In 1826, an old royalist priest in the French countryside wrote his spiritual testament. “I, the undersigned François Jacquemont…declare that I wish to live and die in the bosom of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church.” While insisting on his total fidelity to Catholic doctrine, Jacquemont lamented certain “woes” afflicting the Church of his day: “Almost all the new clergy of the kingdom are imbued with ultramontane maxims, Semi-Pelagian errors, and the corrupt morals of the Jesuits.” Jacquemont believed he lived in evil times, when Catholic “Truth” was “covered with the opprobrium that deceit and error deserve.” Although he would never accept the label—and wrote a defense of his opinions on this score—Jacquemont was one of the last true Jansenists.
Jacquemont was hardly the first to object to being called a Jansenist, a pejorative term coined in the seventeenth century by opponents of the rigorist Catholic reformers dedicated to the theology of St. Augustine. Nor would he be the last. Even after the Jansenist movement went extinct in the nineteenth century, the memory of the dissident sect continued to haunt and inspire, particularly in France. Under the entry for “Jansenism” in his Dictionary of Received Ideas (compiled in the 1870s), the great French novelist Gustave Flaubert wrote, “People don’t know what it is, but it’s chic to talk about.”
It is often said that, while history doesn’t repeat itself, it does rhyme. While there are no Jansenists today, parallels between the Jansenist crisis in early modern Catholicism and the ecclesial situation facing traditionalists are becoming more and more apparent. It would be anachronistic to equate contemporary traditionalism with Jansenism, but those traditionalist Catholics who are increasingly at odds with Pope Francis—and, in some cases, with Vatican II and the modern Church itself—are occupying a similar ecclesiological and ideological position as the Jansenists did in their time. They are also employing some of the same strategies for dissent and survival.
But what exactly was Jansenism? Why is its memory both evocative and nebulous? Both of us have taken stabs at defining Jansenism for popular and academic audiences, most recently for an Introduction to a new anthology of thirty-one Jansenist sources in English, published in 2024 by the Catholic University of America Press. France in the 1600s was full of powerful currents of Catholic renewal. Jansenism was born when several of these currents converged at Port-Royal des Champs, a convent outside Paris. The abbess, Angélique Arnauld, had reformed this lax house and attracted the admiration of devout clergy like François de Sales and the Abbé de Saint-Cyran. The latter worked closely with a Dutch theologian named Cornelius Jansen. Saint-Cyran and Jansen agreed that the contemporary Church was in danger of succumbing to a poisonous error—the theory of “Molinism,” devised by the Jesuits, which sought to give a positive account of free will even after the primordial Fall. Jansen’s book Augustinus (1640) was intended to offer a corrective to this account. Instead of newfangled Jesuit Semi-Pelagianism, the true doctrine of the Church was the “efficacious grace” that St. Augustine had described, a totally unmerited divine gift that changed a person’s desires from evil to good. Tightly connected to this view of divine grace was an opposition to moral laxity in the confessional, a phenomenon they also blamed on the Jesuits. Jansenists, then, were calling for a lukewarm, compromising Church to return to the doctrinal purity and moral rigor of the early Church.
The community that formed around Port-Royal attracted some of the most spiritually serious people in France, including several members of the Arnauld and Pascal families. Women—many of them well-read and intellectually confident—formed a vital core. What had begun as a network of Catholics with a shared set of convictions quickly came to be seen as an organized movement, threatening to both the ecclesiastical authorities and the king, Louis XIV. It was partially at the urging of the French court that, in 1653, Pope Innocent X condemned five propositions allegedly found in Jansen’s book. Thus, “Jansenism” became a heresy, though nearly all “Jansenists” claimed not to hold the ideas that the pope had condemned. The story of Jansenist clashes with ecclesial and royal authorities over the next two centuries is full of twists and turns.
By the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, Jansenism had, despite of many setbacks, spread across Europe. “Jansenism” had come to imply a specific perspective on everything from vernacular Bible reading to the relationship between the papacy and local bishops to attitudes toward religious toleration. At the height of their influence in the late 1700s, their books were read and celebrated from Mexico to Lebanon. But Jansenists quickly fell from this height. For various reasons, they were unable to adapt to the myriad changes of the revolutionary world. As a movement, Jansenism limped into the nineteenth century, before being swept away by the tide of a resurgent ultramontane Catholicism. The late F. Ellen Weaver aptly described Jansenism as “a Reformation that failed.”
Despite an abundance of recent research that has made this story more accessible than ever, Flaubert’s quip about “chic” Jansenists still has a lot of truth to it. The use of the term “Jansenist” as a slur has had surprising staying power, filling a variety of polemical, rhetorical, and even perhaps psychological needs. For some, “Jansenism” means a kind of crypto-Calvinism, something fundamentally foreign to the Church. For others, “Jansenism” encapsulates everything wrong with pre–Vatican II Catholicism: mean nuns; authoritarian priests; sexual neuroses; fire-and-brimstone homilies; rote prayers; and a fixation on purgatory, merit, and penance. Such associations are almost comically unhistorical, since the ultramontane Catholicism that ruled the roost until Vatican II was explicitly anti-Jansenist. Connected to this narrative is another myth: that French Jansenism infiltrated the Irish Church, which consequently exported it around the Anglophone world. That theory simply equates Jansenism with rigorism and clericalism.
Still, despite all the important differences between Jansenists and contemporary traditionalists, there are striking surface-level parallels between them, such as a tendency to moral rigorism, generally pessimistic views of non-Christian religions, a deep mistrust of the reigning popes (and even more so of their entourages), and—perhaps most conspicuous of all—a loathing for the Society of Jesus.
At a deeper level, comparison of the two movements reveals some provocative “rhyming” in Church history. We are not the first to draw connections between Jansenists and traditionalists. For example, in 1989 the Australian Dominican Anthony Fisher (now archbishop of Sydney) asked whether “Lefebvrism” was “Jansenism revisited.” Probably the most fundamental reason that the Jansenist and traditionalist movements have so many similarities is that both appeal to a prior, pristine state of affairs in the Church. Whether the Church “of the Fathers,” the pre–Vatican II Church, or the golden age of “Christendom,” this allegedly purer form of Catholicism—and the capital-T Truth it reflected—has allegedly been obscured or even effaced. With a few notable exceptions, the current Church hierarchy can therefore no longer be trusted, up to and including the pope himself. Those who should be shepherding the Church have either succumbed to poisonous errors (“Pelagianism” for Jansenists, “modernism” for the traditionalists), or are too afraid, deceived, or worldly to speak out.
In a 2019 interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Cardinal Raymond Burke complained that he was unfairly considered an “enemy of the Pope” simply for clinging to the traditional doctrine of the Church. “I haven’t changed,” Burke argued. “I’m still teaching the same things I always taught and they’re not my ideas. But now suddenly this is perceived as being contrary to the Roman pontiff.” Burke was reacting to Pope Francis’s Amoris laetitia (2016), a document which opened a path to Holy Communion for divorced Catholics who had remarried without an annulment. Opposition to Amoris laetitia, spearheaded by Burke, became a rallying point for traditionalists.
One obvious parallel with Jansenism is the traditionalists’ concern over worthiness to receive the Eucharist. One of the most famous Jansenist texts, Blaise Pascal’s Provincial Letters (1656–1657), skewered the allegedly lax hypocrisies of the Jesuits in the confessional. The Society of Jesus—a treasonous fifth column in the Church, according to Jansenists then and many traditionalists now—stood accused of using word games and mental gymnastics to pervert the Gospel and excuse the inexcusable. Pascal’s vicious and delightful satire was actually written in defense of Antoine Arnauld, the great theological systematizer of the Jansenist movement. Arnauld, expelled from the Sorbonne on suspicion of heresy, is best known for his work On Frequent Communion (1643), which was also a riposte to the Jesuits. Steeped in the writings of the Church Fathers, Arnauld argued for rigorist practices when it came to both confession and Communion.
The apparent similarities here are intriguing: a conflict erupts over the sacraments and the limits of accommodation, with Jansenists and traditionalists calling for rigor, purity, and true conversion, while the pope and the Jesuits emphasize God’s boundless mercy and pragmatic accommodation in light of the moral complexity of a changing modern world. The furor over Amoris laetitia brought to a boil a long-simmering debate about Francis’s pastoral and theological agenda. The Jansenist-Jesuit debates were a clear and evocative precedent, and were therefore referenced by both supporters and opponents of Pope Francis’s reforms. From the conservative First Things to the liberal National Catholic Reporter, Catholics flung the epithet “Jansenist” at one another (irresponsibly, it must be said). Douthat, no friend to liberalizing trends in the Church, dwelt on Jesuit laxity and Jansenist rigorism in a chapter of his 2018 book, To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism.
The Amoris laetitia controversy also had an intriguing parallel with the Jansenist crisis at the ecclesiological level. Four cardinals, including Burke, submitted a formal request for clarification on five doubtful matters (“dubia”), seeking to pressure Pope Francis to explain how his new teaching did not contradict that of his predecessors, especially John Paul II. To the student of early-modern Church history, the dubia episode looks like an updated version of the “Appeal” made by four French bishops at the Sorbonne in 1717. Reacting in shock to Pope Clement XI’s 1713 bull Unigenitus, which condemned 101 propositions taken from a popular Jansenist commentary on the Bible, these four bishops formally appealed the pope’s teaching to an ecumenical council. The cause of the “Appeal” became virtually synonymous with the Jansenist struggle. Rather than extinguishing the Jansenist menace, Unigenitus only hardened and galvanized the opposition. Some contemporary traditionalists dream of future magisterial acts that will “clarify” (or annul) the errors and ambiguities of Vatican II or Pope Francis. Jansenists went one step further, actually drafting a papal bull titled Aspicientes that would restore Augustinian “Truth” at the official level. The Unigenitus crisis polarized the Church for many decades and contributed to a climate of mistrust, rivalry, and even hatred, which helped lead to the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773. It even contributed to the divisions in French society that would finally erupt in the Revolution.
What are zealous Catholics to do when they believe that the hierarchy that claims to teach with the authority of Christ is misinterpreting Scripture, undermining Tradition itself, and promoting impiety and error rather than sound morals and the unchangeable Truth?
There are a few options. We have already described the first: urgent requests for clarification or formal appeals. Both the “Appellants” against Unigenitus and the supporters of the dubia believed that the reigning pope had contradicted the clear teaching of the Church. One rhetorically effective response to such tension in papal teaching highlights the distinction between the sedes and the sedens: between the papacy itself and the incumbent individual pope. On one level, every Catholic would accept this distinction—each pope is of course also an individual teacher and pastor. But when pushed too far, the distinction can suggest a break between a trustworthy period of official teaching (through the pontificate of Pius XII, perhaps, or that of Benedict XVI?) and a current period of papal dereliction. Similarly, too stark a distinction between an abstracted “Tradition” and the teaching authority of the actual Church can serve as a rationale to make ideological war on the contemporary Church while claiming a deeper loyalty to a true, unblemished, and conveniently ahistorical Church of one’s own fashioning.
For traditionalists as for the Jansenists before them, there is a painful gap between the Church’s present and its past. Jansenists tended to unfavorably contrast the teaching of contemporary Church leaders with Scripture and the Church Fathers, especially St. Augustine. Christian antiquity was their polestar. Traditionalists, on the other hand, usually pit the modern Church and papacy against pre–Vatican II “Tradition,” understood as an unproblematic continuity of orthodox teaching and liturgical life that developed over the centuries. Concretely, this preference often means privileging the relatively recent teaching of pre–Vatican II, modern-era popes. However, traditionalists occasionally echo Jansenists in more direct ways. In one recent controversy, the sitting vice president and the Pope clashed in public over the Augustinian concept of the ordo amoris and whether or not it could justify President Trump’s draconian immigration policies and cuts to foreign aid. As traditionalist influencer Taylor Marshall tweeted, “Pope Francis has contradicted Saint Augustine on the Ordo Amoris. Francis is not infallible here. Follow SAINT Augustine on this one.” The Jansenists could not have agreed more: if the pope contradicts Augustine, feel free to ignore the pope.
The founder of the schismatic Society of Saint Pius X, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, expressed this somewhat paradoxical framework in a famous 1974 declaration: “We hold fast…to Eternal Rome, Mistress of wisdom and truth. We refuse, on the other hand, and have always refused to follow the Rome of neo-Modernist and neo-Protestant tendencies which were clearly evident in the Second Vatican Council.” More recent traditionalist expressions of the same basic idea have focused, inter alia, upon an alleged “false spirit” of the First Vatican Council that confused “hyperpapalism” with the pristine doctrine of an ultramontane Catholicism properly within the bounds of certain limits set by Scripture and Tradition. This kind of casuistry admittedly finds little precedent in the Jansenist corpus for the simple reason that most Catholics in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French Church did not hold popes to be infallible (though only a tiny minority went so far as to contest papal primacy).
The Jansenists and their allies ultimately looked to an ecumenical council to right wrongs done by the pope. “Gallicans,” and the wider conciliarist tradition to which they belonged, regarded councils as a higher authority than the papacy, at least in emergency situations. The modern dubia cardinals, on the other hand, operated within an ultramontane paradigm that regards such conciliarist appeals as illicit, and thus they could only appeal to the authority of earlier popes to cast doubt on the authority of Pope Francis. They hoped Francis would blink when publicly confronted with the seeming irreconcilability of his teaching with that of his sainted predecessors. But he did not blink, just as Clement XI called no council.
The second option for Catholics who believe that Rome is at odds with Tradition is to set their sights lower and look for moral and magisterial authority in local bishops or even ordinary priests. This was easy enough for the Gallican Jansenists, who operated in a context where the national episcopacy was already widely understood to exercise specific rights independent of Rome. But only a minority of French prelates sympathized with the cause of the Truth as the Jansenists understood it. The French crown eventually began to mandate that all clergy subscribe to the anti-Jansenist bull Unigenitus. Bishops were not exempt. Most notably, one of the original four bishops of the Appeal, Jean Soanen of Senez, was summoned to a provincial synod in 1727, stripped of his diocese, and exiled to a remote abbey, where he died thirteen years later. This “prisoner of Jesus Christ,” as he signed his many letters, became a Jansenist hero. Bishop Soanen was only the most famous of the hundreds of French clergymen and religious who faced harsh penalties for refusing to accept Unigenitus, their names lovingly preserved in works like René Cerveau’s multivolume Necrology of the Most Famous Defenders and Confessors of the Truth (1760–78).
The emergence in 1728 of a Jansenist newspaper, the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, kept these wounds fresh. Historians have identified the Nouvelles as an important force for popularizing the Jansenist cause, as it appealed not only to clergy but to a public discourse always primarily shaped by laypeople. One part scandal-rag, one part church bulletin, and one part political broadside, the Nouvelles lasted until 1803 and never once let up the fight against what Jansenists called the “woes of the Church.” With an ever-widening ambit of reportage, covering news from Peru to England to China, the Nouvelles offered its readers an indignant account of the various outrages committed against Jansenists and defenders of the Truth by perfidious Jesuits and their willing puppets in the episcopate. Thus, in the decades immediately following Unigenitus, Jansenists looked elsewhere for authority, and found new ways of arguing their case.
A similar dynamic has taken root among today’s traditionalists. A whole raft of arguments for a kind of Frankenstein Gallicanism can be observed in today’s traditionalist media, including Part III of the recent Mass of the Ages documentary on the Latin Mass. That documentary features the embattled former bishop of Tyler, Texas, Joseph Strickland—the traditionalists’ equivalent of Jean Soanen. But Strickland is only one of several bishops who have become symbols of resistance to a papacy that some traditionalists regard as nothing less than a dictatorship.
Just as the Jansenists championed and disseminated their own catechisms, free from ultramontane ecclesiology and lax Jesuit Pelagianism, traditionalists have turned to a remnant of faithful prelates to instruct their communities. Pope Francis’s 2018 decision to amend the Catechism so that it totally rejected the death penalty was the last straw for some. Traditionalists can now avail themselves of an alternative catechism, written by the relentless papal critic Athanasius Schneider, auxiliary bishop of Astana in Kazakhstan. In the words of Larry Chapp, an American theologian not noted for his fondness of the present pontificate, Schneider’s polemical work is an alternative view of Catholic orthodoxy, a “weaponized response to Vatican II” and to the official Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Roving prelates like Schneider and cardinals such as Raymond Burke, Robert Sarah, and Gerhard Müller function as substitute lodestars for orthodoxy in what traditionalists regard as a time of confusion, “ambiguity,” or even heresy at the highest levels of the Catholic Church. Some also look to Carlo Maria Viganò, though his open sedevacantism, which incurred excommunication, is a red line even for many who accuse Pope Francis of heresy (though not all!).
Beneath this episcopal cadre is a less visible but nevertheless potent collection of lower clergy, especially the Coalition for Canceled Priests, who derive moral authority in the movement from having been removed from office, ostensibly for their traditionalist views. Traditionalist orders in various states of canonical regularity, from the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest to the Society of Saint Pius X, make up the vanguard of today’s conservative resistance. In 2017, many clergy joined with traditionalist lay leaders to issue a “Filial Correction” of Pope Francis, focusing on Amoris laetitia. And, of course, the proliferation of a febrile media ecosystem online has propagated the traditionalist cause internationally. During the 2019 Synod on the Amazon, a young Austrian traditionalist, supported by Texas podcaster Taylor Marshall, filmed himself entering a church in Rome, removing a Pachamama statue, and dumping it into the Tiber River—a protest against alleged “syncretism” that the Jansenists probably would have cheered. Pope Francis was perturbed by the stunt and publicly apologized.
The third option for resistance is more dire. If the ordinary channels of authority—not just the papacy, but the vast majority of the Catholic episcopate—turn against you, then what do you do? Perhaps one is living in the End Times. For the Jansenists, a sense of historical doom was reinforced by a method of biblical exegesis known as figurism. Jansenists read the Old Testament as a “figural” representation of the New, and both together as a “figural” representation of the subsequent life of the Church. Thus, their own status as a persecuted remnant within an ever-more-hostile Church was actually a share in Christ’s own betrayal by the religious authorities of his day. One particularly florid figurist tract titled “Jesus Christ Under Anathema and Excommunication” (1737) put the argument this way: “As Caiaphas condemned Jesus Christ, [Unigenitus] has condemned His Truth…. The Pharisees, by decrying the Savior, became impious and blasphemers, while the Jesuits, by decrying the truths they hate, have given themselves to heresy.” Perhaps the Antichrist would even appear on earth as the pope. The Jansenist laywoman Angélique Babet foresaw just this scenario in a mystical vision in 1781.
Then again, perhaps God himself would intervene. From the origins of the movement, Jansenists had been interested in using miracles for apologetic reasons, but none were more famous than the wonders worked by François de Pâris, a deacon who died in 1727. By 1731, his tomb had a reputation as a site where God was actively demonstrating his support for the Jansenists by means of numerous healings. But as diocesan and medical authorities converged to discredit the deacon’s devotees, something odd happened. During their prayers, they started to shake and howl at the deacon’s tomb, which earned them the name convulsionnaires. The miraculous cemetery was closed by the police shortly after the disturbances began. (“By order of the King, God is forbidden to perform miracles in this place,” read one memorable satirical placard.) But the convulsionnaires just went underground and continued their unusual rites for the rest of the century. They shook ecstatically, cried out, prophesied, and committed various acts of ritualized violence during their worship sessions. What started as the cult of a Jansenist folk saint became a clandestine millenarian movement preaching the imminent return of Elijah, the conversion of the Jews, and the end of the world. Working-class laywomen were particularly prominent as convulsionary preachers—a fact that alarmed the movement’s critics. The sustained persecution of the “Truth” by Church officials had opened the way for religious authority to devolve to the lowest, most immediate level—the lay faithful, inspired directly by the Holy Ghost. Though derided by ultramontanes, Jesuits, physicians, and even many Jansenist elites, the convulsionnaires nevertheless became an influential minority in French Jansenism.
Jansenist apocalypticism finds an echo in today’s traditionalist movement. Cardinal Burke himself has repeatedly mused about whether the end is imminent. Last September, he posted on X, “Are these the last times? I don’t know that. Our Lord Himself said that it is for the Father to make these decisions. But it certainly seems that way, and so we need a strong intervention from Our Lord; and we’re begging Our Lady to intercede on our behalf.” Burke is not the only cardinal to have entertained such speculations. But his words are relatively tame for his milieu. One traditionalist author has suggested that the combination of the 2019 Amazon Synod, the COVID lockdown, and (perhaps) Donald Trump’s loss in 2020 have brought us to the “removal of the mystical body of Christ from the face of the earth.” Another has written, “While I am not saying that Pope Francis is the Antichrist, I am saying that Pope Francis deceives the faithful, and he deceives them in such a way that will prepare them to accept a worldly religion that is not supernatural.” Traditionalist apocalypticism has become something of a cottage industry, with firebrand online “influencers” churning out whole books on the subject. Brimstone seems to be in the air.
There is not yet a traditionalist thaumaturge like François de Pâris. But Sr. Wilhelmina Lancaster, a Benedictine nun in Missouri whose corpse was recently found to be incorrupt, might soon be turned into one. The traditionalist press has cast her as a “Modern Traditional Saint,” though the Diocese of Kansas City–St. Joseph has been clear that “there is no current plan to initiate a cause for sainthood for Sister Wilhelmina.” Nevertheless, she has thousands of devotees, including one traditionalist family that drove over eight hours to see her body. Sr. Wilhelmina is already being celebrated as a rebuke to the papacy: “The sanctity of Wilhelmina is more real, in a sense, than the circus in Rome,” wrote one traditionalist commentator and pilgrim to her tomb. Conditions are ripe for an outbreak of partisan miracles, but only time will tell if there will be a traditionalist equivalent of the convulsionnaires.
At the most basic level, these are all strategies for people who wish to remain within a Church infected by widespread heresy and apostasy; they are ways to make one’s peace with minority status and a kind of defeat. The final option, however, is simply to leave. Some Jansenists did just that. Typically, this meant taking refuge in the Netherlands, where a sizable population of Jansenists gathered in the Catholic community of Utrecht. The secular clergy of the diocese had a longstanding quarrel with the Roman Curia, which treated the whole of the Protestant-ruled United Provinces as a missionary territory. During several years of tense standoff with the pope, there was no archbishop of Utrecht at all. When, in 1724, a Jansenist bishop passing through the Netherlands consecrated a new archbishop without Rome’s approval, it inaugurated a schism that has lasted to the present day. What is now called the Old Catholic Church of Utrecht sheltered French Jansenists well into the nineteenth century. The schismatic “Église d’Utrecht” became an important node in the network of international Catholics (including cardinals!) who sympathized with the Jansenists and sought to move the Church away from ultramontane and Jesuit tendencies. In the eighteenth century, one’s opinion of the Church of Utrecht—were they exemplary Catholics or rebels?—functioned as an ecclesial and ideological Rorschach test.
The same path of outright departure from Rome has already been trodden by the Society of Saint Pius X, most famously in Marcel Lefebvre’s consecration of four bishops at Écône, Switzerland, in 1988. It was this act that plunged the Society into a canonically irregular situation that persists to this day. There have not yet been any other major schisms, but illicit ordinations have returned, as in the case of prominent traditionalist liturgical scholar and Benedictine monk Dom Alcuin Reid. Archbishop Viganò also stands accused of ordaining dissident traditionalists to the priesthood. It seems that at least some traditionalists are already taking their own Utrecht Option. Just as the relative safety afforded by Utrecht’s Protestant rulers kept a Jansenist enclave alive well after it might have buckled under persecution in France, the willingness of some traditionalists to go into schism may have saved the Latin Mass from virtual extinction in the decades after Vatican II. But adopting such scorched-earth positions certainly cannot endear traditionalists to anyone making decisions in Rome. For any traditionalist who hopes to see the Church at large return to his or her own understanding of the faith, schism is ultimately a path to self-defeat.
It is worth noting that there are also important differences between today’s traditionalists and the Jansenists. Unlike the Jansenists, traditionalists are not generally focused on the mechanics of grace, nor are they wedded to a predestinarian soteriology. They take many of their ecclesiological bearings from the First Vatican Council (1870), which was explicitly anti-Jansenist and anti-Gallican. The ultramontane devotionalism common in traditionalist circles bears a peculiarly anti-Jansenist pedigree. Liturgy, which is often the focus of traditionalist zeal, was not at the center of the Jansenist controversies. Although they have sometimes benefited from symbiotic relations with right-wing governments, Traditionalists have never enjoyed the political leverage that Jansenists commanded when friendly lawyers in France and “enlightened” monarchs around Europe promoted key parts of their agenda. Today’s radically different conditions also prevent traditionalists from challenging the papacy through diocesan or regional councils, as Jansenists did in Utrecht (1763), Tuscany (1786), revolutionary France (1797 and 1801), and Melkite Lebanon (1806). On the other hand, while Jansenists were spread throughout France and, eventually, beyond, they and their sympathizers were concentrated in Paris. In the wake of the Appeal of 1717, a full three-quarters of Paris’s secular clergy rejected the papal bull Unigenitus and joined the four Appellant bishops. There is no such geographic concentration in modern traditionalism—though, as Massimo Faggioli has observed, Americans are now leading the movement, which used to be dominated by the French. The internet has dispensed with the need for a local core.
Finally, traditionalists have not been persecuted by the state. Their attachment to the old Mass has never caused them to face anything like the Bastille, the public stocks, imprisonment in convents, exile, deprivation of sacraments at the point of death, forced hospitalization, refusal of Christian burial, deprivation of property, or any of the other forms of discipline that the French crown used against a community it regarded with suspicion and hostility. Nevertheless, a siege mentality exists in at least some corners of Catholic traditionalism. A paranoid narrative of government oppression, which first took root during the Obama years, became much more prominent during the pandemic, when it frequently became associated with anti-vaxx and QANON conspiracy theories. In a sense, the persecution complex one finds in many traditionalist communities does resemble the mindset of the Jansenists. But there is a big difference: the Jansenists really were persecuted.
But there is one more crucial similarity worth noting: the response of the Roman Magisterium to Jansenism and traditionalism. In both cases, the concrete issues under dispute faded in importance for the papacy as more basic ecclesiological questions arose. In the case of the Jansenists, Unigenitus was more about censuring an alternative conception of post-Tridentine Catholicism than it was about any particular book or theological idea. In a similar way, Pope Francis has made it clear that Traditionis custodes isn’t just about liturgy; it is a rebuke of those who “doubt the Council,” because calling Vatican II into question also calls the papacy that sanctioned and upholds it into question. It was perhaps with the traditionalists in mind that, in his recent encyclical on the Sacred Heart, Francis denounced “a baneful Jansenist dualism [that] has re-emerged in new forms” that “[refuse] to acknowledge the reality of ‘the salvation of the flesh.’” The Pope, at least, seems to be mindful of the similarities.
Yves Congar had Jansenism in mind when he warned that devout reform movements that develop the “spirit of an alternative system” alienate the rest of the Church, shipwreck their entire agenda, and end by becoming sects. Today’s traditionalists should heed the warning. The history of Jansenism shows how one group of dissenting rigorists was able to adapt and survive for many years, but it also demonstrates the ultimate futility of a sectarian mindset in a global Church.
