“The God who loves us all, unconditionally.”
From the first words Pope Leo XIV spoke as pope. Before any doctrine, before any policy, before a single question about who belongs and who doesn’t. Simply that. Unconditionally.
I was born a nothing, then baptized a Catholic. Only because I happened to be born in a country that had been colonized by Christian missionaries. I’m sure that if chance had happened differently and I was born in Iran, I could possibly be Muslim, or Catholic, or Jewish, or Zoroastrian. Who knows?
“Unconditionally” isn’t a word that I’m used to. And it isn’t one I usually associate with religion — in any part of the world. I spent my entire childhood understanding what “conditions” meant — what love was not. Love, where I came from, was a transaction: obedience in, approval out, and the meter always running.
Recently, I began writing again. And in my novel, Jū — my younger self — holds a funeral. A funeral in her head, for a family that is still, technically, alive. She says the words over people who are elsewhere, breathing, going about their lives as though nothing happened.
I wrote that scene the way I write. Over and over, drawing each sentence out until it says exactly what it needs to say and not one word more. And somewhere in the fifth or sixth edit, sitting at my desk, I noticed I was crying.
Because Jū’s funeral was mine. It took a long time to admit that my own family considered me as “dead,” after I was ostracized at 20 years old, by my mother, on the advice of the priests of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX). I’d chosen not to remain in the SSPX, so I’d be a “bad influence.” I’d rejected the SSPX’s conditions, and that was unacceptable.
I’m 53 now. My father is near the end of his life. And my mother still texts me, in the blithe way of a woman whose decision to cut me out of the family was like a sin, simply “erased” in a confessional, as if I’d only imagined that she’d chosen the SSPX over her own daughter.
I read about Louis Massett’s Traddyland: Memoir of a Radical Traditional Catholic on this website the way I read most accounts of the SSPX: half-recognizing myself in every paragraph, half-bracing for the parts I know are coming. I know that world. I was raised in it, in Victoria, Australia, then later, in the girls’ dorm at St. Mary’s Academy in St. Marys, Kansas, about the same time Massett was living through his own version of it in the boys’ dorm.
I started reading his book, and I wept. For him, and for all those who have had their own version of life within the SSPX. And perhaps for me.
I am no longer Catholic. I don’t know if I will again.
But something has been nagging at me since the SSPX’s four new bishops — and the two who consecrated them — were excommunicated in July. This isn’t really about the SSPX at all. It’s about Pope Leo XIV, and the accusation that keeps circulating among trad hardliners: that this pope has gone “soft.” That he’s an ally of “woke” people, that “todos, todos” is code for capitulation.
Leo has been fairly blunt, when pressed, that Church doctrine on sexuality and marriage isn’t changing any time soon. He’s also said, in the same breath, that the Church shouldn’t let its sense of unity or division revolve around sexual matters at all; that morality is not only, or even primarily, about sex. That’s not a progressive rewrite of Catholic teaching, but a refusal to make sexuality the test of who belongs and who doesn’t.
For me, I only see it as acceptance, where forgiving isn’t conditional. Where you can be loved, and there aren’t any conditions on that love.
Anyone who has spent time inside a group like the SSPX understands why that distinction hits so hard. In the world I grew up in, doctrine was never separate from admission. Especially as a woman, you weren’t present, seen, tolerated, spoken to with warmth, until your behavior, your body, and your obedience had already passed inspection. Love was conditional on compliance, and shame was the mechanism that enforced it.
And for a woman to have a career, earn her way up to a PhD instead of marrying and procreating? As good as damnation itself.
But still, groups like the SSPX keep finding people, decade after decade, continent after continent.
My mother was born in 1943 to a mother who raised three girls alone in an era when a single-parent family was a visible, daily shame. My father was the “difficult” one — a man who could solve any number in his head in seconds, and who was treated, his whole life, as an embarrassment because no one knew that there was nothing wrong with him. He was just neurodivergent.
Two people, who weren’t acceptable as themselves, found a group that promised what neither of them had ever had: acceptance.
What they, like many, are sold is that softly filtered picture of belonging — the big Catholic family gathered at Christmas, the candlelit meal, the backyard joy-filled family games, all together.
A hallmark image that creates the escape. Away from the grind. The harsh realities of today.
Then, once within groups like the SSPX, what it actually offers is control dressed as certainty, and such groups are devastatingly good at recruiting people who are most starved for what it pretends to provide — the emotionally vulnerable, the socially isolated, the financially precarious, or anyone whose life has already taught them that love has conditions attached.
The bitter joke, and Massett’s book comes to this too, is that once you’re inside, the very thing you came looking for — a place without judgment, without the fear of being cast out for being flawed — becomes the first casualty.
To leave means being an “outsider”; the one who is despised and ostracized in every possible way — no family, friends, community, and often, no shelter or financial security. And most certainly damned for all eternity.
The very compassion, forgiveness, and lack of judgment people are starving for is relabeled as “moral danger,” and the people who might actually have offered it to you are recast as the enemy.
Even the Catholic Church itself.
Gabriel Hart described this on this site a few weeks ago. He’s correct that the isolation is deliberate, built in from childhood, and reinforced sermon after sermon. He was writing about what it takes to keep someone from leaving. I agree with him, and I can tell you what waits on the other side once you actually do: years to feel truly free. And for some, no full freedom as your family still refuses to accept your decision.
Out, but never truly out, no matter how many times you try to get off the hamster wheel.
Yet, I know that “the God who loves us all, unconditionally” is also, in Catholic teaching, a God who expects those who call themselves Catholic to live by the morals of the faith. I’m not naive about that. Life isn’t rosy. It isn’t without its hardships, and I’ve seen more of that than most people I know.
I’ve stood outside the same palaces I once worked within and seen the desperately poor sitting at their gates, from Jaipur, to Gujarat, to Gwalior. I’ve seen the women who queue for hours around the wells in Bangladesh, just for water. The children in Durgapur who beg for a single chapati. The women and children in the mountains of Vietnam who can’t afford a coat for winter. The old people who sleep on cardboard in the streets across so much of Asia and Southeast Asia.
Every one of those people also deserves God’s unconditional love. So who, exactly, are the SSPX — or any of the other Catholic outliers — to decide that God’s love comes with conditions, and that only those who follow a particular priest’s particular set of rules are worth saving?
So even though I don’t necessarily subscribe to the teachings of the Catholic Church anymore, it warms my heart that one of the first things that a pope says is that there is a “God who loves us all, unconditionally.” And that’s what counts.
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