock. However, there are still devout Catholics (and many others)  in England and Wales who wait until they are married before conceiving or begetting children. The Sexual Revolution conquered the United Kingdom in the 1960s. However, a 1996 study reported that out of 19,000 Britons, 16% of women and 6% of men were virgins when they married. Would Skojec suggest it is wrong or ahistorical for Catholics who love the Traditional Latin Mass (not to mention the Traditional Catholic Faith) to emulate the chaste 16% and 6%? 

If you ask me, Catholics who love the Traditional Latin Mass and the Traditional Catholic Faith are just doing as their ancestors--or their spiritual ancestors--always did. It's not at all ahistorical. It's simply normal, and it is a time-tested, healthy, Godly way of life. Our non-Catholic neighbours would call it "a choice." And it is worth noting we now live in an era where fashion is all but dead and we can pick and choose from any era. I can walk to the gym in a tracksuit or in head-to-toe tweed and nobody will look surprised. I could take a ballroom dancing lesson any Sunday evening, and a swing-dancing lesson any Thursday. I can buy mass-produced beer or a local craft ale. That is our historical context. 

Of course, if I walked to the gym in a feathery hat, the more outgoing of my neighbours might have something to say. As interested as I may be in the social world for which Mrs Humphry supplied the road maps, it would be wrong to irritate my neighbours by imprudently adopting the ephemera, which are dated (or worse, have negative implications), instead of the sterling values, which are not. 

The sterling values include good manners, which is to say, behaviour that recognizes that other people are real. More on that anon. I must now take my tracksuited person to the gym. Incidentally, there is no more unbecoming and modest contemporary garment for the gym than baggy jogger bottoms. As a woman who first braved the weight room in the 20th century, I highly recommend the tracksuit for mixed company at the gym.   

P.S. That is St. Therese of Lisieux LARPing as St. Joan of Arc. She then put her traditional habit back on and lived an utterly authentic (if short) traditional life as a traditional Carmelite nun.