Pope Leo XIV Inauguration Mass In St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City. Photo courtesy the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales/Flickr.

Habemus papam—we have a new Pope, and an American one, no less.

American Catholicism has become a battleground. Sedevacantism, the tendency opposed to the Church’s liberal reforms of Vatican II in the 1960s—approval of vernacular mass, less pronounced hierarchicalism, greater engagement of the laity, more emphasis on social justice—has grown in popularity. It is now the foundational pillar of the “Traditional Catholicism” or “TradCath” movement, a deeply-reactionary right-wing strain in the Church, and one that is especially prevalent in the United States, particularly among Protestant converts seeking the rigor and authority of a top-down Christianity, and younger post-ironic hipsters (see: Dasha Nekrasova of the Red Scare podcast).

Since the resignation of Benedict XVI—a man who went so far as to blame clerical-perpetrated sexual abuse of children on too much moral relativism in theology—conservatives within the Church, of which there is a very high concentration in the US, have often felt their voice has been marginalized in Church affairs. Lately the tensions in American Catholicism that have boiled under the surface for decades have begun to erupt into public view. The American Catholic Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), for instance, has become known for an altogether........

© Canadian Dimension