Tridentineers: When Trying to Be Unbiased Makes One Biased

There is something admirable about what Jonel Esto says he is trying to do at Epistles Online and on the Facebook page The Tridentineers. He describes a balanced approach to the Church crisis, avoiding both modernism and extreme traditionalism. His page bio puts it this way: he simplifies trusted Catholic insights while avoiding modernism and radical traditionalism.

That is a good instinct. The Church does have two ditches, and falling into either one is a real danger. No one who loves the Church should want to trade a vague, accommodating faith for an angry, separatist one, or the reverse. Staying in communion, defending the Church, and refusing confusion are worthy aims, and Esto states them plainly.

The problem is not the aim. The problem is what happens when balance stops being a judgment about truth and starts being a performance of reasonableness. When that happens, the writer overcorrects. He proves he is not extreme by handling the nearer, easier target more harshly than the farther one. In Esto’s case, that target is traditionalists who criticize a prudential judgment of the Church, or even the way the Church communicates a judgment. They get named, motive-read, and scolded. Modernists, by contrast, stay abstract.

That is not balance. It is balance applied asymmetrically, and the asymmetry is the point of this post.

Exhibit A: The Panama passage, and who has to prove what

Start with the passage that prompted much of this discussion. In its summary of the Panama bishops’ ad limina visit on October 21, 2026, the Dicastery for Divine Worship wrote:

“The dialogue also brought to light the danger of extremism in the liturgical sphere and of the instrumentalization of the Eucharistic celebration by certain groups of the faithful. These groups tend to provoke division and confusion by raising issues such as receiving Communion kneeling and in the hand, or the use of the veil by women. It was reaffirmed that the Eucharist is the sacrament of unity and cannot become an object of contention.”

Note what the passage does and does not do. It bans nothing. It does not call kneeling itself extremism. It is a meeting summary, not a decree, and it comes from a dicastery, not in so many words from Pope Leo XIV. But it does something else that matters: it places the mere raising of issues about kneeling, communion in the hand, and veiling next to extremism, instrumentalization, division, and confusion. A traditionalist who raises a prudential question is not answered on the merits. He is located, by association, on the suspect side of the line.

That is what makes the passage disingenuous in what it is trying to do. It presents itself as a defense of unity, and then defines unity as not raising the issue. It presents itself as a warning about extremism, and then defines extremism, in practice, as talking about liturgy in a way the dicastery finds inconvenient. It closes by saying the Eucharist “cannot become an object of contention,” while itself turning discussion of the Eucharist into contention by labeling the discussants.

And it does all of this without taking responsibility for the charge. It is unsigned. It names no group, quotes no one, and gives no example of an actual act of instrumentalization or division. That vagueness is not an accident of a short summary. It is the mechanism. A specific charge can be answered. A vague charge cannot be, and so it hangs over everyone who raises the topic, ready to be applied to whoever speaks next. The dicastery gets the effect of a warning without the accountability of an argument, and the reader is left to fill in the blank with whichever traditionalist he already distrusts.

That is why the defense “it bans nothing” misses the point, even though it is technically true. A document does not need to ban a practice to shut down discussion of it. It only needs to make discussion itself look like disloyalty, and to do so in language no one has to own.

Esto’s own article on kneeling and veils is, to his credit, more careful than the worst headlines about this passage. He says the report does not condemn traditional elements in the Mass, that kneeling and veiling are not in themselves the problem, and that “we should defend traditional practices while acknowledging legitimate concerns about divisive behavior.” That concession should be recorded, because it is true and it is fair, and this post does not cite that article as bias evidence. It cites it as the concession that makes the case selective bias, not blanket bias: balanced when the subject is a practice, loaded when the subject is a traditionalist critic.

But the concession, by itself, misses how the game actually works, and that is the point that needs stating plainly.

If advocacy itself is treated as the offense, then there is no dialogue at all. There is permission to exist silently, and a label the moment you speak.

The practice survives in the abstract. The person who defends it does not survive the conversation intact.

Esto’s article, for all its fairness on the practice, leaves that mechanism in place. It accepts “legitimate concerns about divisive behavior” without demanding that the behavior be specified, and it defends the practice while the advocate is still left to prove he is not the problem. That is the selective bias in its cleanest form: the practice gets charity, the critic gets suspicion. And it recurs, in sharper form, elsewhere.

That is also how Esto allows a demonization he does not have to invent. He does not need to write the label himself. He only needs to accept the vague charge, repeat it as a legitimate concern, and then police the traditionalist side as if the charge had been proved. The demonization is unjustified on its own terms, because it is not tied to a specific act by a specific person. It is tied to a category: the trad who talks about it.

No other group in the Church is treated this way, and that double standard is the tell. Other movements have toxic minorities, and some have toxic majorities in certain corners, yet no one takes their worst voices and uses them to declare the whole movement divisive, or to treat ordinary advocacy for their cause as an offense in itself. Their fringe is treated as a fringe. The traditionalist fringe, by contrast, is treated as the movement, and then the movement is treated as the problem. A very infrequent problem, a few loud and uncharitable voices, is inflated into a reason to smash the movement and shut it up.

That is not discipline. Discipline names the person, quotes the act, and leaves everyone else free to argue. Demonization names the movement, quotes no one in particular, and leaves everyone in it suspect for speaking at all. Esto, by carrying the vague framing forward instead of demanding specifics, helps the second thing happen while sounding like he is doing the first.

Exhibit B: “Surprising” humility

The clearest example came during the 2026 Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage controversy.

On October 26, 2026, The Tridentineers posted Esto’s article on the controversy and framed it in the page’s own caption. Peter Kwasniewski was presented as one of the “self-proclaimed defenders of Tradition” who had “launched angry criticism of the Vatican.” His name was written with a quotation inserted into it, Peter “I’m not in favor of the SSPX” Kwasniewski, while Mountain Butorac was said to have “offered a much-needed reality check” and was given “kudos for helping clarify the situation.” The linked article used the same framing: Kwasniewski’s criticism was “angry” and “accepted without further examination,” while Butorac was the reality check against “interpreting every disappointment as persecution or conspiracy.”

Then Kwasniewski did what a reasonable critic is supposed to do when he gets facts wrong. He posted an “IMPORTANT NOTICE” revising his earlier account. He wrote that he “was misinformed about some of the happenings at this past weekend’s pilgrimage in Rome,” explained that the moving of Vespers was not dictated by ecclesiastical policy, that poor organization and failed communication had made the lack of a solemn Mass easy to interpret as a snub, and that the no-photography policy was apparently common at St. Mary Major’s. He also held his ground where he thought the facts still supported him, writing that the banning of pilgrims, as a group, from entering St. Peter’s Basilica was despicable. And he closed by saying he believed it to be “in the interests of truth to revise my earlier negative judgment, which would have been justified had the data reaching me been accurate.”

That is a correction, stated publicly, with the revised facts and the unrevised judgment kept distinct. It is the kind of correction any of us should welcome without a lecture attached.

Esto’s response, posted as the page author, was this: “Surprising but good to see this gesture of humility.”

Read that word again: surprising. Humility should not be surprising if you have presumed good faith. A charitable response would have been simple: thank you for the correction, or, the record is now clearer. Instead, even the correction became an occasion to remark on character, and to imply that humility was not what one expected from this man. The argument was no longer being weighed. The man was being graded, and graded against a prior expectation that he would fail.

This is why the screenshot matters. This was not a commenter piling on. It was the page itself, marked Author, saying it. And it is stronger evidence than any single adjective in an article, because it shows the reflex in miniature: when a traditionalist critic corrects himself, the response is not only welcome, it is surprise that he could.

Before October: the same pattern, in his own feed

October was not the first time. The same pattern runs through The Tridentineers feed earlier in 2026, in Esto’s own captions, not in commenters’ words.

On July 7, 2026, the page wrote that the SSPX controversy had ended on July 1, “yet Dr. Peter Kwasniewski and other ‘intellectuals’ continue to reject the Church’s judgments regarding the schismatic group,” and added that degrees, titles, and scholarly accomplishments “have little value if they are not used in defense of the Church and her unity.” The credential is scare-quoted, the argument is not first answered, and the frame is obedience.

On July 22, 2026, the page defended Kevin Wells’s open letter against Janet Smith and Peter Kwasniewski, who “have become increasingly sympathetic to the now schismatic and excommunicated SSPX despite repeated warnings from the Church’s Magisterium.” Again, two living traditionalist figures are named, and a status label is attached to their sympathy, rather than Smith’s specific arguments being rebutted in the caption.

On February 7, 2026, under the headline “TOXIC SSPX VS HEALTHY SSPX,” the page wrote of “the toxic, delusional, pseudo-Sedevacantist, and selfish defenders who believe their group alone can fix the Church’s crisis and that Rome should submit to their demands.” That is the strongest toxicity language in Esto’s own voice found in this research, and it should be quoted fairly: the same caption distinguishes “those few who genuinely seek reconciliation with Rome.” It is not a blanket condemnation of every SSPX-attached person. It is, again, selective: the fringe is named in the harshest terms, and the rest of the movement is left to prove it belongs with the few.

A pattern, not a slip

One comment could be a slip. The pattern across Epistles Online is harder to dismiss.

In the Kevin Wells piece, Wells’s critics are “excommunicated Lefebvrist schismatics,” while Janet Smith and Peter Kwasniewski “have become increasingly sympathetic to the now schismatic and excommunicated SSPX despite repeated warnings from the Church’s Magisterium.” The piece closes by saying an SSPX priest who is “too cowardly to answer that call” can “remain a schismatic, excommunicated.”

The SSPX cluster runs in the same register: “The Continuing Fall of the SSPX,” “Why SSPX Confession and Matrimony Are Invalid Now,” “SSPX Bishops, Priests and Laity Excommunicated: What Every Catholic Should Do Now,” “If SSPX Were Eve in the Garden,” “John Salza on SSPX Sympathizers: ‘They’re Almost Worse,’” “Formal Adherence to the SSPX Schism.” In “Not Everything Beautiful Is Good,” a reverent SSPX Mass, a solemn ordination, or the July 1 Econe consecrations “may appear beautiful and inspiring,” but beauty alone does not make an act right where disobedience is at its heart, and normalizing them risks “a parallel ecclesial structure.”

None of this, by itself, settles the canonical status of the SSPX, and this post does not try to settle it. A writer can hold a strict view of that status and still write charitably about the people involved. The issue is the handling: named individuals, repeated status labels, and motive adjectives on one side, and abstract nouns on the other.

The newer epistles.online material extends that handling beyond the SSPX leadership to a bishop in full communion. On Bishop Schneider’s June 4, 2026 statement urging Pope Leo XIV to approve the SSPX’s planned consecrations, Esto writes that Schneider’s statement “reveals a remarkably one-sided view of the SSPX controversy,” and asks: “Does Bishop Schneider realize that every time he makes a one-sided defense of the SSPX, he risks fueling further division within the Church? When he repeatedly argues that the SSPX is right, the implication can easily seem to be that the Mother Church is wrong. This should concern him.” Schneider is not SSPX, and he is not sedevacantist. He is policed for defending the SSPX and for raising the double-standard point, and that defense is reframed as division-risk. In the same article Esto concedes that many of Schneider’s accusations “could more appropriately be directed toward certain modernist groups” — still unnamed groups, not a named parallel.

The same move appears when the SSPX itself proposes terms for discussion. On its June 24, 2026 open letter and Profession of Faith, presented as a basis for a “frank and charitable doctrinal discussion,” Esto first concedes the SSPX has the right to express its concerns, then writes: “What is most striking—and alarming, though sadly typical of the SSPX’s attitude—is its apparent attempt to set the terms of any future discussion with Rome.” And: “no group in the Church has the authority to dictate to Rome which subjects may or may not be discussed. The Pope sets the terms of communion and dialogue, not the SSPX.” Expressing concerns is allowed. Proposing a framework for the discussion is treated as dictating to Rome. That is the imaginary line, drawn around the discussion itself.

In “Lefebvrism: A Heresy in the Making?” Esto goes further still, proposing a prospective name for the trad error: fidelity to Tradition permitting individuals or groups to judge, resist, or disregard papal and episcopal authority whenever they perceive a conflict. No parallel article was found proposing a named future heresy for a modernist movement. The trad error gets a prospective proper name. The modernist error stays a collective noun.

On Facebook on March 26, 2026, Esto put the rule symmetrically: “Both modernists and radical traditionalists can become self-centered, choosing to follow their own preferences rather than the mind of the Church.” In practice, the modernist side stays abstract, “modernists” and a “progressive climate,” with no comparable roll call of named figures given motive adjectives with the same regularity. The traditionalist side gets names. That is the asymmetry. The balance is proclaimed symmetrically and applied asymmetrically.

The control test, run on the WordPress corpus, is comparative, not absence-based. A WordPress search for “James Martin” returns seven posts mentioning him, including two November 2025 posts devoted to him — the Confirmation post and the Abby Johnson interview — and a May 2026 title naming him whose seven reasons are Lorem ipsum placeholder after a satirical opening. The Müller / Ecclesia Dei article is one of the passing mentions. Against that, 32 SSPX-related titles site-wide, with Fellay, Williamson, Pagliarani, and Lefebvre named in the articles’ bodies, not in the titles, with repeated motive language and a follow-up series, make the asymmetry one of regularity and handling, not of total absence.

Why the overcorrection happens

This is understandable, and that is part of why it needs naming rather than mere denunciation. Criticizing modernism costs a traditional-leaning writer nothing with his own audience; it is expected. Criticizing traditionalists, by contrast, signals independence. It tells a mainstream or Vatican-facing reader: I am not one of them, I am reasonable, I will police my own side.

But a signal is not a judgment. Once reasonableness becomes the thing to be displayed, the writer starts to need traditionalist excess to display it against, and ordinary prudential criticism starts to look like excess. A Catholic who says, “I think this prudential decision was unwise, and I think the way it was communicated made things worse,” is not disobeying a doctrine. He is doing what Catholics have always done, including in the debates that produced liturgical reform itself, where reformers criticized the status quo as deficient for the times. If every such criticism is pre-read as anger, self-proclamation, or instrumentalization, then there is no room left for loyal disagreement at all. There is only silence, or the label.

That is also why Esto’s kneeling and veils article, fair as far as it goes, does not rescue the wider pattern. Defending a practice while treating its defenders as suspect still leaves the defender in the dock. Real charity defends the practice and presumes the defender is acting in good faith until his argument, not his temperament, is shown to fail. It does not take an infrequent fringe problem and use it to put a whole movement under suspicion, and it does not apply to traditionalists a rule no other group is made to live under.

The self-appointed policer and the imaginary line

Put plainly, Esto has set himself up as a self-appointed policer of traditionalists, calling out anyone he judges to have stepped over some imaginary line. The line is not a doctrine. It is not a canon. It is his sense of what looks reasonable, and it moves with the audience he wants to reassure.

The policing works in one direction. If a traditionalist cries foul at a prudential judgment from Rome or from someone in the hierarchy, he is told he has overstepped his bounds. He is angry. He is self-proclaimed. He is interpreting every disappointment as persecution or conspiracy. The criticism is not answered. The critic is put back in his place.

If, on the other hand, Rome cries foul against the movement with some overblown accusation, no matter how vague or indefensible, Esto is there to soften it, explain it, and concede its premise. Well, there is toxicity in this movement, he will say, as if that settled the matter.

Yes, and? There is toxicity in every movement. There is a fringe in every large group of Catholics, and the traditionalist fringe is not the movement. Saying so does not excuse the fringe. It refuses to let the fringe be used as a weapon against everyone else.

And there is worse toxicity going on elsewhere that is unchecked, and never gets the same treatment. No one takes a toxic corner of another movement and makes its ordinary members prove they are not divisive before they are allowed to speak. That rule is reserved for traditionalists, and Esto enforces it.

The missing premise in all of this is simple, and it needs stating because the policing depends on forgetting it: Vatican decisions are not beyond criticism. A prudential judgment from Rome, a dicastery summary, a bishop’s policy, a way of communicating a decision, all of these can be criticized by a loyal Catholic without that criticism becoming disobedience, extremism, or instrumentalization. Loyalty is not silence. Obedience to doctrine is not agreement with every prudential choice, and it is not a ban on saying a choice was unwise or badly explained.

A real policer would police that distinction. He would ask, first, whether the criticism touches doctrine or only prudence, and whether the charge against the critic is specific or only a label. Esto, too often, does the reverse. He polices the critic for crossing an imaginary line, and he lets the overblown charge against the movement cross without challenge, so long as he can add, yes, there is toxicity somewhere in it. That is not balance. That is enforcement, wearing balance as a badge.

Two qualifications keep this claim honest, and they actually strengthen it. First, Esto does criticise Rome himself, in strong language, asking, in a July 17, 2025 Epistles post, whether Pope Leo XIV would reverse Traditionis Custodes or “remain complicit” with Pope Francis. So the claim cannot be that he never criticises Rome. The claim is narrower and stronger: he criticises Traditionis Custodes himself, but polices other traditionalist critics when they criticise Rome or propose their own terms. Second, he is not uniformly hostile to traditionalist voices. He publishes Schneider contradicting Cardinal Fernandez, circulates Kwasniewski pro-TLM arguments, amplifies a Fellay homily affirming submission to Rome, and circulates a Burke distinction for SSPX faithful without a schismatic spirit. He amplifies traditionalist voices when they affirm communion, obedience, and anti-modernism, and polices them when they criticise a prudential judgment. That is selective policing, not constant hostility, and selective policing is the point.

What balance would actually require

Balance would require the same tests in both directions.

First, address the argument before the motive. If Kwasniewski was wrong about Vespers or photography, say so, with the corrected facts, and leave his humility out of it. If he was right that pilgrims were barred as a group from entering in procession, say that too, without softening it because the rest was corrected.

Second, welcome a correction as normal, not as surprising virtue. A man who revises a judgment in public has done the hard thing. Treating it as out of character tells the next critic that correction will still cost him his reputation.

Third, distinguish three things that are too often collapsed: doctrine, prudential judgment, and communication. Disagreement with a doctrine is one thing. Disagreement with a prudential liturgical decision is another. Criticism of how a decision was announced is a third. Only the first touches obedience in the strict sense. The other two are the ordinary stuff of Catholic life, and handling them as if they were disobedience is itself a failure of balance.

Fourth, name with the same specificity, or withhold motive judgments with the same restraint, on both sides. If modernist error is to be discussed only in general terms, then traditionalist error should not be discussed as a gallery of named villains. If named criticism is fair, it is fair in both directions.

None of this requires Esto to become a traditionalist, or to agree with Kwasniewski, Wells’s critics, or the SSPX. It requires only that the standard he announces be the standard he uses.

A narrower claim, honestly stated

Domus Dei has thanked Esto before. In our reply to “The Continuing Fall of the SSPX,” we said the Tridentineers had the balance right on remaining in the Church, and we meant it. That praise stands, on that point. Remaining in communion matters, and Esto is right to insist on it.

This post makes a narrower claim, and it should be judged on that narrower claim. Esto is right that the Church must avoid both modernism and radical traditionalism. He is not, in practice, even-handed in how he handles the traditionalists who criticize prudential judgments. His admirable agenda overcorrects toward appearing reasonable, and in that overcorrection traditionalists are handled less charitably than the balance he proclaims would require.

That narrower claim survives the counter-evidence, because the counter-evidence is part of it. Esto draws a fair formal-adherence distinction for SSPX laypeople, saying that attending an SSPX chapel for liturgical reasons, without rejecting papal authority, is not ordinarily formal adherence. He should not be accused of treating every TLM attender as schismatic. He should be judged on what he does with named critics, dialogue proposals, and vague charges: there, the practice gets charity and the critic gets suspicion, and the modernist side gets no roll-call comparable in regularity.

That is not a call to stop reading him, and it is not a judgment on his soul. It is a call to read him with eyes open: when balance always lands harder on one side, it is not balance. It is a position, wearing balance as its justification.

Read the arguments. Weigh them on their merits. And when a man corrects himself in public, do not call his humility surprising. Call it what it is, and be glad he did it.

Sources

• Symmetry rule, Facebook, March 26, 2026: The Tridentineers, post ID 1306670284786576 — https://www.facebook.com/epistlesonline/posts/pfbid02jzFPGwzfCtkGfZQN6KfvXyWkLDp9z8UTG8VDwSRyM2rRSLPN6c3yk52gpDkBq95ul
• “Remain complicit” question, July 17, 2025 Epistles post — https://catholicepistles.substack.com/p/will-pope-leo-xiv-reverse-traditionis-622
• Dicastery for Divine Worship, summary of the Panama bishops’ ad limina visit, October 21, 2026 (Panama summary, quoted verbatim in the Panama section) — https://www.cultodivino.va/en/attivita/2026/ad-limina-visit-of-the-episcopal-conference-of-panama.html
• Kwasniewski correction (“IMPORTANT NOTICE”) — Kwasniewski’s own X post, after the October 23–25, 2026 pilgrimage — https://x.com/DrKwasniewski/status/2115135756838539457
• Tridentineers page-author comment, “Surprising but good to see this gesture of humility” — October 26, 2026 Tridentineers post and comment thread
• James Martin control test: WordPress search for “James Martin” (seven mentioning posts) — https://epistles.online/wp-json/wp/v2/posts?search=James%20Martin&per_page=100 — including “Why Catholics Condemn Scandalous Confirmation in New York” (November 14, 2025), “Pro-life Expert Abby Johnson: Why is James Martin Allowed to be a Heretic?” (November 17, 2025), and “7 Reasons All Catholics Should Support Fr. James Martin and the Liberal Agenda” (May 7, 2026) — https://epistles.online/reasons-catholics-support-james-martin-liberal/
• SSPX title count: WordPress search for SSPX (39 posts; 32 titles matching SSPX/Lefebvr under the title-only rule) — https://epistles.online/wp-json/wp/v2/posts?search=SSPX&per_page=100