Dave Armstrong’s first book on radical Catholic reactionaries — 339 numbered “sayings” arranged across sixteen chapters, modeled in form after Blaise Pascal’s Pensées. The aim is not a legalistic canon-law dispute but a presupposition-level critique: the premises, the spirit, and the “quasi-schismatic mentality” of a sociological sub-group that judges its own bishops, popes, and councils.
Inside: the essential characteristics of the reactionary; faith and optimism against pessimism; the indefectibility of the Church; the so-called “neo-Catholic” caricature; private judgment and “cafeteria Catholicism”; the New (Pauline) Mass; Vatican II and whether it was a “modernist” council; the post-conciliar popes; and a closing chapter on the quasi-schismatic mentality itself.
Written by a Catholic received into the Church by Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J., who attends a parish that celebrates both the Novus Ordo in Latin and the Tridentine Mass — and loves them both. No names are named. The goal, as in the second volume, is to win the reader, not the argument.
Inside this book
- 339 numbered “sayings” across 16 chapters, modeled after Pascal’s *Pensées*
- The essential characteristics of the radical Catholic reactionary — distinguished from mainstream “traditionalists”
- The Pauline (“New”) Mass, Vatican II, and whether the post-conciliar popes were “modernists”
- Private judgment, “cafeteria Catholicism,” and the “neo-Catholic” caricature
- A closing chapter on the “quasi-schismatic mentality” — the diagnosis at the heart of the book
