Review: Catholic militants in the present day

A charismatic priest distressed about the church’s accommodation to modern culture attracts standing-room-only crowds to his weekly lectures. His message: Catholics are under attack by “modern liberalism” and must fight back by living and preaching the fundamentals of the faith, namely that the church is necessary for the salvation of all, Catholic and non-Catholic alike.

The simplicity of this propositional presentation of Truth with a capital T is especially attractive because of the massive societal change transforming an increasingly pluralistic country. Over time, the priest’s tone becomes harsher and more judgmental—and he eventually turns on fellow Catholics and even the hierarchy. The “liberal” church has failed; only this priest and his followers represent the “true” orthodoxy.

Sound familiar?

Though it resembles some 21st-century influencers, this is actually the story of the Jesuit Leonard Feeney and his movement, the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which flourished in Boston in the 1940s. Mark Massa, S.J., tells the tale in Catholic Fundamentalism in America, arguing that the “Feeneyites” and what came to be called the Boston Heresy Case represent the birth of Catholic fundamentalism in the United States. 

Feeney and later Catholic fundamentalists, like their Protestant cousins, resist change above all. As the world around them evolves, fundamentalists cling all the more tightly to the belief that their theological convictions—whether biblical inerrancy or extra ecclesiam nulla salus (“outside the church there is no salvation”)—cannot be tempered. Massa argues that Feeney and his followers became apologists for an older paradigm of the church as the “perfect society” just as the church was moving to a more biblically based paradigm of the “people of God.” To fundamentalists, any shift from what they consider a perfect past is apostasy.

This ahistorical understanding of the past is one of the characteristics Massa uses to describe Catholic fundamentalists—and to distinguish them from more conventional tradition-minded Catholics. Fundamentalists are also often sectarian and militant, and use political labels of liberal and conservative to delineate themselves from mainstream American Catholicism and to denounce their enemies within the church. This latter practice “paved the way for the gradual wedding of Catholic fundamentalism with conservative politics in the United States by the twenty-first century,” Massa writes.

But it is the militancy and sectarianism that ultimately divide Catholic fundamentalism from mere traditionalism, Massa says. Catholic fundamentalists’ apocalyptic language and references to themselves as warriors—particularly masculine warriors—mirror similar tactics in Protestant fundamentalism. And a sectarian willingness to separate themselves from the communion of the church, under the assumption that only they are the true believers, is the antithesis of Catholicism, Massa writes. 

“Catholic Christianity has always condemned sectarian movements—movements that seek to break away from the larger church to become more pure and less contaminated by the world—as deeply suspect and even foreign to the Catholic impulse,” he writes. Feeney, who was eventually excommunicated and dismissed from the Jesuit order, created the template for the Catholic fundamentalist movements that followed, Massa says.

The book takes up six of these movements, each with its own chapter, and categorizes them using H. Richard Niebuhr’s models of “Christ against culture” and “Christ the transformer of culture.” As someone who has frequently covered Catholics on the political and ecclesial right, I was familiar with all the movements in the book. (References to my reporting show up in the footnotes of the chapter on Mother Angelica and the Eternal Word Television Network.) 

The “Christ against culture” movements include Father Gommar DePauw, founder of the Catholic Traditionalist Movement, which opposed the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, especially liturgical ones; Mother Angelica and the Eternal Word Television Network; and the St. Marys, Kan., community of followers of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), founded by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.

Massa details how these movements see themselves as the faithful remnant in contrast to the compromised American church. For DePauw, the novus ordo liturgy promulgated by Vatican II was schismatic and the work of “liberal” U.S. bishops. Mother Angelica, the Poor Clare nun who founded EWTN, also seemed to regard herself as the “authentic magisterium,” over and against U.S bishops. During the 1993 World Youth Day in Denver, she famously denounced the “liberal church in America,” calling it “anti-God, anti-Catholic and pagan.” In Kansas, the Lefebvrites took up what the writer Rod Dreher would later call the “Benedict Option” of fleeing mainstream culture to build a “resilient counterculture.” (The SSPX, once technically in schism, is still not in full communion with the Catholic Church.)

The three movements in the “Christ the transformer of culture” section of Massa’s book also oppose mainstream culture. But rather than withdraw, they try to revolutionize it through education and media. It is generous to call the now-defunct ChurchMilitant.com “media,” given that the website was more of an activist screed against—you guessed it—the “liberal church,” especially what founder Michael Voris termed its “gay subculture.” The site closed in 2024 after it lost a defamation suit and Voris had been forced to resign over violations of the organization’s morality clause. Massa describes Crisis magazine, on the other hand, as a thoughtful neoconservative journal that morphed into a culture war publication under the most recent editors. (Full disclosure: I worked as an intern at Crisis while a student at the University of Notre Dame in the 1980s.)

The third “transformer” of culture, the hyper-traditionalist Christendom College in Virginia, also could be seen as “against culture,” but Massa describes it as trying to transform Catholic higher education and focuses on the union of Christianity and secular power that is referred to in the school’s name. “Christendom” as an idea essentially collapsed after the Enlightenment, especially after the formation of an experimental country where religion would be a voluntary affair. That country, the United States, now seems to be the locus of a re-emergence of the goals of Christendom, particularly among Catholics who call themselves “integralists.”

Massa is a wonderful storyteller, and the book colorfully yet accurately describes each of these movements, providing context and history to demonstrate how fundamentalist Catholicism is often at odds with the church’s traditional understanding of itself and its mission. He also makes clear that while dogma (divinely revealed doctrines confirmed as binding by the church) does not change, church doctrine and discipline in general can develop and even be reversed. There are myriad other groups he could have included in the book, but I have no criticism of those he chose and his descriptions of them. He is to be commended for helping to fight the assumption that Protestant fundamentalist Christians are the only ones worthy of media coverage or scrutiny. 

What I found lacking was any argument of where to go from here. That the United States now seems to be exploding with Catholic fundamentalist movements is more than a little concerning, not just for the church but for the country, if Catholics join forces with groups and individuals advocating for Christian nationalism. It is clear that Catholic fundamentalism, with its inherent militancy, is a serious threat, especially at a time of rising ideological violence. The solutions to these broader societal issues are not simple, but understanding the religious roots and connections is critical.

Massa concludes that the emergence of Catholic fundamentalism, like the Protestant movement that preceded it, was “not an organized theological movement or cohesive ‘party’ in the U.S. Church,” instead emerging “helter-skelter.” “If there was anything like a cohesive master plan, it has eluded discovery,” he writes in the book’s final pages. 

Yet my own reporting—and that of other journalists at Catholic and secular publications—has revealed connections among many groups on the Catholic political right, with certain wealthy individuals’ names popping up on multiple board membership and donor lists. Shedding light on the growth of such groups—and on Catholic fundamentalism more generally—is a necessary first step toward moving the church, and individual Catholics, away from it. We should be grateful to Mark Massa for describing the task ahead of us.

This article appears in December 2025.

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