“Okay then, smart guy…

if you think “neo-Catholic” is a useless pejorative, why do you use the term “Rad Trad” sometimes?”

Because I don’t think it a useless pejorative but a descriptive term. In my book, a person earns the term “Rad Trad” when they violate Romans 14 and start reducing their pet form of Traditionalist piety to the sum total of the Catholic Faith.

Understand this: I have no. problem. whatsoever with Traditionalist piety. My son frequents the Extraordinary Form and we have numerous dear friends who do as well. They are not Rad Trads. Why? Because they do not talk and act as though brother and sister Catholics who are docile to the Church, frequent the sacraments, and practice charity are half-breeds, fifth columnists, and contemptible quasi-Catholics if they do not attend the EF. In my experience, most Traditionalists I know in real life do not do this at all, while a disproportionately large number of on-line Trads (though still not all) *do* talk this way.

It’s really that simple. The Church is a garden of a million flowers and I say “Let ’em all grow”. But the moment one flower starts insisting that all the other flowers, despite their docility to and love of the Church “aren’t really Catholic flowers because they aren’t like me” is the moment I call foul.

It’s one thing to criticize real dissent against the teaching of the Church. It’s quite another to say that because somebody “sounds Protestant” in the way they talk, or is vehemently suspect of not loathing the Second Vatican Council, they are not “really” Catholic. I am as opposed to Reactionary Dissent from the Church as I am to Progressive Dissent. The Lefty who does not dissent and reduce the Faith to her particular preoccupations (a model of this admirable quality is, for instance, Dorothy Day) is just one more flower of the Church in my book. Likewise, the Traditionalist who does not reduce the Faith to his particular approach to it is fine by me. That also goes, by the way, for the Evangelical convert who does not insist that all Catholics everywhere have to knuckle under to his logocentrism, his particular conservative political enthusiasms, and his deep need to articulate everything in propositional form. So long as he doesn’t bind all Catholics to his particular culture and piety, he’s good to go. As Romans 14 puts it, all these do what to do out of love for the Lord. But whenever some subculture or piety demands that the whole Faith be reduced to itself, I recoil: be it the Apologetics Subculture, Rad Trads, or Lefty Social Gospellers.