There is something deeply rotten in the current traditional Catholic media ecosystem, and two recent Trad Inc. podcasts put it on full display. They want their audience to believe they are the sober men in the room, the mature men, the spiritual men, the men too elevated to get caught up in vulgar partisanship. But the act falls apart the moment you listen closely. Anthony Abbate of Avoiding Babylon explicitly says he does not want to “add to the chorus of people who are lambasting the pope,” and then almost immediately pivots into a prolonged denunciation of Trump, MAGA Catholics, voting, and the Republican base.
That is the whole trick. Leo gets the kid-gloves. Trump gets the flamethrower. The pope who visits mosques, speaks the language of interreligious fraternity, and keeps generating scandal after scandal is treated as a sad but predictable fact of postconciliar life. The non-Catholic American president, by contrast, becomes the true menace, the real obsession, the daily fixation. Abbate treats Leo’s mosque appearance as just another instance of the same old conciliar naïveté, while insisting he will not join those “lambasting the pope.” In other words, Leo may continue dismantling Catholic seriousness in public, but the real emergency is that conservatives are still voting Republican.
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