As Tierney writes in his essay, the alienation from the institution also yields a practical difference in how this kind of Catholic culture works. Traditional Latin Mass adherents often cannot operate through the usual channels of Catholic life. They can’t just show up at a parish, participate in its programs, work with but also defer to the vision of its priest. Instead, the traditionalist laity often have to create a subculture that operates much more independently. Here’s Tierney’s description of a version of that process:
A TLM community takes root within a diocese, and it wants to spread the news about the TLM. Rather than just promote their own community, one individual takes a trip to a neighborhood parish and asks the priest if a single TLM could be celebrated there, as an act of solicitude for the flock. That priest does not even need to say the TLM, but it would be nice if they came to the social afterward. If the priest agrees, that individual then calls up a few local priests he knows who can come say the Mass. If someone needs to learn how, that individual is put in touch with lay associations/groups that train priests in saying the TLM. They then either provide the priest YouTube videos or do a private training session, many times absorbing the costs themselves.
To advertise that Mass, a few key individuals in the location are contacted, and they send out an email or post on social media. They spread the word in their own communities. In addition to individuals in the area attending, those communities send “delegations” from their community to be present in order to answer questions and show people what they have found to work best at their community. Maybe, by this point, the parish priest has advertised it in his parish bulletin, yet that bulletin is likely not to be read widely, and most of the people in that community who are attending aren’t from that parish. Once that Mass takes place, this cycle is set up for another parish, and people who want to help out are identified, and the cycle begins anew.
Two points are worth making about this description. First, this kind of church-within-a church dynamic is exactly the justification offered by church authorities for their attempts to suppress or limit access to the traditional liturgy (attempts that include restrictions on advertising in parish bulletins!). The fear is that the traditional Mass creates a sect of believers that operates without normal ecclesiastical supervision, which then recruits from among the much larger population of conservative Catholics — through, say, a traditionalist commencement speech at a conservative college — and draws them into its alienated ranks.
Even Tierney, broadly sympathetic to the traditionalists, describes their movement as “dynamic but also chaotic,” with the potential to “go off the rails without a lot of corrective mechanisms in place.” If you don’t sympathize at all with the desire to maintain the old liturgy, if you regard traditionalism as entirely retrograde, you’ll see it the way many of Pope Francis’s allies do: as a dangerously divisive force within the church.
But then here is the second point, and the great irony: The kind of lay-led organizing described above, in which ordinary Catholics get together and create culture and community without priestly leadership or hierarchical direction, is exactly what Vatican II was supposed to usher in. And if you just gave a general description of the TLM movement it could easily code as “progressive” — with the assumption being that if a bunch of lay Catholics are getting together to do something that cuts across the lines of parishes and dioceses and that the hierarchy regards with disapproval, they must be seeking a more liberalized and modern church.
In reality, traditionalism itself has turned out to be one of the most successful movements of the entire post-Vatican II era, using one manifestation of the spirit of the age (disputatious, populist, anti-authority) to organize against a different manifestation (the renovation of the liturgy). It’s thrived with the advance of the internet, which has made community-building easier and enabled immediate documentary access to the pre-1960s Catholic patrimony traditionalists are eager to restore. And it’s proven to be a very American movement — coming to you in this case from the place where the heartland meets the celebrity culture of the N.F.L. (Nor is it a coincidence that the other center of traditionalism is France, another revolutionary nation where the national Catholic Church has always had a complex relationship with Rome.)
I think you can see in Butker’s judgmental zeal the obvious ways in which traditionalism can be self-limiting. But the idea that it simply represents a kind of atavism, a medieval relic unaccountably preserved, misunderstands the nature of its strength. No less than any progressive form of Catholicism, Butker and his movement are the fruits of a weakened hierarchy, a disillusioned-but-empowered laity and a democratic age.