Endless Thread - Trad Caths Have Risen

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

Two years ago, a headline in The New York Times declared that the hottest club in New York City was the Catholic Church. While that was never true, celebrities and TikTok influencers alike have gotten Catholic-curious over the past few years. More specifically, there's been an uptick in "Trad Cath" content — internet for "traditionalist Catholic" — promoting traditions like the Latin Mass and women wearing veils in church. A lot of these traditions are vibes and aesthetic-based, and easily translatable to social media. But scratch the surface, and many Trad Caths have beliefs about how all of society should look, not just church on Sundays. Endless Thread goes to mass to hear the Trad Cath creed and witness the transformation of a former saint of Catholic TikTok. Show notes: Behind the Catholic Right’s Celebrity-Conversion Industrial Complex (Vanity Fair) New York’s Hottest Club Is the Catholic Church (The New York Times) ‘A step back in time': America’s Catholic Church sees an immense shift toward the old ways ( The Associated Press) Credits: This episode was written and produced by Grace Tatter. It was co-hosted by Grace Tatter and Ben Brock Johnson. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. We usually have a healthy separation between church and state, or at least we try to, but producer Grace Tatter on a recent Sunday, you went to church, thoughts and prayers. I did. Like so many things in my life, I was at New York's Church and Shrine of the Holy Innocence because of some combination of Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok. The Holy Trinity.

Holy Innocence is one of the only parishes in New York that offer the Latin Mass. Hmm. Something, something, pulchari, Puellae. Were there pulchreipuela there, Grace, other than you? I think those are the only words I remember from Latin class. I never took Latin class, so I don't know if you're insulting me. I have no idea. The beautiful girls, Grace. the Polkri Puella. Ah, okay. Yeah, sure.

There were lots of girls all wearing veils, which we'll get to. But the reason that I was at church is because thanks to that Holy Trinity of Social Technology platforms, I know that Latin Mass in Latin is a trend right now. And that is surprising. How surprising are we talking? I mean, I'm pretty surprised. But in order to tell you more, you're going to have to be. have to do Mass with me.

Feed me a biscuit. I'm ready. So we will now present this episode in the form of Catholic Mass. Nominomini, Mabes, Patrice. Part one, the opening remarks. You can't see me, but I am making the sign of the cross. I am your priest on this journey. Now let us say the opening prayer. I'm Ben, Father, Son, Holy Ghost, Johnson.

I'm Grace Slaps Catholic, but still kind of into a tatter. And you're listening to Endless Thread. We're coming to you from the Cathedral of Sound called WBUR. Boston's Vatican City for NPR. Today's episode, Trad Cats. They have risen. Okay, so we did our opening remarks. We did our opening prayer.

Where are we going next? Hail Mary full of grace. Okay. So next in a Catholic Mass comes the liturgy of the Word. That includes readings from the Bible, starting with a reading from the Old Testament. So let me tell you about how things used to be in the olden days. Before the 1960s, all Catholic church services were in Latin. But then...

This is the first ecumenical council in 92 years, and only the second in 400 years. We got a little new testament. The church underwent this huge modernization effort called Vatican II. Basically, it was a years-long convention of bishops from around the world. The council's immediate aim is to make church laws more compatible with modern times and to work towards a long-range plan of Christian unity. Part of getting with the modern times was getting down with modern languages that people actually speak. After Vatican II, the traditional Latin Mass all but dissipated.

until 2007 when Pope Benedict brought it back, a move that a minority of Catholics had been waiting for, especially in the United States. Today, the Latin Mass is more popular here than anywhere else in the world, which is reflected on TikTok. I now officially attend traditional Latin Mass. I'm a TLM girlie now. The way I am seeing the newly devout trad Catholic girlies on Twitter, We're going to have a tradcast summer. You know what I mean? So we hear the word trad on the internet all of the time now, right? Yeah, I guess we're talking like as in trad wife.

It's used to describe anyone who is promoting a sort of more old school, antiquated lifestyle online, especially when it comes to gender roles, right? And we should say that's kind of conservative politically, trad wives? Yeah, I think that's fair from the trad wives that have ended up on my FYW. So on its surface, being labeled or labeling yourself, a tradcath, is a little more specific. It's mostly about getting into pre-Vatican II Catholic traditions, especially the Latin Mass. But there definitely is a gender peace. For women, there's an emphasis on modesty and covering your head during church.

Being covered is a mark of subjection and authority. It induces the woman to be humble and preserve her virtue for the virtue and honest. honor of the governed is to dwell in obedience. Dwelling in obedience. I don't know about that. I was raised Catholic, but this was all... Did you dwell in obedience? I didn't dwell in obedience.

I didn't even wear a veil for my first communion. This was all unfamiliar to me. I don't remember anyone donning a veil growing up except for First Communions, and I'd never been to Latin Mass before. Are you going to Mass in any language these days? To be fair, no. Sorry, Grandma. And I'm not alone. Since 2000, church attendance is down 12 percentage points across the country. But for Catholics, that dip has been faster than almost any other denomination. And this tracks with my experience. I don't personally know many mass goers, though I am a member of a Catholic group chat where we share funny memes with each other called CCD. If you know, you know, you have to be confirmed even to be in the chat. So we're quite serious. But that's about the extent of the extent of, my formal religious involvement these days.

I'll pray for you. Please do. So I was surprised when I heard about a friend of a friend here in Brooklyn who was getting very into the traditional Latin Mass. And then I started getting more content about how to style your veil for church, which is also very pre-Vatican-2 adjacent. This is the person that I've seen myself with the veil on. That is so cute.

And I was also seeing TikToks about how great the Latin Mass is from the actor Shiel above? Latin Mass affects me deeply, deeply. How come? Because it feels like they're not selling me a car. And then I was hearing about it in the news. You might remember this. Harrison Bucker, the NFL kicker,

mentioned the traditional Latin Mass, aka the TLM, and his now infamous commencement speech at a small Catholic college called Benedictine. I do not attend the TLM because I think I am better than others or for the smells and bells or even for the love of Latin. I tend the TLM because I believe just as the God of the Old Testament

was pretty particular in how he wanted to be worshipped, the same holds true for us today. I actually saw this pop up in my feeds, and I am not a football fan or a Catholic. It went kind of viral. He said women have been told diabolical lies about having careers. He advocated for more traditional family households and for men to fight against the cultural emasculation of their sex.

Pretty strange stuff. All of this is part of the Tradgath rabbit hole that I have fallen down, which at first looked like a world that was really about establishing a more surface-level trend. So it seems like people are converting to Catholicism for the aesthetic. The Bells and Smells, if you will. Yep, that's the name of my Super Tradcast metal band, The Bells and Smells. But what I found after reaching out to a lot of TradCath influencers on TikTok and Insta and watching a lot of TikToks and reels is that Tradcasts are way more than that. They represent a movement that has a vision for how all of society should look, not just in Catholic churches on Sundays.

And what or who brought us this revelation? The only person who got back to me. I was raised Catholic loosely. This is Evelyn Lundy. And if you're keeping up with our mass ceremony here, Ben, we're still in the liturgy of the word. And this is the part that's the profession of faith. Evelyn's faith. I have this little wallet rosary that I got, and it is absolutely the cutest thing ever.

For many years, Evelyn was better known by her TikTok and Instagram handles, sunflower Catholic. I found Evelyn because people described her as kind of a proto-trad-cath TikToker on Reddit. We've talked a lot about the trad and trad-cath coming from the traditional Latin Mass, but online people can be a little bit more lucy-goosey with the phrase. Evelyn was never that into the Latin Mass, but she was definitely trad. She talked a lot about wanting to be a stay-at-home mom, wanting to get married and start a family young.

Trad wife one-on-one. Super trad. So-trad. and super interested in old school Catholicism, just not obsessed with the Latin mess specifically. TradCath is a spectrum. A cleanly, godly spectrum. Sure.

But let's go back to before Evelyn was known as Sunflower Catholic or even cared that much about being Catholic at all. When Evelyn was in middle school, her mom signed her up for a youth group at their local parish. More is just something to do. And this youth group became super important. to Evelyn. But when she was going into her freshman year of high school, her family made a big out-of-state move. So that is where I really started to dive into the online Catholic community

because it was kind of a replacement for me of that community I just lost. This was around 2016. Instagram was huge. I had a friend who was Mormon, who had a Instagram account where she would post about like Mormon script. and Mormon beliefs. And I was like, oh my gosh, that's such a great idea. But like, I'm going to do it right and Catholic. And that is really where I got plugged in with connecting with a lot of people. And later on, I started a TikTok as well, which grew even more. Were you still in high school when you started the TikTok? I was. My parents, like, hated TikTok as an app, though. So they, like, made me deleted at one point. But then I just kept redownloading it. I couldn't be stopped.

You can't stop the faithful. Evelyn's family eventually moved back to the town where her old youth group was, but she was already on her way to being an online personality. The original handle was The One True Faith, which I, again, I came up with as a 14-year-old. I was posting these, like, Canva clips I'd made of Bible verses overlaid on, like, pictures of nature. There was no, like, photos of me. People kept thinking I was a guy for some reason, and I got, like, really tired of it. And so then I switched my handle to Sunflower Catholic.

Don't ask me why. I guess I just liked sunflowers and thought that was girly. Who among us understands why we picked the us us we did when we were 14? Who among us, indeed? How many of us were skater chicks who had never touched a skateboard? But back to Evelyn, what she was stumbling into is the school of thought that had existed on the internet since long before Instagram. That's what I learned from Lauren Horn Griffin. The term traditionalist Catholic has been used for decades to refer to Catholics who prefer the liturgy and social teaching from before what they see is the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council or Vatican II.

Lauren is a professor of history and religious studies at Louisiana State University, and she's studied how people use the term TradCath and its counterpart, Radtrad, Radical Traditionalist, online. That term traditionalist Catholic and radical traditionalist Catholic has been used in the 80s, 90s, and into the 2000s. But because of the Internet, the now, like, memified term trad or rad trad emerged in the early 2000s with Web 2. Web 2.0, the internet era defined by social media, the one were unfortunately still in. So the earliest instances of the term that I found came from a 2008 article where some priests and some really active lay journalists were sort of bemoaning the rad tratties. So radical tradcast, the rad tratties take it up a notch.

People described as rad trad often want to split off from the Catholic Church because they think It's too modern. The point is, there was already a long history of people talking about more traditional interpretations of Catholicism online in a way that seemed way more intense than what Evelyn was seeing at her church IRL. Evelyn was inspired. I only wore skirts and dresses because there was this old papal decree from Pope Pius the 11th, I think, the 9th or the 11th, one of them, on like the Marian standards of modesty

that all women in the church should follow. And so I'm looking at these popes and these great saints of the church. And I'm like, okay, so we have to be intense about this, obviously. What did your parents say? Oh, my gosh. They were so over it. I mean, on a certain level, concerned, I guess.

But also they were just like, oh, here goes Evelyn and all the weird things she does. Why can't she just chill? As Evelyn was exploring her faith, she was also posting through it. Honestly, I've always been a girl who loves to do some research. And I loved curating videos about like, oh, Protestants say Catholics believe this, but if you dive into our theology, like, this is actually what it says.

I found that, like, interesting on an intellectual level. And people found what she had to say interesting, too. By the time Evelyn started college in the fall of 2020, she was a recognizable figure. When I got to college, then all of a sudden it was like, oh, my gosh, that's sunflower Catholic. It was almost like being a celebrity, a minor celeb. Yeah, but I didn't like it. Evelyn probably wouldn't have been a celebrity at just any college. But she was at Franciscan University,

a Catholic college in Steubenville, Ohio. And when I say Catholic, I mean almost 100% Catholic faculty and students. A student handbook that says contraception is a moral evil. This is a school where the running club isn't about running for, fitness, but as a prayer to end abortion. Okay, so we're not talking JFK, Catholic workers movement, nuns on the bus, all are welcome kind of Catholic. No. Evelyn didn't necessarily love the feeling of being recognized or people feeling like they knew her based just on her TikTok. But, and I don't know if this will surprise you, her no pants for girl stance hadn't necessarily

endeared her to her classmates in high school. But now at college, Evelyn was, with her people. I loved it. I was like, it's so nice to be around people who get me. And then that quickly started to devolve. Next in our Mass, we will go from the liturgy of the Word to the liturgy of the Eucharist. Transformation Time. But first, Lord, hear our prayer from our sponsors. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But, But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music.

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We are back to our Tad-Cath Mass. And we're about to get into the part of Mass. that's all about the Eucharist, which is really all about transformation. It's when the communion bread and wine become the literal body and blood of Christ. But first, you've got to prepare the altar. Pass me a chalice. I'm ready. Okay. So remember, people are using the term tradcath online since the 2000s.

But it really crosses over into the more mainstream zeitgeist in the aftermath of the pandemic. Talk about a time of transformation. Oh, yeah. Catholicism in general just has a moment, or at least the bells and smells part. Catholic imagery and sounds were suddenly all over Instagram and TikTok. And Lauren Horn Griffin, our professor who has studied tradcast online, has a theory why. Seeing something other than just minimalism than just like gray tile or white tile is like people just are visually drawn to these things. So comments on those types of posts will often be, I'm not Catholic, but I love the aesthetic or, oh man, they really nailed the aesthetics.

Isn't they? Ornate, Gothic and Baroque architecture, stained glass, rosary beads, gilded statues, Gregorian, Gregorian chants. I dig it. It's a vibe. And it sounds like traditional Latin Mass turns the aesthetics up a notch. Oh yeah. There's more incense, more chanting. The pomp dial is turned all the way up. Thus, the eternal question is, are people just doing something for the gram? Yeah. As Catholic-inspired content gets more popular, the sincerity of the beliefs of people posting about it is called into question. Do you actually pine for the mass before Vatican to, or are you larping as Jackie O in a lacy veil? Which brings me to the first time I think I heard the term tradcaf. You know, a lot of people think I'm being Catholic ironically. Right. Which is true. The Catholics of Dimes Square, a social scene on the lower east side of Manhattan that was briefly, but very thoroughly, covered by New York media circa 2021 to 2022. Hey, I'm Nimrod. I'm going to show you Dime Square, the most culturally relevant place in the world right now.

This group kind of coalesced around the idea of flouting COVID restrictions about gathering inside. Some of them were influencers and actors, some of them were public intellectual types, They partied a lot. Heresy. I mean, partying is not, not Catholic. But yeah, they're definitely not practicing the Mary and modesty Evelyn was posting about on her TikTok. One of the most high-profile dime square figures is Dasha Nekrosova.

And she started talking about this brand of Catholicism a lot on her popular podcast, Red Scare. And actually, on any podcast that invited her as a guest. I mean, it seems insane to pass, like, ironically. Right. Even if you go to Mass and you don't mean it, if you continue to go to Mass, things will happen regardless. Sounds like she's giving Edge Lord more than Jesus Christ, Lord, and Savior. Totally.

But the reason I bring up Dimes Square at all is because there's also this ideological component. Peter Thiel was a big fan of Dime Square. Curtis Yarven, a blogger whose writing is explicitly anti-democratic and racist was part of it. Hmm. Okay, so this is all the way to the alt-right. Yeah. The Dime Square Acklite started off poking fun at Girl Boss feminism and woke liberalism and ended up espousing trad ideas in earnest. When you're in one of these high-achieving tunnel vision, career paths, you don't even really get a chance to meet high-quality men, I think. And if you start clicking on some of the Catholic accounts they're interacting with on Twitter,

and TikTok, you see a lot of disdain for feminism. At this point, pretty mainstream. True. But you're also seeing a lot of hateful language about homosexuality and crusade memes that would be right at home on 4chan. Uh-oh. I think it's worth reiterating here that not everyone who participates in the hallmarks of tradcafs, namely Latin Mass and bailing, have extreme right-wing politics. You mentioned the Catholic Workers Party earlier, so you know who Dorothy Day is.

right? Yes, founder of the Catholic Workers' Movement, anarchist, very much to the left. Yeah, and she was a big fan of Latin Mass. People of all sorts of politics find it meaningful. But this link between intolerant extremism and tradcaf is undeniable, and much bigger than Thimes Square, so much so that even Pope Francis has weighed in. Henceforth, priests who wish to celebrate according to the older liturgical books will need to demonstrate to their bishop's satisfaction, their acceptance of the teachings of the Second Vatican Council. In 2021, Pope Francis issued an order directed at American Catholic priest to limit the Latin Mass. He released a statement calling this Latin mass mania in diatrismo or backwards.

Have additional qualifications in the Latin language and use the vernacular for the readings during its celebration. But here's the thing about Pope Francis. A non-aitherto. A non-concations. A non-recyclical. insignificant number of Catholics, do not think he is trad enough. They're trying to say they're more Catholic than the Pope? He's supposed to be infallible, but that's what it sounds like. Which brings us back to Franciscan, where Evelyn is a student. Okay, so let's see here. What do we have on this altar?

Thousands of years of tradition and some modern politics. Now it's time for a complete and total transformation. Okay, wine and bread to bodies and blood hit me. My freshman year, I took Foundations of Catholicism. It is just an entry-level theology class. Pope Francis had just gone on the record saying that civil unions between gay people should be legal and that gay people should not be criminally prosecuted for being gay. You know, to me, that was a fairly uncontroversial statement.

Yeah, what year is this, 1955? Modern era, 2020. Like he's literally just saying we shouldn't kill gay people or throw them in jail and that they should be able to get legally married. That doesn't have to mean anything sacramental or anything to do with the teaching of the church whatsoever. So Evelyn raised her hand and asked, would you say then that it should be against the law for heterosexual couples to have premarital sex? Because that's also against church teaching. And my professor was saying, yes, the civil law should reflect the moral law. I think the church would support that.

And I was just like, whoa, what are we saying? This was the first tiny hairline fracture in Evelyn's sense of belonging at Franciscan. But I was very heavily involved in the Catholic influencing. My scapular broke, so I'm just going into the Catholic store for one thing. I did have a handful. At one point in time, this is so. ridiculous. But I had a little like conversion counter in my phone where I was like tallying up the people who were DMing me that they were converting to the Catholic faith because

of engaging with my content. Wow. Do you remember the number? I don't. I don't. I mean it wasn't anything crazy. Like it was definitely under a hundred. That still sounds like a lot. That's what I thought. Around this time though, Evelyn started to feel a lot of pressure about being a good Catholic. Starting my freshman year, I started to have a lot of panic attacks. Evelyn was also grappling with her sexuality, specifically the fact that she was attracted to women. Franciscan doesn't have Greek life, but they have these living communities called households. Evelyn tried to join one. And when they found out that I was by, which is what I was saying at the time, being very in denial of actually just being a lesbian,

they, and I was saying that on a pure level of this is something I struggle with. I struggle with same-sex attraction. I was not saying, this is a good thing, and I'm going to date a girl at this point by any means. But when they found out about that, they expressed that some girls in household were uncomfortable with that. But Evelyn really tried not to question too much about the church, even to herself, until the end of her sophomore year. It really coincides fully just when I was receiving mental. health care. I honestly think I got very lucky just because I was not able to get a spot in the on-campus counseling clinic. It was just full, and so I decided to look off-campus.

With the guidance of a therapist, Evelyn began to question a lot more about the beliefs of everyone around her, loudly, on TikTok. I used to buy into the conservative Christian narrative of, oh my gosh, I just want to get married and be a housewife because my calling is to stay at home with my babies and big kids. Fred, now that my brain has solidified a little bit, like the frontal lobe bit, whatever, I've come to the conclusion that this common conservative Christian girlie take is actually just a way of us collectively hating capitalism. This did not go unnoticed.

There were a couple large TikTok slash Instagram accounts in the Catholic world that started like publicly denouncing me and my views. Man, TikTok is crazy. People really are out there just making any and every kind of claim. That's just not true. People definitely were just like she's going off the deep end. By the second half of her junior year, Evelyn had spent a semester studying abroad in Austria. She was dating a woman.

She changed her handles on social media from Sunflower Catholic to written by Ev and the life of Ev. When it reached a point where it was clear to me that I was just exiting the church, it became very difficult to post on social media because I kind of just stopped posting about religion a little bit, and then people were like, well, what, are you not still Catholic anymore? And I just, like, wasn't addressing it. Evelyn didn't want to be cath at all anymore, much less anything approaching Trad-Cath, but she wasn't sure if she could just come out and say that publicly. Sure. She's living in a Trad-Cath world, basically realized on a college campus.

I eventually ended up, like, reading the school's student handbook cover-to-cover, and I was like, okay, I can go here and not be Catholic and they can't kick me out, but I can never talk about the fact that I have a girlfriend. Evelyn told her followers the part of her truth that she felt like didn't violate her school's roles. The question everyone's been asking, am I even still Catholic? And as I'm pretty sure most of you have gathered at this point, no, I'm not. And then something happens.

Soon after the start of her senior year, she gets called into a meeting. with her school's administration. The meeting was such a confusing thing. I sat there afterwards being like, so do I leave? Because basically what was said in this meeting was not, hey, you have to leave our school. But it was like, hey, we see what you're posting on social media.

And we really do not like some of these things you're posting on social media. And also, wow, you post a lot about gay people. And we see that. And that's kind of interesting. And also, did you know we have conversion therapy in our wellness center on kids? campus? Have you ever thought about it? No, Franciscan's official resources on same-sex attraction aren't exactly prey the gay away,

but they do emphasize lifelong abstinence and, you know, refer to being queer as, quote, struggling with same-sex attraction. And I, like, left the meeting and was like, okay, my options at this point are delete all of my social media and just like literally not say a single dissenting thing so I can make sure I graduate with my degree or just leave. I'm jumping around a bit here in our Catholic Mass, but the end of Mass is concluding rights. There's a blessing and a dismissal. But we're not tradcast, are we, Ben? We are not, Grace. So let's do a switcheroo and start with the dismissal. Not that Franciscan dismissed Evelyn, she dismissed Franciscan. This was not an easy decision.

I hated being there. I did not want to be there, but I had sank so much money into that education and have looked into transferring and knew I was going to leave with like about zero transferable credits and was like, I just have to finish this out. I like financially could not bring myself to make the decision to just leave of my own accord, much less explained to my parents who I was not out to at that point why I felt the need to leave. It was an oldest daughter nightmare, that's for sure. But Evelyn withdrew. Definitely, like, in the following weeks, just started to be, like, a deep sense of relief that I didn't have to keep up appearances. All right. Is it blessing time, Grace? Blessed be. Oh, thank God.

Now that she was no longer bound by Franciscan's Code of Conduct, Evelyn did something she'd wanted to do for a long time. She shared with her followers that she was in a queer relationship. It was a big moment on Reddit. Written by Ev, formerly known as Sunflower Catholic, has publicly announced her girlfriend after leaving the church and Franciscan University. I couldn't be more proud. Has anyone else followed her transformation?

It's pretty remarkable. I've been fascinated with her since she, She was a small-time trad Catholic TikToker. Her deconstruction lately has been lit. And I'm enjoying watching her burn it all down. You could say that they were giving Evelyn their blessing. Of course she had her haters, but she found that most people online were happy for her.

I'm in online school right now doing a self-paced program. I'll be graduating by December because I'm really just pushing through it. And I'll be happy to have a degree from a different school. So definitely worth it in my eyes. Okay, we're winding down the concluding rights of mass. We had our dismissal, Evelyn got a blessing. But before we leave, I want to go back to the real mass I went to at the church and shrine of the holy innocence, my first Latin Mass.

On the Sunday that I went, the pews were packed, filled with hundreds of people of all different ages and races, whispering in all different languages before the service started. That's a potential appeal of the Latin Mass, right? It's mostly the same no matter what part of the world you're in. Yeah, you can see how that would be comforting. And there's also just something to be said for the feeling of just kind of being outside of time. This particular Sunday was the day after the first assassination attempt against Donald Trump.

And the news outside was a toxic swirl. But in here, I thought that maybe a lot of the troubling rhetoric around the traditional mass online was totally separate from what was actually happening in this church on this Sunday. No blurred lines between the internet and the Catholic Church here. But then came the homily, the part where the priest provides commentary on the day's readings and often tries to make some connection with contemporary life. And this was in English. An attempted assassination takes cancel culture to a new level.

The priest went on to talk about a prayer book from the, this group called Operation True Cross. Several weeks ago, we highlighted that green booklet, the prayers to save America. Operation True Cross preaches that it's God's plan that former President Donald Trump will serve a second term, and that might only happen after a period of violence. That sounds kind of Q&Nan adjacent. Yeah. And what I found clicking through the Dimes Square Catholic social media, these connections to the

all right, that really hit home for me because it meant that TradCath is not just a TikTok trend. This is an identity that is definitely political. And this is where it seems like some of the trend is morphing into, is that fair to say? I think it might be transitioning into something that connects more directly to mainstream politics. Which is why we're bringing you this story in October ahead of the election. Right. It's not just the veils. It's not just the bells. It's not just the bells and smell. It has more serious implications, even if it's still being described somewhat simply.

I really like that the Catholic Church was just really old. So that is vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, who might be the vice president. And who might turn some of that emphasis on tradition into actual policy. He is not using the trad-cath hashtag yet. But he might be using the trend to get elected and to sell some of his ideas about, the place of women in the American family. All with the language of tradition that can be found in TradCath TikToks. Politicians appropriating the language and tools of the population to control the population?

Now that is a tradition. The mass has ended. Go forth. Endless thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and produced by Mary Magdalene Grace Tatter, co-hosted by me. Ben Brock Johnson. Mix and sound design by Paul Vicus. The rest of our team is Amory Sievertson, Dean Russell, Emily Jankowski, and Summa to Joshi. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between the Catholic mystery of faith and mysteries of the internet. If you have one you want us to solve, email us, Endless Thread at wbUR.org. Go with God.