Escape From Traddyland

It is not just pre-Vatican II Catholicism, certainly not as practised in the English-speaking West. Like a number of regular readers, I have heard even worse than Louis Massett describes:

In the town of St. Mary’s, Kan., a blanket party wasn’t as exciting as it might sound. St. Mary’s is the de facto US headquarters of the Society of Saint Pius X, or SSPX, an ultra-traditionalist Catholic breakaway sect. When I lived there, a “blanket party” involved students taking peers who’d misbehaved at the town’s SSPX-run boarding school and setting them straight.

The kids would be tied up and have their heads shaved. A youngster would be punished this way for infractions ranging from dozing off in church to talking to the girls after mass a bit too long. Anyone who didn’t exactly fit in with the rest of the community was suspect and could be targeted for “partying.”

When I was at the boarding school, from 1987 to 1992, I participated in this cruel ritual, sanctioned by Father Ramón Angles, who at the time led the SSPX in St. Mary’s, serving as the rector of its college and secondary academy. Throughout my sophomore, junior, and senior years, I was told not only that I had permission, but that we were encouraged to abuse students for misconduct that would have been viewed as negligible outside the SSPX bubble.

In recent days, the SSPX — my former institution, and that of my now-estranged father — has garnered fresh attention from the global media. Last month, the sect created four new bishops without papal authorization. The move prompted the Vatican to declare automatic excommunications against the newly consecrated SSPX bishops, as well as those who consecrated them. The Roman church also warned the group’s lay followers that those who continue to “formally adhere” to the society likewise risk excommunication.

The SSPX launched in 1970 in opposition to the reforms of Vatican II. It is fundamentally schismatic, promising to uphold the “true” ways abandoned by the “liberal” and “evil” Catholic Church. Among SSPXers, it’s common to believe that the mainstream church has been infiltrated by “freemasons” and “communists.” Anti-Semitism is never far from the surface. They see themselves as the last remnant of faithful Catholics. And they act accordingly, with a heavy sense of who is in the in-group and who is in the out-group, and seldom any room for nuance.

The abuse and cultish behavior generated by such self-righteousness thus long predate the sect’s latest appearance in the media. When I lived in St. Mary’s, in the 1980s and ’90s, first as a boarding-school student (1987 to 1992), then on my own accord (March to October 1993), I once rationalized our sectarian beliefs and bizarre rituals — like the blanket parties — and willingly participated in them.

Over time, I came to realize that the SSPX wasn’t faithful to the gospels of Jesus Christ, but at odds with the very spirit of Catholicism: assuming the worst of outsiders, extremist and insular, ultra-Right-wing and sectarian. In this sense, the SSPX magnifies the hyper-partisan nature of much of American life in the opening decades of the 21st century: thou shalt not go against the team, for the team is always right.

At St. Mary’s, Fr. Angles ran the parish and schools like a dictator. He hailed from a well-to-do family in Barcelona, and his politics were essentially those of an early-20th-century Spanish reactionary. Fr. Angles told me on one occasion that Hitler was a “good Catholic” who just went “crazy” at the end; he also held a Nazi dagger in his office and bragged that when he was a boy, his family in Spain owned at least one bulletproof vehicle originally made for the SS.

Still, I was eager to return to St. Mary’s for undergrad. But as it happened, Fr. Angles denounced my sister from the pulpit for attending an innocuous party where someone brought beer and played rock music on an acoustic guitar.

My parents took issue with this and began complaining to Fr. Angles’s superiors. That was not allowed in St. Mary’s. As retaliation, Fr. Angles reneged on his verbal commitment to provide me with a scholarship for my undergraduate studies; there was no prospect of me being able to pay for it, either. I left town for a while.

Despite all this, the town and the SSPX had become my entire world. Because I was a traditionalist. Because I believed we were the remnant. Because I wanted to save my soul. I wanted to return but was delayed until 1993, when I could save up enough money. It was during this period that I came to be acquainted with the Rev. John Rizzo, a kind SSPX priest who was willing to stand up to the society’s bullying ways and to Fr. Angles.

Later that same year (1993), Fr. Rizzo published a letter to his former parishioners announcing his departure from the society. In it, Fr. Rizzo railed against the “overall ‘cultish’ behavior” he’d witnessed during his time in the SSPX, including “tactics of intimidation and fear [practiced] on the faithful” by society priests and “public denunciations from the pulpit mentioning names and offenses.” He also highlighted the society’s “unhealthy attitude toward women,” including the “insulting and degrading” methods used to uphold modesty norms.

After his exit from the society, Fr. Rizzo returned to St. Mary’s as a mainstream Catholic priest with a mission to minister to non-SSPX believers in the area. I remember hearing it said that it was a sin to attend Fr. Rizzo’s masses.

At one point, SSPX men glued the door to the makeshift chapel where he celebrated his masses. And according to the Kansas City Star, the local sheriff warned him that his SSPX enemies have “stronger firepower” and that he’d best leave town — in a bulletproof vest. The house of Fr. Rizzo’s brother — where the priest was staying — was shot at in the middle of the night. Eventually, Fr. Rizzo left St. Mary’s for good.

By this point, the scales had fallen from my eyes, and I had begun to see, for the first time, the truth about Fr. Angles. A friend’s dad with similar misgivings told me that we had to stand up against Fr. Angles and proposed that I join him in telling our story to a Topeka news station, to warn the community of the danger. For that, I was kicked out of the parish, and my friends’ parents were ordered to shun me. The Waco, Texas, tragedy had also unfolded around this time, casting the extremism of the SSPX in a new light. 

The Rev. David Hewko, another priest in town, agreed with me about Fr. Angles’s vindictiveness and toxicity, especially in the aftermath of Fr. Rizzo being run out. He was one of the few people who wasn’t mindlessly on board with Fr. Angles’s agenda. When I spoke to local TV, Fr. Hewko met me in secret in the dark of the night and urged me to get out. I had spoken to outsiders, against the bottom line of the St. Mary’s SSPX leadership. I had to leave. And I did. In October 1993, I left, full of despair.

Nearly three decades later, in 2019, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, or KBI, launched a probe into allegations of sexual abuse inside the SSPX at St. Mary’s. Once news of the investigation became public, numerous accusers approached the Kansas City Star newspaper with allegations of their own.

Jassy Jacas — who’d posted on Facebook about a priest’s inappropriate behavior toward her during counseling, and who’d reached out to the KBI — told the Star: “There’s no benefit of the doubt anymore. This is corruption.” The KBI, according to the paper, told Jacas that eight SSPX priests were under investigation at the time she approached the agency.

Speaking to the Star, my former teacher Kurt Chione, who taught at St. Mary’s Academy from 1988 to 1990, remembered one student, Michael Gonzalez, increasingly acting out and “crying after school and shivering outside.” Pressed by Chione, Gonzalez reported that “one of the priests ‘hurt me.’” Chione brought this to two SSPX priests, according to the Star, including Fr. Angles. The priests, however, dismissed the claim immediately and tore into Chione for “getting involved.” The academy soon terminated Chione’s teaching contract.

Eventually, Gonzalez dropped out of school in the ninth grade. His downward spiral accelerated. One of his sisters, according to the Star, pressed him to reveal the abuse he’d suffered. “This time,” according to the paper, “Michael named his alleged abuser. Father Angles.” In the year 2000, Gonzalez committed suicide, aged 25.

Earlier this month, the KBI submitted the results of its yearslong probe into the SSPX in Kansas to the state’s attorney general.

Speaking to the Star, Pedro Irigonegaray, an attorney for Fr. Angles, forcefully and categorically denied the abuse and coverup allegations against his client, blaming Chione for failing to go to the police with Gonzalez’s allegations. (Chione insisted to the paper that he did approach law enforcers but was told they couldn’t do much because he wasn’t the victim.)

It’s too easy to dismiss the likes of Fr. Angles and the SSPX as “evil.” They’re not acting out of a desire to do bad. They simply carry with them a monstrously oversized sense of justice that paradoxically licenses evil.

It’s not entirely surprising, then, that Timothy McVeigh, the mastermind behind the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, spent time in St. Mary’s shortly before carrying out his terror attack, according to The New York Times and law enforcers at the time. He, too, had a disproportionate sense of justice. This was highlighted by a 2001 Vanity Fair essay by Gore Vidal, headlined “The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh.” The essay was the culmination of Vidal’s yearslong correspondence with McVeigh after the latter was sentenced to death for carrying out the massacre.

Through those letters, and through conversations with McVeigh’s psychiatrist, Vidal came to a conclusion that has stayed with me, helping me understand my former confrères in the SSPX. McVeigh wasn’t a monster. Nor was he insane. He was, in Vidal’s term, overly serious. McVeigh had fought for his country in the Gulf War. When he came to believe that the same country was now waging war on its own citizens, shredding the Constitution, he decided it was his duty to fight back. The 168 lives lost in Oklahoma City were, in his mind, collateral damage. He didn’t deny his victims’ humanity. He simply believed the cause demanded the sacrifice. He believed the mission was too important. Too serious.

Vidal’s portrait landed like a fist when I first read it three decades after my time in St. Mary’s. The society’s zealots, too, were haunted by over-seriousness: an inability to see how their — our — actions, carried out in the name of God, tore apart the Church and even our own families.

Marcel Lefebvre, the French founder of the SSPX, had been an archbishop entrusted with a sacred duty to guard souls. When he saw the Church changing in ways he believed betrayed Christ, he took his vocation very seriously — permitting no doubt or skepticism, certainly not about himself or his own actions.

Lefebvre’s absolutism had no room for the humility that a life of faith is supposed to nurture. Our version of the faith became so deadly serious, so unforgiving, that in too many cases we were willing to do harm to advance it. This seriousness — this inability to have mercy for human frailty, so fundamental to Christianity — gave some in the SSPX a permission structure to shoot at a priest’s house. To be sure, the SSPX community has many people who are simply seeking peace and meaning. There are plenty of people of goodwill. But there are also those who’ve been radicalized by the mission.

That same absolutism had characterized my life, even after I left the SSPX. I had been scandalized time and again by my father and others, but each time I had been profoundly wrong in how I responded. Instead of turning inward with patience and love — the true power of a Christian — I had charged outward like a crusader, seeking justice, keeping score, tit for tat, chasing ideological shadows while neglecting what mattered most. My righteous anger had become a wildfire that consumed my soul and threatened to consume my home.

Every human carries this capacity. Unconstrained, you get St. Mary’s. You get punishment “parties.” You get Fr. Angles. You get McVeigh.

Peadar Laighléis comments:

I know something about the places and personalities mentioned here indirectly. Father Angles was assigned to Dublin after this and he certainly has the reputation of being tough and leaning right - I can’t comment about the abuse regulations. I first heard of Father Rizzo in a comment made by two priests who were members of the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter, a priestly society set up under John Paul II’s direction to accommodate priests and seminarists leaving the SSPX and training priests for an exclusive ministry in the traditional Mass and sacraments. The comment was that to lose a priest like Father Rizzo indicated the SSPX in the US was in a lot of trouble.

This article focuses on abuse and quirkiness in SSPX run communities. Neither would be unique to the SSPX, but the quirkiness is marked. It ranges from eccentricity to lunacy and in rejecting key teachings of the Second Vatican Council, rather than preserving the integrity of the pre-conciliar Church, they have become a caricature of them and, to be honest, in some ways they have become exactly as the progressive Catholics they react against would want them to be. I don't want to take from the integrity of the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (though I do think he was wrong to reject a deal offered to him by the then Cardinal Ratzinger in May 1988 which would have regularised his society and given them a bishop, without excommunications), but what his society has become is the centre of a coalition of malcontents and crackpots, however sincerely they embrace the SSPX principles first. Successive popes - John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis - have granted concessions in the hope of reconciliation. I believe the advice offered was in good faith by some curial officials, but following the death of Archbishop Lefebvre in 1991, no one within the society has the authority to lead its members (priests, brothers and clerical students) and supporters (laity, some nuns and priests attached to smaller societies/monastic communities working with the SSPX) back into the Church. The numbers are remarkable static - one million is quoted now as was the case around 2000.  This indicates a high turnover of supporters - be aware, SSPX supporting laity tend to have larger numbers of children than average, so a stagnation in support indicates high leakage.

Leo XIV, a canon lawyer, has gotten tough with the SSPX. He has indicated the society’s priests and ultimately supporters, could face excommunication. The problem here is for that threat to hold water, he will need to have an evenly firm hand across the Church which is easier said than done at present. For one, the Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (who is the point man in any deliberation between the Church and the SSPX), Victor Manuel Cardinal Fernandez doesn’t enjoy a huge degree of credibility among conservative minded Catholics, let alone SSPX adherents.