‘Conservative’ Catholicism as the Most Dangerous Position (Part I)

We will simply state our thesis—post-Conciliar “conservatism” is structurally incapable of ending the crisis because its very identity depends upon preserving the Conciliar settlement while appearing to resist its consequences. By repeatedly displacing judgment from the object to authority, intention, permission, and appearance, it has helped produce a deeper crisis in thinking—an increasing inability of the intellect to conform itself to reality.

It is important to identify reality—post-Conciliar “conservatism” is not truly a midpoint between liberalism and Tradition. It is the mechanism by which liberal premises are dressed in Catholic vocabulary, restrained by juridical authority, softened by orthodox fragments, and presented as continuity—a structure visible in many supposedly “conservative” cardinals, whose criticisms of particular consequences are repeatedly prevented from governing their judgment of the Council and the post-Conciliar settlement itself. Indeed, Vatican II is their almost singularly cited text—especially in the case of one particular German cardinal—as though every judgment concerning the crisis had first to be premised upon authority and presumed soundness of this deeply

controversial and revolutionary Council, which has remained the object of division and dispute.

But “conservatives” tend to concede enough truth to gain the sympathy of Catholics who recognize the crisis—but refuse to permit those concessions to govern the conclusion. That is why it is more dangerous than open liberalism—because while open liberalism exposes itself, “conservatism” obscures and conceals what it is, inhibits judgment, and trains Catholics to inhabit contradiction. This has long-term consequences for the intellectual faculties and, ultimately, for souls.

This is the first essay in a series that seeks to unveil the structure of post-Conciliar “conservatism”.

We became acquainted with Jacob Rees-Mogg after the SSPX episcopal consecrations, when we noticed that some “conservative” Catholics began sharing Rees-Mogg’s video, Catholic Unity and Papal Obedience. Rees-Mogg possesses a substantial public platform, and the video’s circulation among Catholics makes it a useful case through which to examine the governing structure of post-Conciliar “conservatism.” At the same time, Jacob Rees-Mogg is comes across as an attractive face for Catholic “conservatism”: “reverent,” morally serious, publicly Catholic, respectful of hierarchy, appreciative of tradition, and opposed to obvious progressive excesses. Precisely because the position appears so respectable, it provides the ideal point of entry into the deeper problem. And we will now close in on it.

Rees-Mogg begins with the conclusion, which is acceptable even as a scholarly piece—but only is you will eventually demonstrate the logic chain that got you there. After noting that the SSPX consecrated four bishops despite the Vatican’s prohibition, they first say, “I fear there is a schism in the Catholic Church,” and later declare categorically: “The SSPX has decided to become schismatic.” But the nature of the act, the Society’s claim of necessity, and whether the consecrations constituted a rejection of papal primacy are never adjudicated before the conclusion is announced.

They then concede very serious things to the SSPX. Rees-Mogg calls the Society “broadly a force for good,” praises its reverence and fidelity to Catholic teaching, and acknowledges that post-Conciliar practices were “essentially Protestant,” diminished the priesthood and reverence for the Real Presence, divided the Church, and produced “slackness,” “irreverence,” and even “sacrilege.”

There is something structurally analogous to a Hegelian movement here as contrary truths are admitted and preserved, but then deprived of their power to govern the conclusion. Rees-Mogg’s praise of the SSPX is absorbed into a “balanced” synthesis that leaves the prior declaration of schism untouched. See our brief review of Eric Sammons, in The Peddlers of a Brand of ‘Balance’: ‘Moderation’ as the Mirror Image of the Hermeneutic of Continuity. The moment those admissions might lead toward examining Vatican II and the liturgical reform as possible causes of the disorder, Rees-Mogg closes the question, declaring that the Council was valid—even if the SSPX does not dispute it—authoritative, a term requiring distinctions they do not supply, and guided by the Holy Ghost. “It’s not the Council that is the problem.” The contradiction is therefore not resolved through adjudication; it is managed within the enclosure.

The disorder is therefore relocated downstream into “abuses,” bad interpretations, failures of implementation, and parishes neglecting later instructions—the familiar post-Conciliar explanation according to which the governing form remains sound while its recurring consequences are attributed to defective interpretation or implementation. So symptoms are acknowledged while the governing framework is declared innocent in advance.

Rees-Mogg then points to the Institute of Christ the King (ICK) and the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter (FSSP) as the correct alternative communities that preserve traditional liturgical practice while remaining canonically approved. But the conclusion that their existence answers the SSPX position is simply asserted, not demonstrated, and presupposes the adequacy of an Ecclesia Dei settlement whose own structural contradiction we have already exposed (see here).

Even granting Rees-Mogg’s premise, the conclusion does not follow. The existence of canonically approved traditional communities does not adjudicate whether Vatican II and the Novus Ordo are doctrinally and formally sound, whether the SSPX’s state-of-necessity argument is true, or whether canonical permission can substitute for the preservation and public profession of the Faith. It merely demonstrates that traditional liturgical practice may continue under specified canonical conditions. It does not prove that those conditions resolve the crisis that made such communities necessary, nor that their accommodation answers rather than manages the underlying doctrinal and liturgical dispute.

The entire response finally resolves into authority and obedience, as the Pope prohibited the consecrations; the SSPX proceeded; therefore the Society is schismatic. “He has the authority. He has the right.” But the existence of papal authority is not even disputed by the SSPX. What remains unproved is whether this particular prohibition bound under the circumstances claimed, whether proceeding formally rejected papal submission, and whether proceeding with the consecrations formally constituted schism.

Simply put, Rees-Mogg recognizes the symptoms, but protects the Council and reform from causal judgment, offers canonical management as the remedy, and condemns the SSPX without addressing its actual argument. Their sympathy creates the appearance of balance, but it does not repair the missing adjudication.

Rees-Mogg does not begin with the object actually in dispute. They ignore the texts of Vatican II; the formal and final causes of the Novus Ordo; the destruction of traditional priestly and liturgical formation; the state of necessity; or the reasons episcopal consecrations became necessary in the first place. They begin instead with the subject—the SSPX—and its alleged “schismatic” position. That is the Cartesian beginning identified throughout our corpus—when the claimant becomes the object of examination while the reality about which the claimant is making claims recedes from view. The question becomes: What is wrong with the SSPX? vs. Is the SSPX correct about the Council, the liturgical reform, and the state of necessity?

Rees-Mogg moves from acknowledging grave liturgical disorder, to praising the Society for resisting it, to condemning the Society—without adjudicating the cause or supplying the premises by which those admissions could logically lead to the conclusion of schism. Sympathy creates the appearance of balance and lends emotional credibility to the condemnation, but it does no logical work. The movement is therefore incoherent, as truths that should reopen the conclusion are admitted and then prevented from governing it. This is the displacement identified throughout our corpus: the subject replaces the object, the consequence replaces the cause, and juridical classification replaces prior metaphysical judgment.

Rees-Mogg declares that the SSPX has become schismatic. But schism is a conclusion requiring premises, and cannot be established merely by pronouncing the word or invoking a prior ecclesiastical characterization. They would have to do the following: 1) Demonstrate that proceeding with the consecrations formally constituted a refusal of submission to the Roman Pontiff or of ecclesial communion, rather than an act undertaken under a claimed state of necessity while continuing to recognize papal primacy; 2) Engage the SSPX’s claim that a state of necessity affected the ordinary binding application of the law and the culpability and juridical character of the act.

Rees-Mogg does neither. They activate the juridical conclusion while ignoring the disputed premise that would determine whether the ordinary application of the law obtains. This is juridical prejudgment and begging the question. Rees-Mogg

adopts the anticipated juridical conclusion as though papal prohibition and noncompliance were sufficient, by themselves, to establish schism. The same structural defect appears in the FSSP critique of the SSPX consecrations, where ordinary hierarchical norms are applied as though the normal conditions for their application had already been established, while necessity remains unexamined.

Note: This is not a fresh dispute awaiting another hearing. For nearly sixty years, Rome has replied to the SSPX chiefly through obedience, canonical status, “reconciliation,” and schism-language, while leaving the prior doctrinal object—and with it the claim of necessity—substantially unadjudicated. Already under Paul VI, Archbishop Lefebvre’s doctrinal and causal arguments were displaced into disobedience and Paul VI even accused the Archbishop of taking “the position of an antipope”—an accusation that neither engaged nor refuted the arguments the Archbishop was making. In that context, further postponement is not neutral but another turn of the entropic time loop (see here, here, and here), because if episcopal continuity is genuinely necessary, indefinite delay would frustrate the preservation of the Faith and sacraments for the salvation of souls. Prohibition and noncompliance simply cannot and never has settled the question.

Rees-Mogg describes the ugly phenomena of the Novus Ordo as “abuses.” The word performs crucial rhetorical work, as it places the disorder outside the form and operative principles of the reform. Vatican II and Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC) remain fundamentally sound; only implementation, disobedience, excess, or bad taste supposedly went wrong.

But our corpus has already demonstrated that SC established participation, intelligibility, simplification, adaptability, and cultural accommodation as governing principles. Its permission structures loosened inherited guardrails and created the interpretive field within which the reform developed. The Novus Ordo’s minimalism, modularity, optionality, and adaptability are not merely violations of the reform’s logic; they substantially embody it.

While some concrete practices are genuine violations of the rubrics and therefore “abuses” in the narrow juridical sense, the worldwide and multigenerational pattern cannot honestly be explained as countless accidental departures from an otherwise stable form. Many of these phenomena arise from the reform’s own principles, while even genuine abuses are facilitated, multiplied, or insufficiently restrained by its formal looseness. What “conservatives” call bad implementation is often either design fidelity or the predictable consequence of loosened form (see here and here).

Former Ecclesia Dei communities embody the corresponding contradiction. Officially, they affirm Vatican II and the legitimacy of the Novus Ordo; practically, their priestly and liturgical identity is organized around the exclusive celebration of the traditional rite. The difference between the rites is treated as decisive in practice while remaining formally undetermined in their official position. They affirm both but live only one, without supplying the metaphysical premise explaining why (see here).

Thus, permission substitutes for truth; “attachment” substitutes for necessity; and canonical accommodation substitutes for doctrinal adjudication--reducing the TLM to an accommodated preference while leaving the Conciliar crisis untouched. The prior question of form is left unresolved while juridical and prudential conclusions are activated anyway. This is precisely the cart-before-the-horse inversion, where canonical permission and practical accommodation govern before the nature and difference of the rites have been adjudicated.

The position therefore does not resolve the contradiction. It inhabits and manages it. The “abuses” explanation and the Ecclesia Dei solution perform the same function at different levels as both protect the Conciliar settlement by managing its consequences rather than judging its operative form. See our critique of the FSSP critique of the FSSPX consecrations.

Rees-Mogg devotes much of the final portion of their video to St. John Fisher, but the invocation conflates three materially different controversies: whether corruption in Rome nullifies papal authority; whether Henry VIII could usurp papal jurisdiction; and whether the SSPX’s episcopal consecrations without a pontifical mandate, under its claimed state of necessity, formally constituted schism. By compressing these into one lesson about obedience, Rees-Mogg makes the third appear answered by the first two.

Fisher’s defense of the papacy despite corruption answers a position the SSPX does not hold. The Society does not deny that the Pope is Pope, reject Roman primacy, or claim that immoral churchmen lose their authority. Its argument is that an extraordinary state of necessity affected the binding application of this particular prohibition. Rees-Mogg replaces that disputed question with an easier, uncontested one—whether corruption destroys papal authority—and allows the answer to stand in for the argument they never address.

But the appeal to Fisher’s opposition to Henry VIII is even more misleading. Henry attempted to override Roman judgment and eventually substituted royal supremacy for papal jurisdiction. Once again, the SSPX does not claim secular supremacy, establish another papacy, or deny Roman primacy. Yet Rees-Mogg’s arrangement silently assigns the moral roles, and Fisher’s fidelity is placed on the side of submission to the papal prohibition, while Henry’s rebellion becomes the implied analogue for the SSPX’s proceeding with the consecrations. That correspondence is not demonstrated, and instead produced rhetorically.

The same equivocation appears in Rees-Mogg’s conclusion concerning the Pope: “He has the authority. He has the right.” But the second proposition does not follow merely from the first. The Pope’s possession of authority establishes jurisdictional competence, but it does not prove that every particular command is correctly applied, binding under extraordinary circumstances, or that noncompliance formally constituted schism. Rees-Mogg moves from the true proposition that the Pope possesses authority to the unproved conclusions that this prohibition necessarily bound, that proceeding necessarily constituted schism.

Their reference to “these matters of faith and morals” further collapses categories. The prohibition is principally a juridical and disciplinary act. The controversy certainly involves doctrine, but that does not make the truth of a disputed canonical classification follow automatically from the Pope’s possession of authority.

Rees-Mogg’s invocation of Fisher therefore does not illuminate the SSPX controversy; it prejudges it. Fisher’s defense of Roman primacy substitutes for examination of a particular command, Henry VIII’s usurpation is made to shadow the SSPX, and the moral authority of a martyr supplies the weight that the missing argument does not.

This reasoning is especially sloppy and reckless coming from someone publicly presented as a political historian, former Member of Parliament and Cabinet minister, and Privy Counsellor. While Rees-Mogg is not a theologian or canonist, it is reasonable to expect someone of such stature to know the basic distinctions between office and act, possession and the rightful exercise of jurisdiction, secular usurpation and claimed ecclesial necessity, and general principle and particular application. Instead, historical solemnity substitutes for formal comparison, papal authority substitutes for adjudication, and Fisher’s martyrdom supplies the moral gravity that the missing argument could not provide.

Rees-Mogg’s position is not moderate because it stands between liberalism and extremism. It is structurally disordered because it begins with the subject, leaves the object unadjudicated, reduces the wider recurring effects of loosened form to “abuses”, substitutes canonical permission for doctrinal resolution, and then pronounces schism without demonstrating its premises.

The same recurring pattern appears throughout Rees-Mogg’s response and, more broadly, post-Conciliar “conservatism”, which acknowledges the visible disorders, absolves the governing form, but protects the Council and reform from causal judgment, manages the resulting problems through permissions and discipline, and then condemns those who insist upon examining the cause.

This is why the position is more insidious than open liberalism. The liberal at least exposes the revolution. The “conservative” obscures it, protects it, and condemns those who refuse to cooperate in the obfuscation. This is why post-Conciliar “conservatism” has not ended the crisis. It has extended its life.

Nothing argued here requires a judgment of Rees-Mogg’s private intentions. “Intellectual dishonesty” is used structurally—meaning, a position is objectively intellectually dishonest when it depends upon suppressed premises, unacknowledged equivocations, category collapses, or conclusions that its own admissions do not support.

Rees-Mogg admits enough to open the Council, the liturgical reform, the papal prohibition, and the state of necessity to judgment—but arranges those admissions so that none may affect the conclusion. Instead, the crisis is acknowledged but its cause is protected; papal authority is affirmed but made to substitute for adjudication; and the SSPX is condemned while its argument remains unheard. Whatever the intention, that is the objective structure of the reasoning.

Rees-Mogg—similarly as we demonstrated with Marshall here and here--is therefore not an isolated anomaly, but a prominent expression of a growing commentary culture and gatekeeping class. Its members retain the appearance of cultivation, integrity, scholarship, seriousness, and good manners, yet their reasoning reveals a profound detachment from the reality they presume to interpret. Assertions, personalities, optics, canonical status, and authority do not merely accumulate around the disputed object while leaving it unjudged; they replace the object, until the appearance of order is mistaken for order itself and institutional continuity for truth.

At best—and without imputing bad faith—this reveals a mode of thought so habituated to the enclosure that it has become oblivious to what stands before it. The crisis is therefore not merely that the gatekeepers refuse to judge reality, but that they increasingly appear unable to recognize it.

The SSPX controversy exposes two crises at once: 1) the visible crisis in the Church; and 2) a deeper crisis in the ordinary act of judgment itself. The first concerns Vatican II, the liturgical reform, doctrine, authority, and the preservation of the Faith. The second concerns whether Catholics still know how to identify the object in dispute, distinguish a premise from a conclusion, demand demonstration before condemnation, and follow reality wherever it leads (see here)-- in other words, a crisis in the ability of the mind to agree with reality.

These crises are not unrelated. Catholic trust in legitimate ecclesiastical authority is not the problem. It is ordinarily proper because authority, by its nature and end, is ordered to truth, Tradition, and the salvation of souls. When authority is rightly exercised, the faithful are formed in truth, obedience, and stability.

After Vatican II, however, particular acts and exercises of ecclesiastical authority became implicated in disputed novelties, ambiguities, and reforms, while the faithful’s normal habit of trust continued to be invoked as though the normal conditions remained intact. A Catholic strength has thereby been made vulnerable to being used against the very adjudication the abnormal situation required. The invocation of authority came to substitute for adjudication; “implementation” for causality; canonical status for doctrinal resolution; sympathy for argument; and accumulated assertions for conclusions that actually follow from their premises. What began as a crisis concerning the Council—its texts, principles, reforms, and effects—became a crisis in thinking about the Council—the disordered method used to judge—and eventually a more general inability to think in an ordered way.

This is where post-Conciliar “conservatism” has been most damaging. The open liberal at least makes the direction of movement visible. The “conservative” recognizes fragments of truth, surrounds the crisis with Catholic language, and then prevents those recognitions from governing the conclusion. Whatever the subjective intention, the position functions as a gatekeeper for the Conciliar settlement, as it permits criticism of consequences while protecting causes; permits attachment to Tradition while withholding judgment of the form that displaced it; and permits endless discussion while preventing arrival (see here and here). The SSPX is therefore not the ultimate object of this article. It is the concrete case through which disorder in reasoning has become visible.

Our deeper purpose is to invite Catholics to begin thinking again in the ordinary and Thomistic sense—beginning with reality itself, identifying what a thing is, judging the object before the subject, and permitting the evidence to determine the conclusion—rather than in the Enlightenment sense of making the autonomous subject the measure of reality. If Catholics recover that order, the entropic time loop begins to break (see here).

The crisis has endured not only because error was introduced, but because obfuscation has made the error difficult to identify and judgment increasingly difficult to perform. Post-Conciliar “conservatism” has prolonged the crisis precisely by extending its disorder into the habits of judgment of generations of Catholics. Recovering the proper order of judgment is therefore not ancillary to resolving the crisis; it is indispensable to it. Enough is enough. Gatekeepers refuse to judge reality, but they increasingly appear unable to recognize it—maintaining the Cartesian enclosure into the entropic time loop of perpetual displacement.