Profiting from Crisis? Catholic Traditionalism during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, traditionalist Catholic communities have been able to draw worshippers from mainstream parishes that restricted services, thereby profiting from the crisis. In addition, they have used pandemic conditions to advance an ultra-conservative strain of Christian theology that foregrounds the role of believers in the Ecclesia militans or “militant Church” by rejecting (in part) state-imposed measures against the pandemic and propagating a critique of vaccination in line with decades of mobilization against abortion and secularism. The paper focuses on the largest of these communities, the Priestly Fraternity of St. Pius X and the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter. Focusing mainly on Austria, it details how these communities have sought to leverage the crisis to court worshipers from mainstream parishes and advance their long-term strategic ambitions to destabilize the post-Second Vatican Council status quo within the Roman Catholic Church.