Imagine if throughout your life you’d heard about a city built on a rock where, despite all the changes in the world, people have held the same beliefs for 2000 years. After agreeing with these beliefs, you go there and see for yourself. At first, it’s as you expected. But once you become more at home, you see that there are several factions who disagree over the interpretation of the long-held beliefs. Furthermore, the place is surrounded from the outside by people who want to destroy it. Some of these outsiders have entered the place posing as citizens but want to bring it to ruin. This place is the Catholic Church today.
Why would someone become Catholic? Why would someone believe in God? I know a lot of the arguments, or at least the ones proposed by Nietszche, Bertrand Russell and Marx. Though I never described myself as an atheist, entering a religion, becoming a Catholic, moreover a Traditionalist Catholic (which I didn’t even know existed) never occurred to me. My usual reaction upon going into a church was to look for the exit as soon as possible. What changed?
One day I received a phone call. Someone very close to me died suddenly. Nothing had prepared me to deal with it. No philosophy, work of art, piece of music, novel, poem, no encouraging words from friends, nothing could help me overcome the pain. For days and days, I didn’t know what to do. Finally, I left my apartment and began to walk down the street. At a certain moment I found myself in front of a church, and I went inside. Feeling like a total fake, I began to pray in front of a statue of Jesus, saying “I cannot stand this pain, help me.” When I left the church, I felt a little better. I kept going back to churches to pray and little by little the feeling of being fake started to go away.
Christ said, “I stand at the door, if anyone knocks, I will open it.” I can only surmise that by going into that church, without knowing it, I had knocked.
I never received so much advice as when I made this decision. People who were never particularly concerned about me suddenly felt the need to share. “Have you looked into Buddhism, Hinduism, Greek Orthodoxy, Protestantism, the Unitarians have some neat ideas…” I was told. “Shop around, don’t be hasty.” Some told me not to do it; that they “knew better than I did. This exact line was used by a person who was raised a Catholic, converted to Judaism because of a relationship, stopped practicing Judaism after they broke up, and then, started professing, but not practicing, a Religious Universalism based on a quote from Spinoza. This could be summed up as “the world’s a big place, God is everywhere, churches aren’t necessary, so let’s all be nice.” Someone else said he’d always assumed that he and I “thought alike,” and since he’d rejected Catholicism years before, how could I believe it was true? I was struck by the vehemence of their outpourings.
These people can breathe a sigh of relief, for I, along with the priests, the bishops and anyone else affiliated with the Fraternal Society of Saint Pius X (FSSPX), was excommunicated on July 2nd, 2026. The reason? The day before, without a mandate from the Pope, the Society consecrated four Bishops. This was labelled schismatic and led to collective excommunication.
I attend a church run by this Order, founded in 1970. It calls itself Traditionalist to differentiate itself from Conciliatory churches which practice the modernist reforms put in place in the 1960s, as part of the Vatican II Council. These reforms, particularly in the Mass, are meant to align the church with modern sensibilities, and include things which Traditionalists feel can’t be qualified as Catholic but rather as a new religion, a form of Protestantism. Because of this, they’ve had a troubled relationship with the Vatican for years, the recent consecrations ended it.
It was interesting to see how the FSSPX was treated in the media. I’ve never been much of a “belonger,” so, to see myself described as a member of a mind-control cult (the French Government is considering investigating it as such), being right-wing, intolerant, possibly heretical, as a small-minded Fundamentalist came as a surprise. My reaction is that it assures me that I’m on the right track.