Tradinista!


Tradinista! was a group of young Roman Catholics devoted to a synthesis of Marxist and traditional Roman Catholic critiques of political and economic liberalism, and to the promotion of a socialism that would be compatible with Catholic social teaching.
The name Tradinista! is a portmanteau of traditionalist and Sandinista. The symbol used by the group on its website was a pelican wounding its breast to feed its young – a symbol of Christ.

History

Tradinista! began in 2016, gathering on a private online discussion group known as the "Papal Octopus" and promoting their ideas on Twitter. In September 2016, they launched a website with a manifesto sketching their main aims, and other articles explaining the manifesto in detail. The authors used pseudonyms on their site, but some of them identified themselves in discussing their group on other sites. The Tradinista! website was taken offline in 2017, but it later went online again as "an archival website maintaining the materials published as part of the Tradinista project."

Positions

Tradinista! held that political authorities ought to promote the teachings of the Catholic Church and the virtue of the people. It held that the economic system should be ordered to the common good of the whole society and that capitalism should be abolished. It considered racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia to be structural injustices that ought to be eradicated. It was pro-life and pro-immigration. Tradinista! can be seen as a form of political Catholicism and of Christian socialism.

Media attention and criticism

The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat brought Tradinista! up in a column, claiming that part of the younger generation of Roman Catholics were drawn either to a revived Catholic Integralism, or to the Tradinista!, and arguing that Tradinista!'s affirmation of the social kingship of Christ "attacks the modern liberal order at the root." The First Things literary editor Matthew Schmitz wrote that he was "not contra" the Tradinista!
The right-wing Catholic writer John Zmirak criticized the group, which he argued "rejects important moral truths and embraces crude economic errors." The left-wing Catholic writer Dean Dettloff, on the other hand, criticized the group for not being sincerely progressive.