What Catholic once were, we are.
If we are wrong, then Catholics through the ages have been wrong.
We are what you once were.
We worship as you once worshipped.
If we are wrong now, you were wrong then.
If you were right then, we are right now.
Robert De Plante
To be Catholic is to be traditionalist. To be traditionalist is to be Catholic. It seems that during these times of crisis in the Church to be traditionalist in a Catholic sense is to make one the equivalent of the red-headed stepchild. What of those who use this phrase to describe their fellow Catholics? What does it make them when they use the tactis of Saul Alinsky himself?
Frankly, it makes them, bad Catholics.
When one is accused of being a "radical traditionalist" what does it mean?
Does it meant that one rejects the Second Vatican Council or the "banal manufactured product" of the new Mass as Benedict XVI referred to it? What if one accepts the reality of the new, but prefers the old? Does it mean that one speaks out against the shenanigans coming from the highest places in Rome? If we are angry about the heresy proposed by Kasper or his racist remarks about Africans, if we are disturbed by some of Pope Francis' ill-chosen words and phrases or interviews, if we are dismayed when media prominent priests blatantly ignore the liturgical law and then distort to explain it away, does that make us radical traditionalists? If we oppose the will of some bishops and cardinals to provide the Most Blessed Sacrament to people in unrepentant mortal sin does that make us radical traditionalists?
I hope so!
One cannot be Catholic without being traditional. If one is Catholic one must be radical. The word comes from the the Latin radix, meaning root. How can Catholic be anything but radical, particularly living within this secular world and the new "pagan ideology" that has taken over parts of the Church as so aptly phrased by Bishops Schneider.
The reason that we are labelled such is that we are right. Those who put these labels on us are conflicted and schizophrenic because on one hand, they might like a little Latin Mass once or twice per year but on the other hand they have become "pagan Catholics" as our Holy Father so aptly called them a few days ago. If all you can do is look away from the real problems and crisis facing the Church and mock and deride then you are nothing more than a coward and part of the problem; and this goes for you if you are laity or priest or a bishop. You are lukewarm and you will be spat out on the last day.
If I wish to follow the practices of the faith in my life my parents grew up with in the Church I am, in the positive sense of the word, proud to be a radical traditionalist.
If you are not a radical traditionalist, then you are simply, not Catholic.