Radical Traditional Catholicism

Top Takeaways

Adherents of radical traditional Catholicism, or “integralism,” routinely pillory Jews as “the perpetual enemy of Christ,” condemn the Vatican’s outreach to other Christian denominations and faiths, and sometimes assert that recent popes have all been illegitimate. These groups generally reject the liberalizing reforms of the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council, which placed more power in the hands of laypeople and encouraged the church to interpret modern social problems through Catholic teaching. Crucially, the council also condemned hatred for Jews and dispelled the notion that Jewish people are collectively responsible for deicide in the form of the crucifixion of Christ.

Radical traditionalist Catholics differ from traditionalist Catholics. The latter embrace the traditions and practices of the preconciliar church while rejecting the Novus Ordo Missae, which updated the Catholic Mass by, among other changes, replacing Latin with vernacular languages. Though they may be critical of the Vatican, the organizations listed here do not represent all those Catholics who call themselves “traditionalists” or prefer the Latin Mass.

These liturgical trappings have nevertheless found currency among some far-right figures, including white power activists, who have embraced the aesthetics and practices of traditionalist (or what they often call “trad”) Catholicism. They do so as part of a larger effort to revert to a world before political upheavals like the Civil Rights Movement enshrined racial equality into law and before liberalizing reforms took hold in the church.

In Their Own Words

“Adolf Hitler was merely the end-product of what had been championed by the Freemason Otto von Bismarck sixty years previously. Bismarck started a Kulturkampf against the Holy Faith. Hitler’s own quasi-religion, Nazism, was simply result of four hundred years of revolution against the Divine Plan to effect man’s return to Him through His Catholic Church, a revolution that was aided and abetted by Talmudists at every turn.”

– Thomas Droleskey, in an article on the Christ or Chaos website, Feb. 19, 2023

“We have Jews all over the world. What, 14 million of them? Some liberal, you know, reforms. Some conservative. Hasidic Jews. Some in the middle. They have no recourse to the Catholic Church. As a matter of fact, they come in, and they try and change church doctrine to suit the Jews.”

– Robert Sungenis in an April 27, 2021, YouTube video titled “Is There Salvation Outside the Catholic Church?”

“Here is my contribution for the inter-religious dialogue between Catholics and Jews: ‘Catholics, don’t trust the Jew; he hates you and is just playing games. The whole Vatican II dialogue with the Jews is a pantomime to distract your attention and destroy Catholic militancy against Judaism.’”

– Atila Sinke Guimarães, in an article on the Tradition in Action website, Aug. 31, 2015

“A Jew is now a rejecter of Christ and thereby to some extent a rejecter of Logos, which is the Greek word for the rational order of the universe. Insofar as they rejected Christ, the Jews rejected Logos, and in rejecting Logos, they rejected the order of the universe, including its moral or political order. As a result, they became revolutionaries, a decision they solemnly ratified when they chose Barabbas over Christ.”

– E. Michael Jones, editor of Culture Wars magazine, in a September 2008 interview

“There’s a lot of controversy among people who study the so-called Holocaust. There’s a misperception that Hitler had a position to kill all the Jews. It’s all a fraud. Six million people – it didn’t occur.”

– Douglas Bersaw, a lay member of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, quoted in The Boston Globe on Feb. 22, 2004

Background

Many traditionalist Catholics adhere to the Tridentine Latin Mass, which was replaced by the Novus Ordo Mass in 1969, or disapprove of many of the reforms enacted in the Second Vatican Council, which took place between October 1962 and December 1965.

A small subset of these believers are members of radical traditionalist Catholic organizations whose rejection of Vatican II is rooted in antisemitism. Leaders and members of these groups have been led by their radical beliefs into clashes with more mainstream Catholics, even very right-leaning ones. For example, the New Hampshire-based Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary was once formally reprimanded by the Vatican for referring to itself as a Catholic organization, and the Vatican once again upheld the prohibitions it instituted against the group in 2021.

Leaders of radical traditionalist Catholic groups depict themselves as in existential conflict with the mainstream church, at times portraying themselves as “counter-revolutionaries” or “‘militants’ who intend ‘to wage … real ideological and political war’ against their enemies,” which they define as “the modern social order.”

Members of many of these groups have collaborated with other organizations or prominent figures within other parts of the radical right as well. Recently, prominent white nationalist figures, including Rise Above Movement propagandist Vincent James and livestreamer Nick Fuentes, have promoted the work of E. Michael Jones, the author of several antisemitic texts and the publisher of the radical traditionalist Catholic magazine Culture Wars. Infowars’ Alex Jones, one of the country’s most prominent conspiracy theorists, has hosted E. Michael Jones on his show multiple times. Dave Reilly – a white nationalist propagandist and himself a radical traditionalist Catholic – graduated from co-hosting Jones’ Culture Wars podcast to anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns and Republican Party activism in Idaho.

Radical traditionalist Catholic leaders distributed literature at various white supremacist events in the 2000s. For instance, John Sharpe Jr. of the Virginia-based IHS Press sold books at a 2006 conference hosted by American Renaissance. Likewise, Nicholas Gruner of the New York-based International Fatima Rosery Crusade sold his wares at a conference hosted by The Barnes Review that same year. Prominent radical traditionalist Catholics have cited, promoted or distributed works associated with antisemitic violence, including “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a fabricated text originally published in Russia in 1903 that has helped shape modern antisemitism.

While radical traditionalists have criticized the church’s theological and liturgical reforms in the wake of Vatican II, they have reserved special ire for the council’s efforts to mend Catholic-Jewish relations, beginning with the 1965 declaration, “Nostra aetate.” The declaration’s title translated as “In Our Time,” and it focused on the Catholic church’s relationship with non-Christian religions, particularly Jews. With memories of World War II and the Holocaust still fresh, the council’s declaration rejected the long-held depiction of Jewish people as being uniquely responsible for the death of Jesus Christ. It states, “What happened in His passion cannot be charged against all Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.” While the final conciliar document did not include an outright rejection of the concept of Jewish deicide, the statement nevertheless pushed aside one of the core components underlying the church’s long-standing embrace of a doctrinal antisemitism that has animated bigoted conspiracy theories around the Jews for centuries.

Radical traditionalist Catholic critiques of “Nostra aetate” have tended to conspiratorially portray the declaration of the product of Jewish maleficence. E. Michael Jones, the antisemitic publisher of Culture Wars, for instance, has promoted narratives describing “Nostra aetate” as a “weapon” and framing it as means for Jews to interfere with Catholic practice.

In 2012, John Vennari, the now-deceased editor of Catholic Family News, misrepresented Jewish-Catholic dialogue prior to the issuance of “Nostra aetate” as a “secret accord with Jewish leaders.” In a subsequent article, published in 2013, Vennari claimed the council “constructed a false theology to serve the new god of ‘Jewish-Catholic relations.’”

Atila Sinke Guimarães, a Brazilian church scholar tied to the California-based radical traditionalist Catholic group Tradition in Action (TIA), has also characterized the 1965 document as having “gagged the entire Catholic church so she cannot speak against Judaism” in a 2015 essay on TIA’s website.

While “Nostra aetate” has undergirded these groups’ decision to break with the mainstream Catholic church, the particular form of conspiratorial, antisemitic thought that animates radical traditionalist Catholics’ critiques of the council’s approach to Judaism had roots in the church prior to Vatican II.

Among the figures influencing the radical traditionalist Catholics’ conspiratorial worldview were: Denis Fahey (1883-1954), a controversial Irish priest who once stated that “every sane thinker must be an antisemite” and who promoted the idea that the Soviet Union was a product of “Jewish forces”; Charles Coughlin (1891-1979), a Michigan-based Catholic priest and broadcaster who used his radio show to express sympathy for Nazism and inspired the formation of an antisemitic militia known as the Christian Front; and Leonard Feeney (1897-1978), a Massachusetts-based Catholic priest whom the Vatican excommunicated in 1949 for promoting the belief that there is “no salvation outside the [Catholic] Church.”

Writing of Fahey in his book The Smoke of Satan, sociologist Michael Cuneo noted, “It would be extremely difficult today to find mainstream Catholics” who support his views. However, for these radical traditionalists who are “uninfected by ecumenism and desperate for final solutions, they are received as gospel truth,” Cuneo added — a truth that represents a significant departure from even ultraconservative articulations of Catholic doctrine.

2023 Radical Traditional Catholicism Hate Groups

View all groups by state and by ideology.
*Asterisk denotes headquarters

Catholic Family News/Catholic Family Ministries Inc.
Niagara Falls, New York*

Christ or Chaos
Corsicana, Texas*

Culture Wars/Fidelity Press
South Bend, Indiana*

Fatima Crusader, The/International Fatima Rosary Crusade
Buffalo, New York*

In the Spirit of Chartres Committee
Glenelg, Maryland*

Remnant, The/The Remnant Press
Forest Lake, Minnesota*

Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary
Richmond, New Hampshire*

Tradition in Action
Los Angeles, California*