I'd be interested to know as well, things are bad where I am...

I actually agree: the new home of traditionalism is the USA. Maybe because it's less politicized than in other, older countries.

I think that it could well just be the internet's fault. Unfortunately in the U.S. the internet trade are legion and often fight with each other (cf. Mike Voris (my autocorrect changed this to "virus", which was too amusing not to share), Anthony Stine, Taylor Marshall, Ann Barnhardt, et al.), and they tend to block out others on the Google.

But traditionalism is big in France, and other countries too, and has been growing in others since Summorum. If one looks at the photoposts at New Liturgical Movement for big feast days one will see a representation of a good portion of the globe including Australasia, South America, Europe and Africa (there are decent-sized pockets of traditionalists in Africa, ministered to by the SSPX and ICKSP).

And I can attest to the difficulties of accessing foreign press, secular and Catholic: I tried on several occasions to subscribe to The Guardian (international print version), and despite their website specifically saying that they accepted subscriptions from and could ship to the USA they in fact could not. So I think that the US-centric, if you will, image of traditionalists is not the reality. Of course there have been some high profile trads in the U.S. over the past decade, such as Peter Kwaśniewski or Archbishop Cordileoni, but they aren't the only ones. I also think that part of the "confirmation bias" is because English, particularly American English is the lingua franca of the internet, so even someone in Sri Lanka will publish in English, and could be perceived as American.

The USA doesn't have government-paid healthcare, or much of a social safety net, and our "traddies" have to earn a living for their large and growing families!
Outrage media gigs probably pay a few bills.
Also goes for a few of the "Daily Wire" personalities.

2 factors occur to me.

1) We have now had almost 50 years of big-money conservatism, ever since Paul Weyreich and Jerry Falwell realized evangelicals had lost the segregationist fight and the only way to power was to hook up with Catholics and fight abortion. Along come Bill Kristol and Ralph Reed and Ronald Reagan and Rupert Murdoch to put it all on TV and there we go. The Evangelicals got the Catholic voters, and some Catholics picked up a bit of evangelical fundamentalism and pugnacious behavior. So now you have the nasty spectacle of Rod Dreher and Steve Bannon and the Napa Institute folks mixing pseudocatholicism with truly vile authoritarian political agendas, and the legions of lesser stars in the more-strictly-religious and more-strictly-political spheres. Two generations have addled their brains consuming the media this movement produced, and so you get ever more contrarian and extremist attitudes.

2) The American ur-myth can be crassly reduced to “special guy figured out the right way to do it and was richly rewarded, despite what everyone else said”. From the Puritans to William Penn to the Founding Fathers to Joseph Smith Lincoln to Edison to the Wright Brothers to Henry Ford and Bill Gates, it’s all been the same: “I alone,” or “I and this small number of true believers” “have sole possession of the real truth, and everyone else has erred; I must reject them and forge my own path”. So from childhood, we are taught to revere those who had their own ideas and rejected both hierarchy and society to claim or often reclaim what they thought was true, whether inventors or statesmen or founders of new religious groups. When that’s been part of your psyche longer than you can remember, of course it seems logical to abandon your parish and your bishop and start a new website about your pet issue because you read one blogpost that agreed with you.

Yep. The whole thing is wicked complicated, but my point was that the waters have long been very muddied by profit and much has been written and said and broadcast to serve a whole lot of competing goals by astroturfing, that is: pretending a big corporation or political organization’s messaging is actually that of a grassroots movement.

"Astroturf", v.
Definition,please.

Dear Salieri,
What a lucky escape you had not being able to subscribe to the Guardian. There are much better things to do with your time and money!

I suppose another reason America may seem outsized in the pro-trad movement is partly due to its size: Michigan is the size of the UK (in fact, there are eleven states larger than the UK), and Texas is the size of France… (I can’t remember which Californian city it is; I think it’s San Fernando—the incorporated city limits are the size of Scotland. I’m not joking; one city controls the same landmass as an entire European country!) that means there’s just an awful lot more of us that get all clumped into one group, but in reality, it’s a bit like combining the resources of all the EU under one banner. So perhaps it’s a big false to think Americans are particularly disposed to tradism; perhaps it merely appears that way.

True, but America has 328 mil to Europe’s 447, so it’s not entirely disparate. That’s still a 3:4 ratio.

The 328 million people live in the same country and speak a common language. Now, I'm not claiming that the US is really the center, or the only major place for the traditional movement, but it's obviously important, one of the reasons being that it is a country, whereas Europe isn't even one empire. Yes, you have more or less free movement, but you have a slew of cultures and languages, and English doesn't get you there (in part because you need to master it, in part because European English is idiosyncratic and bizarre to native speakers).

Another reason which mattered more when Summorum was the law, although it didn't hurt in the indult days either, is that Americans are generous insofar as they'd rather as many people as possible find some kind of solution. So bishops eventually created oratories and personal parishes for trads. The canonical stability has been very good for people in what concerns their ordinary lives as Catholics, and it means that these communities can grow without having to beg the bishop for more, as they're already recognized.

And to the OP's original question about Canada: the extreme provinces of the American Empire tend to be behind the US in adopting the latest attitudes, but they do so having advanced the conclusions even further.

Nevertheless, I'm still not sure that the US has entirely eclipsed France; the fact is that the French has most of the monasteries, even if we have far more personal parishes, and it has the SSPX as a major player as well as the former PCED communities plus a bunch of smaller communities; the FSSP wants to have an exclusively Francophone seminary as well.

[And New England is slightly (~7%) larger than England and Wales by land area.]

MatthewJ says he's seen 2016 figures on attendance at TLMs, but a survey by Crisis magazine in 2021 shows a considerable increase in the years 2019-2021.
https://www.crisismagazine.com/2021/the-growth-of-the-latin-mass-a-survey

Their survey got responses from about 75 parishes, with attendance averaging just under 200 for their Sunday Masses, so the article's graph shows about 15,000 Catholics attending a TLM in the US. That is indeed small compared to any diocese, but I am not sure that the authors are drawing the right conclusions from the data.

If I understand them right, they are being very conservative and only giving figures based on the parishes that responded to their survey. That is, they do not seem to be making any projection about the parishes that did not respond to the survey, but are likely to be similar to those that did.

They got responses from 75 parishes, which was 12% of the 658 parishes that were reported as offering TLMs, and that is a pretty good sample size that is likely to be representative of the whole population under study. And if that's the case, the figure of 15,000 Catholics in the responding parishes might indicate a projection of about 120,000 Catholics overall in the US attending TLMs. Still small compared to most dioceses, but a very significant number of people.

Schoenbergian,

So various protest groups in the U.S. would qualify as Astroturf? Ok, but when Gamba says

my point was that the waters have long been very muddied by profit and much has been written and said and broadcast to serve a whole lot of competing goals by astroturfing

astroturfing appears to describe an action.

Gamba,

Do you mean "people setting up fake grass roots organizations", or do you mean "people pretending to be connected to the grass roots, but not really being so", like Chirac to farmers or George Bush to Texans or Biden to Catholics?

Jacques Chirac may have grown up in Paris, but they summered in Corrèze, where he was astronomically popular and actually personally attended to his constituents’ needs, even while he had a dual mandate as mayor of Paris and during his service as prime minister. I don’t think that there’s anything cynical or phony about his relationship to the people; France lost the grandfather of the nation when he passed away, and the long lines of mourners, above all his former constituents from Corrèze, were there to express real, deep, and profound respects.

This is a good question. I am not sure of the numbers anywhere. It would be good to get reliable ones.

I think the ease of setting up charitable foundations has a lot it do with it, as does the fact that we have no established churches. I think the Church atrophies when it gets too much cash from the government.

I didn’t see anyone mention William F Buckley, Jr, thigh i just skimmed through some entires. He now seems largely forgotten. He was a constant presence on TV and through his baby, the National Review, gave a lot of publicity to traditionalism. He himself paid for a private Mass each week and was very supportive of Lefebvre. I always counted him as a huge source of support for the TLM.

Kenneth

If priests continued to offer the old Mass, what happened to them?

I have always wondered what happened to the Priestly Society of St Anthony Mary Claret in Spain or whatever it was called. Not being able to speak and read Spanish, I can't follow up on this. There's some work on the Opus Sacerdotale, but not enough to explain how it became known as fertile ground for trad-leaning priests (or even priests who didn't necessarily start as trad but became so), because its ties to Fontgombault, of which its founder was an oblate if I'm not mistaken, would have persisted through the period where the abbey used the NOM at conventual Mass. There is some work on the establishment of what would become the FSSP, of the occupation of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, the seizure of Saint-Louis (the church of Port-Marly now served by the ICRSP)… but it's a mix of primary, bordering on secondary, sources. There's little academic or even journalistic book work aside from a master's thesis on Saint-Nicolas. Which is all unfortunate, because sociologists could do some interesting things here, especially if paired with the right historian, and between France and the US, you could find the right duo or trio.

I have meditated on this question for some years before. With respect to the previous people, the responses given to the original question asked by schonbergian are not quite satisfactory. Therefore I shall attempt to respond to this topic with my own views.

I speak as a man who no longer lives in the United States, but for reasons of religous freedom, I have been given the privilege of being able to reside with my family in an idyllic small town known for it's giant medieval monastery dedicated to the protomartyrs of Russia, SS. Boris and Gleb, in the heart of rural european Russia. I find many interconnections between the Roman Catholicism of the Americas and the Orthodox Catholicism of Russia.

I think there is a dichotomy to Roman Catholicism in the United States which belies two influences. The first influence is the US Constitution and the nature of "civil liberty" and justice'. The second influence is the legacy of catholic (mostly european) ethnicities that formed the heart of the largest cities working class in the United States, mid-west and east coast.

The nature of the many Catholic immigrants in the United States was that once they arrived in their new home they tended not to any longer take their faith for granted but to become more sincere about it, to the extent that they retained faith in God at all. In the old country of europe (for the most part), there was a tendency to take for granted the faith and assume it was always going to be there, There was nothing to compete with it, it was catholicism or nothing in many cases (or sometimes a mild degree of competition with protestantism). Thus the faithful in the United States would actually question authority more than in Europe and no go along with errors or heresies quite as easily. In the USA the Roman Catholic faithful would indeed question their authority figures.

The second influence is the US Constitution, US political and economic culture as compared say to the European ones. In Europe there was more intransgience with malaise as far as the sense of being able to built oneself up and make a good life for oneself starting with very little worldly power or material wealth. Europe during the 20th century was intensely economically unstable, by the 1920's money flowed from europe to the US and the people went with it. Therefore Europeans as a whole became much more frustrated and gave themselves to a secular worldly materialist political activist mindset, versus the spiritual mystical "trust God to bring us wealth" attitude their ancestors previously had. After world war II most of western europe became a vasal state to the United States and lost the will and ability to be as prosperous as it could have been if left to it's own devices and to a deeper trust in our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore as the winning victors in the post WW-II, post-cold war era the USA Catholics are less cynical and less materialistic than the europeans desceded ones as far as governance, they see themselves as having a right to keep the Church pure and influence it, therefore they are willing more often to take a risk to uphold the teaching and defend it. Europeans are much less willing to question authority, they expect the elites to do this, the average working class person will not, or at least until recently has been less willing to defend the faith, feeling more helpless and that they will be ignored and trampled over regardless of what they do or believe.


The third aspect which has been mentioned here is the nature of the United States of America being one of the largest most powerful nations in the world. I can say that in many ways Russia and China have much in common in this regard. (The European Union has no true political unity and has the little nations constantly fighting amongst themselves). When you're in the USA you have more of a sense of greater unity and connection to all the other people in the nation and ability to organize in larger numbers without having to cross any boundaries, with free convenient movement. The faithful Catholics become almost like an invading army and grow stronger and stronger by the year. Thus we see the situation of the March for Life in Washington, DC where nearly a million people showed up in 2019. Of all the clergy there, a much higher ratio of clergy who celebrated and had more traditional beliefs and liturgy was representing itself, thus allowing itself advertising, growing respect and spiritual grace for further growth.

Essentially when you have groups of people of strong orthodox faith in super power nations, they become in time an unstoppable force, much like during the Roman Empire. Now all we have left is for the age of martyrdom to manifest itself again in the west, and the blood of the new martyrs of europe and north america will than be the future seed of Holy Mother Church's glorious resurgence and flowering for the saving of millions of souls around the world!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHR4mtrhzxc

Troparion: The choirs of martyrs who contested in the ancient times, welcome the hosts of victors newly crowned by Christ our God, and they form one common festival in divine joy. For these ranks which fought for faith throughout the Russian land, set at nought the wicked schemes of godless tyranny. Hence we cry to them: Rejoice! ye passion-bearers of the Lord.

Kontakion: O ye holy hierarchs, royal-passion bearers and pastors, monks and laymen, ye countless new-martyrs and confessors, men and women and children flowers of the spiritual meadow of Russia, who blossomed forth wondrously in time of grievous persecutions, bearing good fruit for Christ in thy endurance: Entreat Him as the One who planted thee, that the Church of Russia and all the world be made steadfast through thy blood and suffering, unto the salvation of our souls.

ТРОПАРЬ И КОНДАК НОВОМУЧЕНИКАМ РОССИЙСКИМ

Тропарь, глас 4
Днесь радостно ликует Церковь Русская, прославляющи новомученики и исповедники своя: святители и иереи, царственныя страстотерпцы, благоверныя князи и княгини, преподобныя мужи и жены и вся православныя христианы, во дни гонения безбожнаго жизнь свою за веру во Христа положившия и кровьми истину соблюдшия. Тех предстательством, долготерпеливе Господи, страну нашу в Православии сохрани до скончания века.

Кондак, глас 3
Днесь новомученицы Российстии в ризах белых предстоят Агнцу Божию и со Ангелы песнь победную воспевают Богу: благословение, и слава, и премудрость, и хвала, и честь, и сила, и крепость нашему Богу во веки веков.

A war cry is heard on the face of the earth and everywhere
the ready warriors draw their sword and enlist for fight
that is what they have been trained to defend the truth and not
The fire that is in their blood will be taken from them.

Long live Christ the King, long live Christ the King
the war cry that lights up the earth
Live Christ the King
our sovereign Lord
our captain and champion
fight for him
It's an honor.

We know that this battle is not easy and many will cower
and under the darts of our enemy they will perish
I will hold my sword high as my Lord uses it
Nothing has defeated him, his strength is that of God.

Long live Christ the King, long live Christ the King
the war cry that lights up the earth
Live Christ the King
our sovereign Lord
our captain and champion
fight for him
It's an honor.

We do not know greater joy, there is no more honorable desire
that with my brothers to be on the line and life together deliver
to the one who deserves the glory and recruited us for love
before Him the knees bend and the heart prostrates.

Except that this is what got us George Floyd protests in the streets of Berlin, which have not only nothing to do with Germany, but they didn't address any problems in Germany, which it surely has…

I'm not, because the 1968 revolution was a disaster in western Europe; I don't think that we can root for or be thankful for accelerating the Parousia beyond thanking God for his providence, and that's exactly what looking positively on post-war Germany, as it turns out, has been.

Also, having lived in France, Elmar, sure, it's a generalization, but not even the French entirely ignore authority like Americans do, with respect to petty laws; we like to talk about the Anglo versus Roman/Latin approach to laws, but, for example, yielding to pedestrians is routine in France, a fairly car-centric country, and while there are motorists who don't, they're an exception, not the rule. Stopping on a crosswalk and rolling into pedestrians on a busy evening, then getting mad for being called out (which has happened to me as the pedestrian) is not something which they do over there. They have strict noise rules, largely obeyed. Again, I'm generalizing, but Americans are actually really bad at following such laws, speaking from experience.

In fact, they are on both ends of the spectrum: they hate the current executive, or at least are profoundly cynical about him, but they have a deep respect for the Father of the nation (it's profoundly psychological; they need the king).

Also, having lived in France, Elmar, sure, it's a generalization, but not even the French entirely ignore authority like Americans do...

Considering France is a good point; I've French relatives and lived there for two years as well.
Indeed they seem to respect 'their' executive (it's 'their own' as part of the French revolution) much more than we Germans tend to do nowadays - after having discovered that following our own 'Führer' was not exactly a very clever thing to do...