I’m angry because I’ve spent my life trapped within various ideological subsets of Catholicism that subvert autonomy, critical thinking, and reason itself. Steve goes on to describe a certain kind of Catholicism as a “crippled religion.” More:Īs I sit down to write this, I’m so unbelievably angry. I’ve been trying to puzzle that out for a very long time. Drown in what? What are the logs protecting them from? Why are they so afraid to move beyond the confines of the ideological system? These are not obvious things. You’re starting to pull out the logs, and they’re afraid they’re going to fall in and drown. It’s like they’re on a raft in the middle of the ocean. There’s a fundamental truth that they’re standing on. People get unbelievably upset when you poke them in the axioms, so to speak, and it is not by any stretch of the imagination obvious why. Why the hell do they care, exactly? What difference does it make if all of your ideological axioms are 100 percent correct? You can tell that they do that because of how upset people get if you challenge their belief systems. I’ve thought that for a long, long time, probably since the early ‘80s when I started looking at the role that belief systems played in regulating psychological and social health. I think that there isn’t anything more important that needs to be done than that. I think it’s very important that we sort out this problem. It provides a certain amount of security and group identity, but it’s warped and twisted and demented and bent, and it’s a parasite on something underlying that’s rich and true. They’re like religion that’s missing an arm and a leg but can still hobble along. That’s the right way to think about them. That’s this proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies, and I really do think of them as crippled religions. It’s really not a good thing because it manifests itself not only in individual psychopathologies, but also in social psychopathologies. He consequences of having your rational intellect divorced in some way from your being-divorced enough so that it actually questions the utility of your being. Steve begins with this quote from Jordan Peterson emphases in Steve’s original: Let me quote generously from it - but don’t for a second think that just these quotes do justice to the cry from the heart that is this piece. He finally hit a breaking point when his priest, who sounds like a stone-cold legalist, denied his children the sacraments. He has also - this is in the essay too - been struggling more recently with fellow traditionalists I’ll quote him below as to the reason. Steve, whom I know a bit from correspondence, has been struggling epically with the Catholic Church over its failures to be what it says it is. He was for years a lay member, or at least affiliate, of the cultish Legionaries of Christ religious order, which left him badly shaken.

Some background: Skojec is a prolific writer and the founder of One Peter Five, a popular traditionalist Catholic website (by “traditionalist,” I mean conservative Catholics who are skeptical of the Second Vatican Council, and who worship in the Tridentine (Latin) Mass. This personal essay by the traditionalist Catholic blogger Steve Skojec is one of the most searing things I’ve ever read.

Steve skojec sspx