July 2024 Print

By Sean McClinch

A few months ago my friend Charlie, who is choirmaster at our church, was telling me about a Trad conference he was invited to in the Midwest, and chuckled at how one of the organizers sent him a preparatory email inquiring about his preferences in whiskey and pipe tobacco. I was impressed by the meticulous attention to detail, and with it the implicit understanding that Trad culture comes with…stuff. This stuff (especially for reverts or converted Catholics) might consist of prayers and/or gestures we’ve never learned (like the Angelus prayer, the practice and knowledge of which in my life, only dates back to the Obama Administration) fast and abstinence days we’ve never fathomed existed (Ember Days, likewise, were a total curveball) and, yes, arguable vices like pipe tobacco we thought had gone extinct (whenever Sherlock Holmes died…?). But in my worst moments since reverting, I’ve also found some of this stuff to consist of new anxieties to harbor, especially after spending a good deal of time on Trad social media and YouTube channels. My own family had fallen away pretty abruptly when I was young. A cursory perusing of my Google history around the time of my revert days many years later, in my early thirties, would probably reveal a quick progression from questions like “How to genuflect?” to ones like “Is it a mortal sin to refrain from offering my wife fraternal correction for wearing a pair of jeans?” and “Will Harry Potter books make my children possessed?” and “Do I need to make restitution for not reporting income earned shoveling my neighbor’s driveway in 1991?” Now, a vigorous, newfound awareness of the demands of the gospel is a good thing. As Our Lord Himself said, “And unto whomsoever much is given, of him much shall be required” (Lk. 12:48). This new awareness, however, can lead the wrong person down a spiral, and full-blown scrupulosity may result. As Mark Lowery wrote in his piece Scrupulosity: The Occupational Hazard of the Moral Life, “If you take morality seriously, you are prone to this error.”¹ And, pretty much all new Trads I know would fit the bill here because we do take morality seriously. In this piece I’d like to help fellow new devotees to Catholic tradition—whether we’re full-blown scrupulous, tender of conscience, or just trying our best to live virtuously in a fallen world—work out our salvation with the appropriate amount of fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12), but hopefully without too much Xanax.

In Understanding Scrupulosity, Rev. Thomas M. Santa, CSsR, includes “stomach ailments” amongst the maladies suffered by St. Alphonsus Liguori as a result of what Santa believes was that Doctor of the Church’s own scrupulosity.² If true, it serves him right, because sometimes St. Alphonsus Liguori gives me stomach ailments. Ever read what he wrote about impure thoughts, new Trads? In his Precepts of the Decalogue, Chapter VI, St. Alphonsus writes “It is…necessary to confess all immodest thoughts”³ because “Indeed, whatever is a sin to do, it is also in the sight of God a sin to desire.”⁴ Amongst the stories St. Alphonsus tells is one of a man on his deathbed:

At the hour of his death he confessed his sins with great compunction, so that everyone regarded him as a saint; but after death he appeared and said that he was damned; he stated that he made a good confession, and that God had pardoned all his sins; but before death the devil represented to him that, should he recover, it would be ingratitude to forsake the woman who loved him so much. He banished the first temptation: a second came; he then delayed for a little, but in the end he rejected it: he was assailed by a third temptation, and consented to it. Thus, he said, he had died in sin, and was damned.⁵

(My brain can never resist conjuring up Sad Trombone whenever I come across this story).

When I returned to the Faith after many years away, the concept of confessing thoughts (or confessing anything, for that matter) did not appear immediately on my radar screen. Indeed, in the weeks leading up to my First Communion in 1980s Novus Ordo Land, I expressed my pre-first-Reconciliation jitters to my Boomer Catholic parents, who in turn decided that a young man of my age and spotless moral character should not have to confess his sins. They explained this to our 1980s Novus Ordo Land pastor, who folded like the cheap 1980s Novus Ordo Land vestments he undoubtedly wore, and I was allowed to receive Our Lord with whatever sins were on my seven-year-old conscience. As I processed up the aisle to receive the Sacrament that day, I’m not quite sure I singed those felt banners my class had made and that were now adorning the pews. But, it was not the ideal moral formation for a young man soon to be immersed in MTV and raunchy VHS cover art. (A trip to any video store in the eighties always felt a bit like pre-Giuliani Times Square).

New Trads (especially those of us with a formation that was anything like my own) coming across a passage such as the one above from St. Alphonsus might understandably need a Pepcid afterwards. Our feverish brains might start estimating the number of damnable images we’ve entertained up to this point and now need to confess, and we also might be tempted to despair of our hope for salvation altogether. (A fellow new Trad my wife and I are friends with was telling us recently that she finally made the decision to start attending the TLM when the lector at her Novus Ordo parish showed so much cleavage that she feared her son would be scandalized when he served at the altar. How can any of us even risk going out in public?)

What we need to consider, however, is that St. Alphonsus also has a warm and fuzzy side. As Rev. Sean O’Brien wrote in his introductory essay to St. Alphonsus’ Guide For Confessors, for that saint, “caring for the integrity of the Sacrament overlaps with caring for the person before him.⁶ Father O’Brien explains further “that St. Alphonsus was a master of balance: truth and love, loving and challenging, laxity and rigor.”⁷

And one of the things that St. Alphonsus did that may set our neurotic new Trad minds at ease was to have rules of thumb for dealing with those with scrupulous consciences. As St. Alphonsus wrote in a section dealing with bad thoughts, “the Confessor should use the rule: when a person has a tender conscience, he should be presumed not to have committed the sin unless he is extremely certain that he has.”⁸

Earlier, St. Alphonsus kindly takes our fretful minds into consideration when he writes that the “confessor should forbid [the scrupulous] to read books which increase their anxiety and to mix with other scrupulous persons. If one of them is troubled with terrible guilt feelings, he may even forbid him to attend sermons on terrifying subjects.”⁹

A while back I came across a social media rumor of a priest who delivered a sermon on the precise number of seconds it takes an impure thought to become a mortal sin. Maybe stay away from that guy, Trads. Likewise, if we’re going to read John Bosco, we should probably give his dreams a wide berth. The one about the vision of his young students with nooses around their necks held by hideous cats who shoot flames and blood droplets from their eyes and drag their victims to hell with said nooses by enticing them into bad confessions?¹⁰ Some of the folks I know from coffee hour won’t watch the Superbowl with their kids because they might see a gay kiss during the commercial break—a perfectly reasonable consideration. It seems like they take the moral life pretty seriously, and I imagine that their confessions are quite thorough. I tend to doubt that they are the intended audience for Don Bosco’s account of his Hideous Cats With Nooses dream. If Trads want to read of that saint, maybe stick with the emphasis he placed on engaging in sports and recreation with the children in his charge,¹¹ or how before he became a priest he used magic tricks he’d learned to gain the attention of local kids, and used the opportunity to tell them a homily he’d heard at church.¹² Maybe leave the more “metal” parts of Don Bosco and other saints to those Catholics with lax consciences¹³ that St. Alphonsus also addressed.

And, in regards to that quote above from St. Alphonsus’ on having the scrupulous avoid terrifying sermons:¹⁴ some of the priests we might come across on, for example, Trad YouTube channels, go (as Dave Chappelle might say) “hard in the paint.” Maybe we needed to hear some of that stuff when we first reverted or converted (I know that I probably did) but not so much anymore.

In his Guide for Confessors, St. Alphonsus was writing to priests. I would very humbly submit this anecdote to the Trads amongst them: a married couple I’m friends with recalled a priest who was formerly at their parish whose sermons were all about subjects like the importance of dressing modestly—basically preaching to the choir at a TLM church. Their main effect was to make many of the female parishioners nod their heads in self-satisfaction and cast disparaging looks at any of the women who were wearing pants. That priest left, and a new one came. My friends love this priest because he consciously addresses common issues for Trads like scrupulosity or spiritual pride. He gave a sermon one Lent about how “your spiritual mortifications are worthless if they aren’t done with love.” Just some food for thought.

Many new Trads will reach a point on our spiritual journeys when we are confronted with the decision over whether to ask our daughters to incinerate their dolls or not. Trads who have not asked ourselves this question, perhaps, have never read of St. Jean Vianney. One of the missions undertaken by this saint in the village of Ars was the establishment of a girls’ school which eventually came to include an orphanage.¹⁵ One of the orphaned girls was quite attached to her doll, taking it everywhere she went.¹⁶ Vianney’s biographer proceeds, “One day M. Vianney asked her to give it up, nay, to throw it into the fire…At first the child seemed greatly disconcerted, when all of a sudden her decision was made, and she consigned the beloved idol to the flames.”¹⁷

In his time as pastor of the parish of Ars, St. Jean Vianney subjected himself to mortifications much more severe than anything he asked of the people of that village. He gave his own mattress away and used a log as a pillow.¹⁸ He subjected himself to violent and painful penances. Before retiring for the night, “[a]rmed with a discipline, the effectiveness of which had been increased by sharp iron points, he mercilessly struck his ‘corpse,’ ‘this old Adam,’ as he used to call his poor body.”¹⁹ His biographer, Abbé Francis Trochu, reports that the wall of Jean Vianney’s room bore the stains of blood droplets, and the bloody impressions of a shoulder, palm, and fingerprints.²⁰

However, just after the discussion of these severe practices, which also include Vianney’s rigorous fasting and irregular meal taking²¹ Trochu reports that Vianney later “called these excesses his ‘youthful follies,’…He went so far as to agree, rather vaguely, that then he overstepped the limits of prudence: ‘When one is young,’ he said to a priest, ‘one is apt to be indiscreet.’”²²

It is unknown whether Jean Vianney considered the aforementioned doll-torching incident to be one of these youthful indiscretions, but the important point here for new Trads is that this great saint did come to see that some mortifications and penances were a bit over the top. When considering our own, and those of the souls in our charge, we should keep this in mind. Perhaps, if a child has a beloved “idol”²³ or relatively harmless indulgence that doesn’t lead her to mortal sin, we can choose to leave it alone. (Subjecting my own daughter’s doll collection to Vianney’s remedy, for what it’s worth, would require calling in a Napalm strike). And in regards to fasting, I recall one Trad mens’ group I joined briefly during the turmoil of 2020 that limited its members to one full meal per day, but gave no end date for the practice. For laymen leading daily work and family lives, this probably “overstepped the limits of prudence.”²⁴ (And, as one other member pointed out, Trad men seem a bit too soft, so maybe we should focus on pumping iron instead).

In the lives and counsel of the saints mentioned above, there is a theme of balance that I believe new Trads can put to use as we attempt to navigate the moral decisions and prudential judgments that the secular world might present. As a priest friend reminded me during a desperate phone call made in the throes of my own new Trad anxiety, the Church can’t offer a teaching for every conceivable situation, but she has moral principles that we may apply to those situations, whether they involve which weddings we might or might not want to attend, the books we’ll permit our children to read, or anything else that might torment the conscience of a Trad navigating modern life. In a question-and-answer section of Understanding Scrupulosity, Fr. Kaler, CSsR, discusses the concept of a “spiritual friend” we might call upon to listen to us and offer advice.²⁵

If we frequent the typical Trad coffee hour, we’ll meet plenty of these people to have in our arsenals—and we might weigh the counsels they offer against each other while applying them to the particularities of our own situations. One faithful couple my wife and I know cite the moral lessons their children might glean from the Harry Potter series as a reason for permitting them to read it, while another couple forbids them from doing so because of the descriptions of magic. (This latter couple has big, strapping young sons who might someday hold our own household’s Harry Potter fans down during their exorcisms). One set of parents might avoid taking their kids to the beach to avoid exposing them to scandalous swimwear, while another might see a trip to the beach as an opportunity to teach their teenage boys the importance of keeping custody of the eyes. “I personally would; I personally wouldn’t” are phrases I’ve learned to keep in my repertoire when explaining some of our approaches to these scenarios, because there are not always clear right or wrong answers.

Of all the advice I’ve received during my own struggles navigating the traditional Faith through the modern world, the most useful also probably sounds the most mundane: “You really need to take up basket weaving” a former spiritual advisor told me a couple years ago. For me, “basket weaving” meant picking up the guitar after nearly twenty years away, and it’s worked wonders as a respite from stewing over every moral dilemma daily life presents. So that’s my final advice to any other new inhabitants of Tradville. Get a hobby, Trads!

Endnotes

¹ Mark Lowery, “Scrupulosity: The Occupational Hazard of the Moral Life,” Catholic.com, 11/1/2006

² Thomas Santa, Understanding Scrupulosity, Questions and Encouragement, Third Edition, Liguori, Missouri, Liguori Publications, 2017, p. 29

³ Alphonsus Liguori, Precepts of the Decalogue, Chapter VI, The Sixth and Ninth Commandments, as excerpted in the Against All Heresies and Errors blog, 5/6/2017, against-all-heresies-and-errors.blogspot.com

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Sean O’Brien, Beforeward: An Introductory Essay to St. Alphonsus Liguori’s “Guide for Confessors,” p. 5.

⁷ O’Brien, p. 5-6.

⁸ Alphonsus Liguori, Guide for Confessors, p. 96.

⁹ Ibid., p. 96.

¹⁰ John Bosco, Forty Dreams of St. John Bosco, ed. J. Bacchiarello (Charlotte, North Carolina: TAN Books, 2014), pp. 22-24.

¹¹ Edward Broom, “St. John Bosco’s Ten Steps to Helping Our Youth,” CatholicCulture.org, from Catholic Exchange, 4/19/2016.

¹² Angelo Stagnaro, “Find Joy With St. John Bosco,” USCatholic.org, 10/23/12, uscatholic.org/articles/201210/magic-act/

¹³ Alphonsus Liguori, Guide for Confessors, p. 154.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 96

¹⁵ Francis Trochu, The Curé D’Ars: St. Jean-Marie-Baptiste Vianney, (Rockford, Illinois: TAN Books,1977), pp. 195-198.

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 205.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 120.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Ibid., p. 121.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Ibid.

²³ Ibid., p. 205.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 121.

²⁵ Santa, Understanding Scrupulosity, p. 93.

TITLE IMAGE: The Penitent Saint Peter, Jusepe de Ribera (1591–).