There is a woman who started a website for recovering Trads, who is organizing a conference for recovering Trads. She posted a video recently about her work commented on recently across the trado-sphere. The conference will feature the chief of anti-traditionalist popesplainers, known for his lack of charity to Trads. Here are my thoughts.
There is some truth in this because there are pathological elements in the trad movement. Archbishop Lefebvre himself experienced a lot of that from some of his own priests and laity following him. Not the majority, but some. Many have been driven away and spiritually and psychologically damaged. They need something to help them heal.
On the other hand, this women’s approach seems false. She is characterizing Trads as a whole, as a movement, in this bad way, as by and large bad, as something to come out of and distance yourself from. She characterizes objections to Vatican II and the liturgical reform as schismatic and disobedient.
Like other popesplainers, her error is dogmatizing ultramontism aka papal maximslism. She acts as if Catholics are required to believe the pope is infallible outside his ex cathedra statements, a view which is not official Church teaching, one that Vatican I decidedly did not take up and teach. There are indeed doctrinal errors in certain conciliar texts and in the Novus Ordo, according to cardinals, bishops, priests, and theologians.
To support that view is not unorthodox. But to insist it is unorthodox is itself unorthodox and an error. We all need spiritual healing from the Crisis in the Church, including from within the trad movement on all sides, but those problems are ultimately the outcome of a Church not being led by its shepherds, who often persecute Catholics faithful to Tradition, generally speaking. We all need healing from that.
The solution remains the traditional movement, but at the same time practicing charity and humility within it, and showing the proper respect for Church authority, neither rebelling against it nor treating it as absolute.