From the fringes to the spotlight – Catholic World Report

It’s hard to deny the inherent attractiveness of the Church’s liturgical and artistic legacy, especially in an historical moment thirsting for beauty. The trend of young people drawn to the Tridentine Latin Mass and other elements of traditional Catholic art and spirituality has become more prominent on the internet and in news outlets. Take the recent New York Times and Vox pieces featuring those drawn to the decadent and campy elements of Catholicism, which to them is an alternative to what they perceive to be the drab aesthetics and the inauthentic “sincerity” that pervades much of mainstream culture. Others are drawn to the TLM and traditional Catholicism for less aesthetic reasons, and rather are seeking to escape from (or react to) the lax morals of the culture.

Pope Francis warns in his recent motu proprio on the TLM that placing excessive emphasis on the external gestures of the Faith, rather than treating them as entry points into the what’s most essential–having a transformative encounter with Christ–is a problematic distraction and worse, a form of idolatry. Are these young “trads” just following the latest trend, or “flavor of the month”? Are they merely seeking to use Catholicism as a means to signal their counter-cultural status? A closer look at the various manifestations of this trend reveal that as much as the trad trend can quickly become a path to idolatry, it could also be a stepping stone to reaching profound insights into Christ’s relevance to today’s world.

Among the celebrities drawn to the aesthetic side of traditional Catholic art and liturgy cited in Rebecca Jennings’ Vox piece is Kourtney Kardashian, whose wedding ceremony included a baroque altarpiece decked in red roses and a statue with the Virgin and child. Kardashian wore a revealing mini-dress partially covered by a cathedral length lace veil featuring an image of Mary on it. The wedding was not a Catholic ceremony and was celebrated by a justice of the peace outside a medieval castle in Italy.

Britney Spears hinted in August of 2021 that she had become Catholic and was attending Mass, and posted prayers like the Hail Mary on her Instagram page. Spears posted later in August of 2022 that she was disappointed that she wouldn’t be able to get married at St. Monica’s parish in Santa Monica, California. “During the 2 years of Covid, I also wanted to go there … I was told no due to the pandemic.” She then indicated that she told her wedding planner (who also planned Madonna’s wedding) that she wanted to get married there, but was turned down: “they said I had to be catholic and go through TEST!!! Isn’t church supposed to be open to all???” The post, which included an image of the sun shining down through the window in St. Peter’s Basilica onto the tomb of St. Peter, might cause some to question how much she was interested in the sacrament of marriage versus using the church as a backdrop for her wedding.

Other celebrities have taken to Instagram to post about their interest in Catholicism. Lady Gaga posted a picture of herself praying the rosary in 2017, and another with her parish priest, quoting Pope Francis on the importance of the Eucharist in the caption. More recently, Kanye West posted pictures of himself and Candace Owens at a Paris fashion show wearing a shirt with the phrase “WHITE LIVES MATTER” on the back and a collage of images of Pope Saint John Paul II on the front.

Among those who are more blatant about their ironic attraction to Catholicism’s counter-cultural aesthetics are meme pages like Instagram’s @ineedgodineverymomentofmylife and @memes.of.heresy. Catholicism’s aesthetic imagination has also been the subject of a variety of museum exhibits including the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination exhibit, which turned out to be the Museum’s most successful show in history, attracting nearly 1.7 million visitors. The exhibit featured a series of dresses and jewelry made by high end fashion designers and inspired by Catholic art and liturgical vestments. The exhibit also served as the theme of the 45th annual Met Gala in 2018, where an exclusive list of elite invitees wore original outfits inspired by the pieces in the exhibit. The Brooklyn Museum hosted the Andy Warhol: Revelations exhibit until June of this year, which featured Warhol’s pieces inspired by his (complicated) Catholic faith, as well as his personal devotional items and photos of his visit to the Vatican in 1980 and shaking hands with John Paul II.

While some are drawn to traditional Catholicism’s elaborate pageantry, others are drawn to its demanding moral doctrines and rituals that orient the individual toward ideals that transcend the self. Shia LaBeouf is perhaps the most visible of a slew of traditionalists lauding the rigor and rich symbolism implicated in the TLM.

A Capuchin friar posted an Instagram photo of LaBeouf with himself and his confreres in December 2021 while on pilgrimage visiting several Franciscan holy sites in Italy. The pilgrimage was made in preparation for his role as Padre Pio in an upcoming biopic, which left him feeling “completely immersed in something way bigger than myself…It is super attractive to see people giving themselves to something so divine and it is heartwarming to know that there is a brotherhood like this that exists.”

The interest was set ablaze when LaBeouf appeared on a Word on Fire interview in late August with Bishop Robert Barron, discussing his experience preparing for the role and his newfound esteem for the TLM. As he attended and studied the TLM, he found himself drawn to the way that it puts more onus on the priest to “activate” the people, in a way that echoes a classical Aristotelian understanding of the actor’s role in “activating” the audience in a theater. He goes on to assert that “the Mass has changed because there was a yearning to activate the public in an artificial way … but it feels like this bureaucratic activation, like rules were set … where it’s almost as though the Church is trying to, from the office, activate the audience, without putting the agency on the priest.”

He remarks having found a striking difference between guitar masses at his local parish where it felt like they were trying to “sell me on an idea,” and TLM parishes where “it feels like they’re not selling me a car.” The Novus Ordo Mass is too “direct” and appeals to the intellect, he insists, while the subtlety and mystique of the TLM appeals to one’s senses and emotions. Similarly, he’s found that too often at NO Masses he hears homilies that try to feel relatable, giving him the feeling that at that point of the Mass the priest has “let the air out.”

He remembers that his first exposure to Jesus was that of a “soft, fragile, all-loving, all-listening” figure with “no ferocity,” which felt foreign to his own experience of masculinity. He goes on to lament the “feminization” of Western culture and to laud the hypermasculine spirituality of figures like Padre Pio. The more he spent time with the Capuchin community, he found a model of “redemptive” masculinity that encouraged him to let go of his attachments and enabled him to experience healing from his wounds and self-seeking tendencies. The friars helped him understand that “freedom without structure doesn’t feel good,” to which Bishop Barron responds with a Bob Dylan lyric: “freedom just around the corner for you. But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?”

His sentiments reflect those of many other young men who are starving for “a roadmap,” as he said, to make sense of their mascuine “genius” in a culture that insists on neutralizing gender difference and fostering widespread homogeneity. His remarks are reminiscent of other proponents of heroic masculine virtue like Joe Rogan, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson (who has expressed interest in converting to Catholicism), and Milo Yiannopoulos (who was raised Catholic and has published a book about his qualms with the “feminization of the Church” and his esteem for the TLM).

Some have criticized LaBeouf’s “aggressive” masculinity, though a more charitable reading of the interview may recognize that his remarks are not much unlike those of other young men during their “starry eyed convert phase,” which with time and experience will temper out and develop nuance. It may take some time for the “truth” that has begun to structure LaBeouf’s freedom to mature from a set of abstract principles to be adhered to an encounter with the loving presence of God in the flesh.

It’s easy to accuse the various proliferations of young traditionalists of only engaging with Catholicism on a superficial and self-indulgent level. But people like Dasha Nekrasova demonstrate that what for some may begin as ironic performance art can become a sincere journey toward He who is at the origin of the Catholic imagination. In a 2020 Interview magazine interview, the 31-year-old Belarusian-born co-host of the controversial Red Scare podcast (who at the time viewed herself as a believing but not practicing Catholic, as she attended Mass but abstained from the Eucharist) said, “what’s so great about faith is that it doesn’t have to be grounded in rational thought. We are seeing a lot of people return to religion because everything feels so senseless and pointless, so why not be a Catholic? Catholicism is nice because it involves a whole body of work outside of the Bible — it’s a very aesthetic, literary religion.”

Nekrasova and co-host Anna Khachiyan (a Russian-born secular Jew of Armenian descent who claims to “believe in God and say a prayer everyday”), have been grouped with other “dirtbag leftists” who are known for their penchant for politically incorrect, sardonic cultural commentary. Though Nekrasova was raised Roman Catholic, her family lapsed after immigrating to the US when she was three years old, citing being disillusioned with the uninspiring “boomer capitalist Catholicism” she encountered in the parishes near her home in Las Vegas, and with the way the priests addressed congregations in a way that was “affected” and felt like they were “pandering” to them, in a way echoing the sentiments of LeBoeuf.

Since the podcast’s debut in 2018, “the girls” have interviewed several Catholic guests ranging all over the ideological spectrum, including democratic socialist Elizabeth Bruenig, far-right political strategist Steve Bannon, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, and the traditionalist “leftcath” known as Mecha. As time has gone on, Nekrasova’s Catholicism has become increasingly prominent (and decreasingly ironic or, as she would put it, “LARP-y”) on the show. Her allusions to her faith range from mentioning the lives of mystical saints to her concerns about the Masonic influence on Vatican II and her (dissatisfying) experiences at several schismatic SSPX masses.

Many have expressed their doubts about the sincerity of her faith. She mentioned a “radtrad” who called her out for not being a “real Catholic” due to several sexually provocative selfies she posted in the past on Instagram, while others belittle her musings about her obsession with buying “religious ephemera.” But after working closely with a spiritual director, doing sacramental preparation for chrismation and enduring a spiritually demanding Lenten sacrifice (alcohol and Taco Bell), she was officially confirmed in the Byzantine rite of the Church on June 5th of this year. Since then, she has continued to open up more about her personal growth in faith in Christ and how it is shaping her lifestyle. Since her reversion, I’ve met several Red Scare fans who have expressed interest in beginning to attend Mass, some of whom seem to be interested in doing so for the irony of it, while others seemed more earnest in their interest, and have mentioned formally converting to Catholicism.

Similarly, as Tara Isabella Burton displayed in her May 2020 New York Times feature on “weird Catholic Twitter,” many young people who feel disillusioned by mainstream Democratic or Republican moral, political, and cultural paradigms are drawn to the way that the countercultural aspects of both traditional Catholic liturgy and Catholic Social Teaching transcend the American neoliberal left/right “duopoly.” The people featured in Burton’s article demonstrate what it looks like to do the work of moving beyond abstractions and into the depths of what is attractive about traditional liturgy, art, and piety. Their trajectory is an example of a mature integration of worship, personal morality, and furthering the Common Good through social activism.

Echoing the remarks of people like Nekrasova and LaBoeuf, cultural critic Camille Paglia, who was raised by Italian Catholic immigrants, lamented in a 1994 interview with Fr. James Martin SJ feeling alienated from the American brand of Catholicism she grew up with in the 1950s. “I began seeing a pattern in American Catholic churches: As they were being refurbished and restored, there was what I now regard as a snobbish purgation of the ethnic origins of the parishioners in these churches.” She attributes the flattening of American Catholicism with an effort to align itself with a suburban WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) sensibility in order to gain more credibility in the eyes of the cultural hegemony of the 1950s.

In our culture, under the influence of Protestantism, there has been this homogenization, this constant bleaching out of everything ethnic in America. As that happens we get more and more removed from the life of the body. Even though the body is tortured in Catholic iconography, it’s still there, it’s present. But in Protestantism, in Presbyterian, Episcopalian styles, which is very chi-chi … it’s a very bland, country-club style. That’s what I see as the number one problem in America. It absorbs everything. The minute you get any ethnic group into the middle class they begin to lose any ethnicity. You have this incredible domination by the WASP style. It completely cuts you off at the neck. It makes you very bland, very soft-spoken. All the bloody, barbaric reality of life in the body is gone…It’s been homogenized and turned into ‘The Donna Reed Show’! If you go into any suburban Catholic church … the priest acts towards the parishioners as though we’re all friends … It’s part of the therapeutic culture of America, which again …the kind of debased therapy that goes on today is just making you feel better about yourself. ‘I’m O.K., You’re O.K.’

Speaking specifically about church architecture, she cites the removal of elaborate, upward pointing altar pieces and altar rails, describing the experience of going to Mass as feeling like “a Chamber of Commerce/guild hall … totally sanitized. What”, she asks, “does that do artistically and architecturally to the church? It is incoherent. … Now we have this abomination in America of these shells of the old churches with these barbecue-pit interiors! These airline-terminal interiors. What does this do to young Catholics? I think it just removes any visual culture.”

It’s no wonder that people who feel outcasted for their unconventional personalities and sensibilities–from queer people, to those who don’t relate to the Anglo-American cultural sensibility, to people on the Spectrum–are drawn to the TLM (as I documented in a previous article). This trend is not without historical precedent. Other figures throughout history who felt like black sheeps for their temperaments or ways of perceiving reality–from turn of the century decadents like Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, and JK Huysmans, to others like Andy Warhol, Stephen Patrick Morrissey, and Princess Margaret and her confidant Fr. Derek “Dazzle” Jennings (whose conversion was featured in season four of The Crown)–were drawn to traditional Catholic liturgy, art, and piety for similar reasons. Huysmans, often criticized for his “neuroticism” and “peculiar” sexuality, expressed concerns similar to Paglia’s about how the Church in France was selling “its mystical soul to bourgeois liberalism and commerce” during his lifetime.

The ironic and reactionary attitudes associated with this trend is an understandable response to what can be perceived as the spread of a bourgeois suburban cultural sensibility in the American Catholic Church. This sensibility has a tendency for breeding what philosopher Charles Taylor would call “buffered selves,” who are able to avoid being impacted by spiritual forces, in contrast to “porous selves” who are impacted by the spiritual charges—both holy and demonic—of forces outside of themselves. In this “disenchanted” state, we determine the meaning of things on our own, rather than allowing our lives to be affected by forces beyond our control and dealing with the unpredictability of such an existence. Expressions of religiosity that overemphasize the agency of the individual and his or her will, as opposed to the agency of God and other spiritual forces, are largely indistinguishable from the rest of secular culture.

It’s not hard to find the correlation between the interest in aesthetic Catholicism and the rising trend of “TikTok witches” and other brands of occultism that emphasize the immanence of spiritual forces in everyday life. “Even satanism,” writes Ellis Hanson, “belies a paradoxical piety, since it is a mystical indulgence in evil and abjection that would be sheer nonsense apart from the moral authority of the Church,” citing the entryway of figures like Huysmans and Baudelaire into Catholicism “through the backdoor” via occultism. “It is just at the moment when positivism is at its height,” wrote Huysmans, “that mysticism rises again and the madness of occult begins.”

Skepticism toward the various outcroppings of the trad trend are surely understandable. Much of the rhetoric–from the ironically decadent to the heroically masculine strains–gives whiffs of neopagan reductions of Catholicism, with their overemphasis on secondary elements of the Church’s tradition at the cost of downplaying the significance of the transformative power of an encounter with Christ. But perhaps these reductions are also seeds–fragments of the fullness of the Truth–which require fostering and guidance in order to mature into the flower of a sincere faith in Christ and the Church.

It would be imprudent–especially for clerics, theologians, and religious educators–to dismiss the phenomenon as a passing trend. Rather, the trend ought to be seized as an opportunity to deepen our understanding of how Christ and the Church’s tradition can speak to today’s culture in ways that we may not have noticed before. Further, it’s an opportunity to look more closely at the errors made in preaching and pastoral ministry over the last few years. As a matter of both prudence and charity, the Church ought to heed the call to help foster the growth of these seeds that so many young people are receiving, lest they die out or be distorted among the thorns of neopagan reductionism.