What’s A Traditian Order Again?
By Patrick Pierce, Traditius
We are doing some regathering lately as we renew the Order as both a place that honors tradition, and a place that looks to world events from the perspective of Catholic Intregralism, a part of that tradition. Where the Order plans to fit into the Integralist world, philosophically and politically, is the subject of an upcoming column here. But where we are coming from must be set out first.
First, if you dig very deep you will find that the word traditium (Trah-dit-ee-um) refers to the content of tradition and traditio refers to the handing on of tradition. Many years ago it seemed like a marvelously unused word to use as the title of a blog. It began with Traditium, Comments on the Culture, a blog created by Patrick Pierce, a Florida attorney, to comment on current events, and inform interested parties on how to look at the world from a different, traditional perspective, one often critical of the culture and the pervasive effects of ______. At first the preceding blank was filled with the word Relativism, meaning the general idea that there can be multiple truths and the damage that such as idea can do and was doing.
As we dug deeper, the many faces of relativism seemed just a symptom of something deeper, and after some contemplation, the blank would come to be filled with the word Modernism. Many of our columns over the last few years explored that theme, leaning the site a bit less from politics and a bit more toward religion. With this as the motivating factor, the Traditian Order (Trah-dit-ee-in) was born as a place for tradition-minded Catholics to gather, educate others, talk about current events, and fan out from to defend tradition across social media. That was the idea, and we actually did some of that. Somehow, though, the Order ended up with a lot of members who didn’t have a lot of time, which is the story of modern life, and it didn’t accomplish much. Some great writers were gained, some articles were posted, the beginnings of some informational pages on the site were set up, but the steam ran out, and once people stopped writing for the page it became a bit of a wasted effort.
Still, there was the digging–the reading, the disgust at current events within the Church and without, the search for answers in history, psychology and even philosophy. That search led us to the Josias, to professor Adrian Vermeule, to the French–Ahmari uproar on social media, to Servais-Théodore Pinckaers to many others for advice, through a process of overcoming some of our own obstacles, and finally to the final word to fill in that blank above: Liberalism. Not the virtue, not the politic term, but the skewed idea of liberty that grew so monstrous that it has all but driven faith from the respected public square. The sort of Liberalism that can only be remedied with some type of Integralism.
We bring with us to this cause some of our existing outposts around social media: The Paleoconservatives, a Facebook page about the depths of modern culture and politics; the Dominionists, a Facebook page about the environmentalism without socialism; The Traditium, the personal blog page of Patrick Pierce with a Facebook page here, the Traditian Order, the home of the Order on social media, the Traditium on MeWe, Traditian Catholica on Instagram, the Catholic Integralist, a Facebook page meant to link to stories and writings on the topic, and others. Late next month we hope to begin our podcast, In The Traditium. (By the way, if you believe in and want to help with any of these efforts send us a note).
At the moment, the particulars of our philosophy are being spelled out in a column called Integralism and the Process of Crystallization and Clarification, which we expect out in March, before the new podcast. We hope to gain new members, favorable to Catholic tradition and Integralism, who are interested in writing and defending these causes in print and in social media (we happily reprint recent articles if they are on topic). And of course, we are looking for followers to like, follow, comment, spread the word and otherwise make all of these efforts worthwhile.
Welcome back!
Identical
The Dominionists: Genetics
From our apostolate, the Dominionists on Facebook.
GENETICS. The modern environmental movement would have you believe that humanity, in the form of large corporations, is now for the first time manipulating plants to bend to what corporations and their consumers want them to be. Monsanto, for example, is blamed for adjusting the genome of beneficial, edible plants to be able withstand its line of weedkillers so that farmers can just spray everything in the row. The argument against this being that the weedkillers, and even the genetic adjustments themselves, increase the triggering of certain diseases, such as cancer, in humans.
Let there be no doubt: they may be right in saying this. To adjust and change the genome of a living creation of God raises more questions than it answers, and it is certainly more than enough to send a chill down the spine of His creations in the human family.
Know, though, that humans have been bending the plant kingdom to benefit ourselves for centuries, indeed millenia. Ever eat a crabapple? It is harder to eat because it has more fiber and less sugar, unpleasant characteristics that mankind bred out of certain varieties of apple so that it would taste and sustain us better–we kept planting and breeding the sweetest ones until the modern varieties emerged.
Even in our lives we have seen it. Cherry tomatoes are tasty and sweet but grape tomatoes are tastier and sweeter so they are crowding out the cherry tomatoes in the produce aisles, and on farms that want to grow what will sell. We have been breeding the more tasty, and often less healthy, varieties for longer than recorded history. Is that bad?
At what point is our manipulation too much? That is a personal opinion. Is the genetic manipulation of the food supply a brand new and shocking development? Not really, it’s just another step along a path we’ve been on for hundreds of years. Is it a step too far? What do you think?
The Dominionists: Populations
It is the mission of the Order is to evangelize and defend Catholic tradition itself via social media. To that end we have a number of apostolates, this site being one. On Facebook, we have a page called the Dominionists, the goal of which is to help people understand the traditional view of the environment and mankind’s role toward it.
The environment is now under the “protection” of modern environmentalists and their leaders, who are more concerned with advancing socialism than they are in being good stewards of God’s creation.
This website being the face of the Order, as we go forward we will be sharing posts from some of our apostolates here.
POPULATIONS. State laws regulate the hunting and fishing of animals to protect the populations of creatures useful to mankind and other species, and where the species are invasive, dangerous or out of balance, we relax those regulations. This is a part of our God-given, natural duty, having been given dominion over the other creatures. Often compassion is called for in our role as stewards of creation, but at other times it’s just plain time to kill the snakes:
80 pythons caught in Florida’s 2020 Python Bowl
Burmese pythons are not native to Florida and have devastated the state’s native wildlife.
In Saecula Saeculorum
By Patrick Pierce, Traditius.
There is only one measure of things and it is salvation–have souls been led toward, or away from, salvation? The principles are eternal, obvious from creation around us, the deposit of faith and the unalterable magesterium of the Church founded by Christ in the Book of Acts.
I have been weak. An American raised on television and the pablum of modernity, to be sure, I was nourished on liberal democracy: All religions are equally true, all pursuits of the truth equally valid, do what you want, believe what you want, it’s all good.
Meanwhile so many burned, so many walked away from tradition, so many thought that if all faiths are equal, then why waste my time with mine. Even the pope hints that the cultures of the Amazon are equal to the faith of the martyrs, even the bishops seem ready to let heretics into their churches, heresies to persist if it means growing their flocks.
But the flocks, who understand from all of this that there is no truth, do not come. They flee. Because the greatest institution in all the history of the world–the one entrusted with the greatest truth, the great way, the greatest life–effectively says its truth is no better than that of the church down the street. Who, told that, would not flee? Who would not rather spend their Sunday at the mall or watching the television? Even the Church itself acts as if there is not truth.
But all who claim there is no truth, indeed even those like me who were ready to believe it, still have the God-sized hole in their hearts, they still have an emptiness as vast and infinite as God himself, until they understand this this is an emptiness God himself can fill.
The Church created by Jesus Christ is not a weak faith, it is not a faith that will not, at some point, defend what it holds dear, but in modernity it has been sold out. Sold out by leaders who brought in fornicators and heretics, and turned away those who loved its traditions. Sold out by leaders in the Vatican who did not serve Christ, indeed quite the opposite. Sold out by many, but not all, local pastors who would rather get along and go along. The urge to be like the current culture, to cozy up to modernity, is a demonic one. It is the urge to pretend that no one will be judged, that God has within Him no wrath, to believe that all of the Bible, all of tradition, is to be cherry-picked until all that is left is smiley faces and the building of a utopia on Earth.
Study, then, the very Jesus Christ who spoke more of hell and its punishments than he did of heaven, who spoke of Himself as the truth, the life and the way. One need not be clever with mind or words to see that he spoke of truth, of sin, of heaven and hell in stark and plain terms. There was no confusion like the current pontiff generates, there was a clarity of faith, a shepherding toward the narrow way, a building of treasure not here, but in an eternity that was only accessible through salvation.
And so that is the measure, the yardstick, salvation.
It is so easy to believe that this measure of all things does not apply to our politics, to our time, to our reality. But it is the only measure, the only application of eternal truth, the only measure of a state or city or home. Are you helping people toward salvation, to Jesus Christ, or are you not?
How does this apply in modern Western democracies? Who knows? Must they become monarchies, the very model of government Christ seemed to understand? Perhaps.
What we do know is that the atomization of truth–the bubble that surrounds you and keeps your truth from dirtying the truth of the person next to you, is nonsense. If there is one truth, one way, one life, then it cannot be captured in some bubble that surrounds you, it can only be universal. It can only be the measure of salvation. It can only be the knife that cuts through the nonsense, leaving truth and salvation on one side, and abstract indifferentism on the other. No man, no bishop, no pontiff could accept otherwise and maintain their position. There is truth or there is not. Jesus said there was, indeed He said it was Him. To deny the truth, the faith, the Church is to deny Jesus Christ himself. If you are a common man, that is not a good claim to stake. If you are the Holy Father, all the more so.
Traditium, the Traditian Order, the Catholic Integralist, have all, under my leadership been shy to say that salvation is the only measure, but no more. The Traditian Order was created a few years ago to gain members. Now, I do not care if it has but a handful, but it will be a force for tradition, for integralism, for the truth that is Jesus Christ, or it will be nothing.
You are welcome to join us, or to not, but know that we exist, and we will defend the truth of Christ from all who would deny him, within or without.
The Racists At The Synod
On October 21, 2019 two men took pagan statues from a Roman Catholic Church and tossed them from a bridge into the Tiber River. It was taped and is available on Youtube. Since then there have been those who recognize these actions as heroism, and those who seem offended and vindictive about these events.
Most amusing, of course, is that those who claim to be offended, mostly white, are again yelling racism. This in the middle of a “synod” about the Amazon region where bishops are walking around in feathered hats, and allowing pagan idols into Churches under the pretense of ecumenism. The people of the Amazon, though, mainly live in cities, attend Churches, and gave up pagan idols when their ancestors learned of Jesus Christ.
They claim that the people left living far from the cities cannot understand the message of Christ, that the faith must be watered down, dressed up, and it must go native by changing the liturgy or the celibacy of the clergy, or the usual grab-bag of modernist demands. This implies a people who cannot grasp the good news of Jesus Christ unless it too is given a feathered headdress. It is demeaning to the Amazonians and is racism of the worst kind–the kind that seeks to step between them and their eternal salvation.
Meanwhile, Protestant religions, which appear to take the mission of Jesus Christ much more seriously than those running His Church these days, are gaining members by presenting the Gospel unadorned. And they are gaining members with little problem, indeed even from the Church. There is no problem with the people of the Amazon which needs solving. There is no problem with the message and mission of Jesus Christ. There is a problem with a Church run by modernists, indeed hippies gone wild, who, it is increasingly clear, are men who stand against Christ and are unwilling to share His message. Indeed men who bark “racism” at the removal of idols that risk the souls of all concerned, as if they knew how the term really applied here.
There is a Catholic mission to the Amazon which has had no baptisms over decades, there are Amazonians thirsting for the words of Christ, there are souls at stake, and the Church of Pope Francis is playing dress-up in Rome instead of doing the hard work of bringing the message of Jesus Christ, the sacraments of the Church, the traditions of the ages to a people.
That is the racism the Church should be most concerned about.
The Traditian Order is on Pinterest!
Satan In The Light
“I saw the torments of hell and those of purgatory; no words can describe them. Had poor mortals the faintest idea of them, they would suffer a thousand deaths rather than undergo the least of their torments during a single day.”
— St. Catherine of Siena
Modernism is the coming together of many heresies, but if you look carefully you will see that they all share a disbelief in, or disdain of, the supernatural. The supernatural, of course, is the belief in angels and devils, heaven and hell, sin and salvation. It is composed of that which is above the natural, that which we can feel only with the soul, and know only through the highest of reason.
Many moderns believe these unseen matters to be foolishness, ignorance, and in so doing they distance themselves from them, endangering their soul for the sake of honor and pride, for the satisfaction of thinking they are the highest authority over their own lives.
Looking at these latest scandals in the Church is to see this principle in action. If someone believed in heaven and hell, sin and salvation, would they commit these awful sins for years? Would they do so without remorse, without removing themselves from occasions of sin, without recognizing that they are on the path to Hell? It is hard to believe, but the fact is that once you cut yourself off from supernatural truth, you are simply an unprotected soul behind enemy lines.
The Traditian Order 