Traddyland: Memoir of a Radical Traditional Catholic

Every family has a moment when they realize the story they were raised inside is not the story they thought it was. Lou Massett's family had many of them. His came slowly — at a Kansas boarding school where his headmaster explained over dinner that Hitler had been misunderstood, his bishop was later tried in Germany for Holocaust denial, and a sovereign-citizen militia later linked to the Oklahoma City bombing drilled on weekends in the surrounding fields. Lou Massett was thirteen when his family sent him there. He was twenty when he left the movement. It took him thirty more years to write the book you are now holding. TRADDYLAND is the memoir of what it was like to grow up inside the Society of Saint Pius X — the traditionalist Catholic movement now formally declared schismatic by Pope Leo XIV and currently under federal investigation — and of the family, faith, and first love the movement cost him along the way. It is a book about how a totalist religious formation devours the children it promises to save.