The Lefebvrians relate to the Catholic rite as Pupo relates to the high school final exam, or whatever we want to call it. The degree loses value, the diploma is not enough to find a qualified job with sufficient pay to repay the investment of time and money, but those who have not even completed high school continue to chase that piece of paper, despite international successes (a prophet at home and in Putin’s Russia). The ultra-traditionalists relate to religious practice as gays, and here everyone can use the acronym they prefer to indicate them, relate to marriages and children: which interest less and less those who can celebrate and have them but very much those to whom they are still forbidden or limited. Human beings are made this way, the drive of desire and need is twisted.
The so-called second Lefebvrian schism had a very wide, almost incomprehensible media echo, for which various reasons can be hypothesized: from the alternative to the heat as a theme of summer mass distraction to being the first to unfold in the social era. Followers count and are counted, in short, not the truly practicing faithful. Just as the focus of the affair is insisted upon as the Latin Mass, which is actually fully authorized. The affair is observed with the usual superficiality.
A couple of useful interventions to better understand are the Corsera interview with Father Georg, former secretary of Pope Ratzinger not treated exactly paternally by successor Bergoglio, and the comment by Roberto de Mattei, perhaps the clearest figure of the Catholic traditionalist archipelago. Which is as varied as it is tiny. Returning to numbers, the faithful are few, the gate is narrow as the eye of a needle (biblical translation errors aside). But even those of the official conciliar rite and ecclesiastically correct are scarce and in dramatic decline, a vertical collapse celebrated in the era of the democratic republican constituent and women’s suffrage.
Eighty years ago, Italians declared Catholic were almost the totality and those who regularly attended Sunday Mass were a silent but vast majority. Then came the economic boom, materialism, consumerism, DC-PCI bipolarism, mass radical party and Italy secularized. So why bother with the Lefebvrians? Perhaps because, like the faithful of the Eastern Catholic and Orthodox Christian rites, or like the very rare anchorites who communicate to the world via social media their choice to withdraw to a certain hermitage, they remind us that the desire and need for the sacred is not cultivated by accommodating and following the world. As the failed conciliar reform tried to do.
