Episode Details

Welcome to The Curated Chapter, a chapter-sized look at books and the people who write them. Today we’ve opened up the book The Resurrection of the Roman Catholic Church: A Guide to the Traditional Catholic Community by Griff Ruby. In it, Mr. Ruby explores the sweeping changes that followed Vatican II — the major Catholic council of the 1960s that reshaped how the Church interacted with the modern world, including changes to the Mass, language, liturgy, and the Church’s relationship with other faiths.

For many Catholics, Vatican II represented renewal and modernization. For others, it marked a dramatic departure from tradition.

That tension sits at the heart of this book.

Now, I’m going to let Mr. Ruby do most of the talking today because this is an intelligent and deeply researched work. But for listeners unfamiliar with the term Vatican II — and honestly, I wasn’t fully clear on it myself before preparing for this episode — that historical context is important here.

According to Griff Ruby, authentic Catholic tradition still survives today in small but faithful communities scattered around the world — including one hidden in the hills above Spokane, Washington that changed the course of his life.

Griff Ruby: “It’s a whole massive hub of the faith up there.    And everything is the old way. Everything’s in the Latin, all the old theology, all the theology works that form the basis of what they teach. And I saw that, I’m in awe. This is incredible. Where has this been all my life? I mean, I know about the church. The church is structured a certain way. And then here’s these communities that, you know, they’re not fitting the usual, what most people think of as the structure. And yet, they clearly have more claim on it. And that was kind of the interesting dichotomy that impressed me. I wanted to know more about this.”

That curiosity formed the basis for this book. And he says it wasn’t just what he found in Spokane that fascinated him. It was why communities like this existed at all.

Why had so many Catholics spent decades searching for older forms of worship, older theology, and older traditions that they believed had largely disappeared from mainstream Catholic life after Vatican II?

And perhaps more importantly — if the Catholic Church is meant to preserve continuity across centuries — how could such dramatic changes happen in the first place?

Answering that question led him into years of research, travel, interviews, and historical study that eventually became this book.

Griff Ruby: “I wanted such a book. It didn’t exist. So then I started getting all these periodicals and publications, books, anything I could find pertaining to this subject. I also started traveling and interviewing different people and so forth. I really talked to a lot of people, learned a lot, picked up all these pieces.”

Like any project that you’re passionate about, if you throw yourself into it deeply enough it can change you.

Griff Ruby: “That changed me from someone who thought this is really neat and interesting only to something where I’m involved. I believe in what these people are doing. It is my life.”

As his research deepened, so did the conclusions he drew from it. And this is where the conversation gets a little controversial. Mr. Ruby argues that the changes that followed Vatican II were