One representative passage from the Documents of Vatican II expounds that “some nations with a majority of citizens who are counted as Christians have an abundance of this world’s goods, while others are deprived of the necessities of life and are tormented with hunger, disease and every kind of misery. This situation must not be allowed to continue.”

Those lines are official Catholic doctrine, but if recited today on Fox News they would be derided as rampant globalism. And they certainly fly in the face of the “America First” doctrine of the Trump-era nationalist right.

And as noted by the Times, some trad-Caths even ascribe to the idea of sedevacantism (this group loves inventing fancy nonsense-words) which holds that all popes since the Second Vatican Council are illegitimate. Other trad-Caths simply refer to themselves as “postliberal,” an ideology advancing no original ideas of its own but instead standing upon a rejection of modernism and liberalism.

There is no doubt that the trad-Cath movement is metastasizing and often dovetailing with Christian nationalism through the shared notion that “Western civilization” is at risk. In a 2014 speech at the Vatican, longtime trad-Cath Steve Bannon told attendees, “I believe the world, and particularly the Judeo-Christian West, is in a crisis.”