My Path to Tradition
Tell us a little about yourself. Where did you grow up, and what was your level of exposure to Catholicism as a child and as a young adult?
I grew up in the American South. I can recall almost zero contact with Catholicism. As a child, I did respond one Sunday to a Baptist altar call. However, the pastor later visited to dissuade me: “You’re going to have to stop fighting with your brother, you know… Do you really think you can do that?” Even then, I knew something odd was afoot. Wasn’t Jesus supposed to help me be good? Why, then, was I being talked out of baptism?
It may sound strange, but the place I encountered a genuine supernatural realism—where God exists and our choices matter for good or for evil—was in the classic horror films I saw on TV. When thirties and forties era films like Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man were sold in packages to local television, kids found themselves listening as Bela Lugosi intoned, “There are far worse things awaiting man than death.” This was a cultural phenomenon that extended from the sixties into the seventies. That’s when I encountered Peter Cushing’s “Professor Van Helsing” on the CBS Late Movie as he employed the crucifix and holy water against evil with genuine gravitas.
My imagination was struck, it seems to me, by a kind of Thomistic realism: “What if this supernatural landscape fits together into a cohesive worldview? How would coming into contact with supernatural Good and Evil change a person’s life?” Some films explore this better than others, of course. Son of Dracula (1943) is pretty remarkable in this regard—even though Lon Chaney Jr. makes for an odd Count.
What experience first piqued your interest in Tradition?
I experienced a profound conversion to Christ in college. This took place in an Evangelical Protestant context. Although my fellow Evangelicals were intensely sincere, I began to sense a pervasive distrust of culture—not merely a Southern Protestant disdain for all things liturgical, but a devaluing of stories, art, and music when compared to straightforward evangelism.
Looking back, I realize why. The focus was on direct spiritual contact—asking Jesus to become your personal Lord and Savior and experiencing an inner witness. Minus baptism. Minus the Eucharist. Why, if you had this direct contact, would you favor a sacrament theology in which contact (or grace) is mediated to you through the things God has made? Mediation becomes an unnecessary “middleman.” As a result, Evangelicals regard religion itself as “in the way” of direct contact and sport bumper stickers that announce, “It’s not a religion. It’s a relationship!”
By a kind of Gnostic instinct, this orientation reflexively distrusted even the mediation of stories, art, and music—any and all forms that mediate truth to us.
They were right to emphasize a personal relationship with Our Lord but mistaken to reject religion and mediation in general. Being human, after all, means being embodied. And being embodied means experiencing mediation as a given. Therefore, the Incarnation—in which the Divine Logos takes on human flesh, human nature—is not a half-hearted concession (when a more direct approach was possible), but the absolute height of God’s self-expression.
I couldn’t articulate this at the time. All I knew was that stories, art, and music could be sources of wonder and insight. They could bring philosophical questions to life. So, some friends and I began a “zine” called Wonder where we could figure out as Christians why particular movies and stories moved us so. Without realizing it, we tacitly assumed a positive stance toward mediation—stories expressing truths too profound for bare prose, God communicating through what He has made, the Logos taking on human nature. In about ten years, most of the staff had become Catholic.
So, I would say that so far as Tradition is concerned the above led me to favor lex orandi, lex credendi in principle long before I encountered that phrase.
Then, at the very cusp of my reception into the Church, there was a crisis. My wife became very ill following the birth of our first child. The doctor insisted, “You must use contraception” as another pregnancy might cause her to relapse and never recover. So, we found ourselves poring over Humanae Vitae. Of course, we approached our parish priest to share our rather desperate situation.
He smiled a bit and replied, “I think you know what love requires.”
This, we understood instantly, was a euphemism for, “Use contraception with my blessing.”
I replied, “But Father, the only reason I am joining the Church is I believe she has the truth. How can I dissent from the very start?”
He looked at me like I was insane.
We chose not to use contraception. So, in addition to prioritizing lex orandi, lex credendi, there was from the very start a remarkably “hands-on” experience of the crisis and the practical necessity of a Traditional response.
This rendered us, I believe, oddballs at our parish. But we had no idea a Traditional movement existed. We were simply clueless as to why a disparity existed between the Catholicism we experienced at our parish and the Catholicism we encountered in Chesterton, R. H. Benson, or Ronald Knox.
Two decades went by. We had three more children. Susan experienced one relapse but recovered. Then, we were deeply scandalized by Pope Francis’s encyclical, Amoris Laetitia. Thanks to our own deeply personal struggle, we detected in Amoris the same “I think you know what love requires” scenario. This led me to explore an FSSP parish and an Ordinariate parish. But things really solidified when the sacraments became “non-essential services.” I discovered Father Danel at St. Michael’s SSPX chapel in Roswell, Georgia was offering Mass and Confession (in their spacious backyard with attention to distancing, it turned out) during the pandemic and made the two-hour drive to investigate.
What issues did you wrestle with during your conversion to Tradition, and how have you found resolutions to those concerns?
I encountered a dilemma that was very real to me but that may strike others as odd. It is, I think, unique to Evangelical converts to the Catholic Faith.
When I first attempted to wrestle with the claims of the Catholic Church, I thought I could make a list of specific Evangelical Protestant objections and settle them one by one. This proved true regarding some matters. Evidence for the Eucharist in St. John’s Gospel is quite substantial and St. Justin Martyr’s “First Apology” reveals early Church beliefs to be quite Catholic.
Eventually, however, I realized: if I attempted to settle each and every objection to my own satisfaction, I would never convert.
I was dealing with Mysteries. Wrapping my head around each Catholic distinctive—from Mary to merits to purgatory—this was impossible. I would have to decide, instead, whether the Catholic Church had the authority to speak to me in Christ’s name. If the answer was “Yes,” everything else fell into place.
Decades later, when I approached Tradition, this very solution appeared to pose a problem.
It is important to remember: when an Evangelical Protestant converts to the Catholic Faith, he accomplishes by God’s grace an almost impossible task—shifting the very locus of truth in his life from “private interpretation” and “Sola Scriptura” to a living, teaching Church. He entrusts himself to the care of the pope and the bishops (in my case, Pope John Paul II and my onetime hero, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) in a paradigm shift that other Evangelical Protestants find simply unthinkable.
Then, despite this trust and following perhaps twenty years of formation in Novus Ordo culture, the scandal of Amoris (or Pachamama, or the Abu Dhabi agreement, or what have you) renders you for the first time capable of asking yourself, “What if the Ordinary Magisterium is (somehow) infected with error? What can that mean? What sort of scenario falls into place?”
On the one hand, awareness of Church teaching and the law of non-contradiction compels you to state, “Something is dreadfully wrong with Amoris.” On the other hand, because of the shift in the locus of truth that made your conversion possible in the first place, the scenario that begins to suggest itself is intolerable. Merely admitting the existence of the crisis seems to betray the principle of authority and trust that made it possible to become Catholic in the first place. Most Evangelical converts, as a result, simply won’t “go there.”
But there is a further problem. If you manage actually to contemplate the scenario (that is, to admit the existence of the crisis), and if you encounter Tradition, you sense a ring of truth while, simultaneously and due to your Novus Ordo formation, you cannot automatically comprehend the whole of Tradition’s response to religious liberty, ecumenism, or even the deficiencies in the New Mass. How, then, do you embrace Tradition?
Well, once again, you find yourself making a list of questions to tackle and, once again, you discover it is a bit too much for you. It isn’t so much that you are dealing with Mysteries this time. Instead, perhaps you read the entirety of Michael Davies’ The Second Vatican Council and Religious Liberty and find yourself admitting, “I still don’t get it…”
Unlike your initial conversion, you cannot entrust yourself to a different, better, alternative, living Magisterium. There is no alternative Magisterium. It is the Magisterium itself that is in crisis!
Perhaps not many people experience this problem. It has caused me a great deal of distress. All I can offer is that as an Evangelical I used to walk through the Zondervan bookstore, past devotional helps and Christian fiction, all the way to a tiny shelf labeled “Pastor’s Helps.” That was where the handful of “why we believe what we believe” books were kept.
At any rate, the answer that came to me was this: “No, you cannot solve this problem by entrusting yourself to a different Magisterium. There is only one Church. However, you can approach the SSPX as you would a lifeboat. When a ship is in crisis, and you find yourself treading water in the icy Atlantic, you don’t have time to debate the nature of the crisis or the various solutions. You swim for the lifeboat. And you climb in.”
This involves a similar element of trust. And, oddly enough, this is where the role of mediation returns. Although you may not possess a settled grasp of what Tradition has to say about what happened at Vatican II, religious liberty, ecumenism, and so on, the principles that Tradition brings to bear on these concerns are present in the Latin Mass. You encounter and imbibe those principles by way of the Mass, by way of lex orandi, lex credendi.
So, the lifeboat that appears is the Mass itself—by way of the SSPX and its service to Tradition. You climb into that lifeboat, for your own sake, and for your children’s sake, in order simply to survive. And, by surviving, you gain time for the longer-term task of understanding and, one hopes, helping others.
Why did you settle on the SSPX as opposed to some other TLM community?
I investigated an FSSP parish. It turned out they were celebrating a church picnic that day, so I met several people. One was a fellow who hoped to be certified as a catechist for the diocese. He was on his fourth attempt. As he described it, the diocese kept sending him to the same seminary for training and there the same teachers told him, “Look, if you keep insisting John wrote the Fourth Gospel, we just can’t give you a passing grade.” He was a loud, uncompromising fellow who took pleasure in throwing their unorthodoxy back in their face. Even though I didn’t know a thing about the SSPX or “Ecclesia Dei” communities, this seemed to illustrate a real problem.
What practices or devotions within Tradition have you found to be most fruitful for you?
I pray the rosary each day. However, I would have to say my primary focus is (and has to be) on the Mass. I still have a great deal to learn about the Roman Rite so I may “enter in” more fruitfully.
Now that you are a traditional Catholic, what are the greatest challenges that you face?
We came to Tradition rather late, so our children are already substantially formed by the Novus Ordo (our youngest is 14). During Mass, I worry about them. The Latin Mass and the Novus Ordo really are worlds apart and I see my children sitting there, struggling with this fact. It feels like I have asked them to become French and they are looking at me, asking, “What do I do with this baguette?”
It’s impossible to say to kids, “To understand why we drive four hours round trip to attend a Mass said in Latin, you should read this book about ‘the long march through the institutions.’ ” All I know to do is lead home catechesis with the Baltimore Catechism, get to Mass as often as possible, pray novenas, and so on. Also, mortification, which I am working on.
Being so far away from the parish, we feel quite isolated. I would ask for the prayers of the readers of The Angelus as we seek the Lord’s will regarding living and working nearer an SSPX chapel. One of our children has Crohn’s disease, needs infusion treatments, and shouldn’t be subjected to stress if possible, so we can’t easily relocate.
Do you have any advice for the reader who may be considering, but not yet committed to, Tradition?
I find that if you can accept a genuine crisis exists, you can approach the situation as you would any crisis. In an emergency, the normal rules do not apply.
Typically, while driving, one does not cross that solid center line down the middle of the road. However, if a deer steps onto the highway, you swerve into the other lane (while avoiding oncoming traffic). You cross that solid center line without a second thought. Why? The “rules of the road” exist to preserve life. By acting in this manner, which on the face of it involves breaking rules, you preserve life. Law exists not for its own sake—as an artificial imposition of arbitrary rules—but for the sake of the common good.
Once this principle is applied to the salvation of souls, the SSPX’s stance becomes rather clear. But you have to be honest about the depth and reality of the crisis.
That said, I have found that SSPX priests (and the people of the chapels I have visited) do not continually speak about the crisis. The priests, while serious and remarkably focused, seem rather jolly. They celebrate Tradition (which is simply the Faith) rather than dwell on all the problems in the Church.
TITLE IMAGE: Founding Mass of the Order of the Trinity, Juan Carreño de Miranda (1614-1683) [jayadra.com/adventures/europe-2014/paris].
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