O Ye of Little Faith

I have omitted the question mark, because it cannot be anything else.

I have been, if never of, then certainly around and at least arguably in, a little world of those to whom the Teaching Office was an abstraction located at some indeterminate point in the past, with the Church seen as either in constant danger of apostasy or already in that state, and with them as the only faithful remnant.

It was all there: the raging bitterness, the embittered rage, the dogmatisation of opinions (by no means only theological opinions) that they merely happened to hold anyway, the pathological obsessions with haberdashery and what have you, the levels of eccentricity that would have led to psychiatric interventions in anything other than a religious context, the contrived avoidance of normal people, the secret signs and signals, the funny words for things that everyone else called something else, the silly little catchphrases, the thing that Damian Thompson on Twitter really does not like my mentioning, the lot.

It was horrendous. By all accounts, it still is. I have looked, and more than looked, with unalloyed horror at the institutional incorporation of that subculture into the Catholic Church.

Even though, and not least because, those structures have been created specifically in order to ensure that that subculture can never be corrected by the established, mainstream, stable Church at the national, provincial, diocesan and parochial levels. Being defined by their unity with the Holy Father, those are in themselves expressive of the Petrine Ministry, and are indeed the means by which almost everyone receives that Ministry.

But I struggle to find so much as the vocabulary for the emergence of such a phenomenon from within the Catholic Church. That which I had seen before was the product of the most profound, desperate, and entirely well-founded insecurity. It is wholly and terrifyingly inexplicable in those who are founded "on this Rock".

They can never again accuse anyone else of having been poorly catechised, or of having a liturgical life that failed to express doctrinal Truth with sufficient comprehensiveness or clarity. Something really very important indeed has decidedly passed them by, too.