Recently​ I had an opportunity to check in on the state of American Catholicism. The occasion was a tradcath wedding in St Louis, greyscale city of my teenage years, and the last place I truly believed in demons. I left in 1999, just before my senior year of high school. My friends would celebrate the turn of the millennium without me, but in escaping I also narrowly missed a more tailor-made end of the world.Usually I try to spot a priest at the airport. ‘Nun on the plane!’ I shouted this time, as a woman boarded bearing the unmistakable stamp of the calling. What was it? Some combination of short salt-and-pepper hair, a red turtleneck and a heavy medallion. Her lack of makeup was not temporary but lifelong. She nodded her assent and for some reason I saluted her. Belief, or past belief, is a kind of biomarker, like grief or perversion or having studied magic. When you see it in others, you realise you must shine with it yourself.At the time I was writing a long piece about how gay Willa Cather was (and how she really might have been a man called William). She was a good companion on this journey. She has a seriousness to her; she does not make light of people’s lives or the directions their destinies take. People marry, have affairs, get pregnant. ‘I wonder if someone in this situation has been trapped,’ I mused to my husband, Jason, in the hotel room, pulling a floor-length dress over my head. The wedding invitation had urged us to wear modest clothing because the Eucharist would be present. It was for the Eucharist, then, that I was wrestling a thick anti-intercourse pair of tights up towards my waist. ‘I had a lot of imagination and I entrapped you. You should be eternally grateful I didn’t give you a weird baby. In almost any other situation you would have ended up with a weird baby.’ ‘That’s true,’ he said, neatly tying his Pride trainers, which cause Midwestern women in elevators to first compliment him and then fall hideously silent. ‘What would you have preferred?’ He paused, but I already knew. ‘Mountain-top philosopher who invented a new kind of veganism where the bee told him the secret in the glade.’In the next room an opera singer began performing scales. I assumed, when I married so young, that I would eventually have a weird baby – albeit one whose eyes were the correct distance apart and whose legs were neither bowed nor knock-kneed. I thought perhaps the baby would have a lovely name and no trouble filling out forms at the dentist and not such a hard time going to the grocery store. In short, I thought procreation might be a chance to smooth out my own wrinkles. That’s where everyone gets it wrong. ‘Celine Dion had two gamer sons,’ as the comedian Chris Fleming put it. ‘What chance do you think you stand?’The site of the wedding was not the Cathedral Basilica across from my high school, but a Gothic Revival structure called the Oratory in a deeper, more economically depressed part of the city. We arrived late to see the bride standing on the steps, her veil stirring in the February wind. We clattered up the stairs, and were soon lost in the Oratory’s bowels, our panic increasing every moment. A minute late for a tradcath wedding is an eternity. They will always start on time, as none of the normal Catholic weddings in my family has ever done. By the time we found our way through a side door and snuck into an empty pew, a man known to the congregation as the abbé had already taken possession of the pulpit. He explained that in traditional Latin Rite ceremonies, which were the only real kind, words were delivered at the beginning of the service, and then launched into his mad message.Since 2005 the Oratory has been in the charge of the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, a group of guys who are probably as normal as they sound. Still, no matter how often you tell yourself, as the celebrant opens his mouth, that you are in for the ideological ride of a lifetime, you are never really prepared. I have heard my own priest father, at my grandmother’s funeral, describe with relish the way people now roll up their relatives in carpets and bury them in the backyard like pets. The pompom on the abbé’s hat bobbed with fury. His stridency was undercut by the fact that he sounded exactly like Corky St Clair in Waiting for Guffman. He invoked Google and ChatGPT – so clumsily it seemed he didn’t really know what they were – and railed for a long time against international travel, which hardly seemed to be something this congregation regularly indulged in. Who needs to hear this message? Men whose hearts leap for Rome at night in their narrow beds!He pronounced the word ‘nuptial’ as noopt-see-all. If that’s correct, never tell me. Dishearteningly, but perhaps inevitably, he began to speak of the Great Replacement Theory. ‘There are places where the marriage and birth rates are so low that even the secular media, of all people, are beginning to talk about it.’ The clear takeaway was that I should sneak out to the bathroom and become impregnated without further delay; only then could he be at ease. ‘When people ask me what they can do to help the world’ – I cannot imagine anyone ever asking him this – ‘I tell them get married, have a family and DON’T BE CRAZY!’ At the altar sat a veiled twenty-year-old girl who had met her beloved on Snapchat using the hashtag #bigfamily. She had never known any other kind of language, kind of life. She had hoped to have a mechanical bull at the reception, but none had manifested.Behind me sat Jeannie, a Eucharistic mystic, and her Cajun ex-seminarian husband, David. (At the reception afterwards, in his lovely honk: ‘Best decision I ever made, to leave!’) The women’s heads were covered. Time had not passed. My younger sister, Mary, walked down the aisle in a sort of black sausage casing, as the wedding photographer captured an iconic image of veiled heads turned to her in unison. Jason, along with his rainbow Pride trainers, was wearing an enormous silver cat medallion that made a mockery of his height, width and Y chromosome. We were their nightmare come to life.Who goes trad, and why? Is the whole world experiencing a deathbed conversion? ‘I don’t understand how these people can have taken this turn,’ Jason recently observed, having watched the situation from the sidelines for two decades. ‘What are they doing? You’re kissing a demon on the tip of his penis every minute of the day with insane pleasure and it’s total madness.’ ‘It’s a 45-55 split,’ I told my father once, ‘between the people who look to the future and the people who look to the past.’ ‘That’s true,’ he said, always willing to believe a dubious statistic presented in a voice of authority. ‘I never thought of it that way before.’Now the men on the altar began to mill with excited purpose, like cheerleaders before they climb into a pyramid. There were at least twenty of them, and it is nearly impossible to describe the fussiness of their movements, the duration for which they occurred or the pleasure the men seemed to take in producing them. At regular intervals a phalanx of frocked boys would pour out of a side door like athletes at the Super Bowl. ‘BOYS ON STAGE!’ Jason clapped excitedly. ‘BOYS OF EVERY AGE!’ Whenever they rang the chimes, which seemed to be every four seconds or so, a toddler screamed ‘WOW A BELL!’ to the visible displeasure of the celebrants – though isn’t the entire point of the ritual that you’re supposed to be that awestruck every time?An unseen fog machine pumped the Cadillac of Incense. It was so thick and blue that God, in the rafters, coughed delicately. The trad addiction to incense, by the way, is the reason my mother no longer attends church regularly. I’m not sure what they think it’s accomplishing; if you’re pushing it that far, if extremity is its own end, why not go the rest of the way and roast an ox up there? Replace communion wine with pruno. Flavour-blast the body of Christ. Make Jesus, for promotional purposes, go on Hot Ones.The dance now coalesced around the veneration of an enormous gold book. The men, bent at the waist and making little dives, swoops and dashes towards it, seemed to believe they could get inside and finally rest comfortably. I looked around to give the sign of peace, but that wasn’t happening. They are practising a folk religion in that place. In a hundred years it will have a name and not be folk anymore. In the absence of direct supervision, new brotherhoods will form, new sects that pride themselves on a truer or stricter reading of the law; word from a new pope will make its way and commentary will be plain on the faces of the faithful, if you know how to read it. New saints will arise in a new land and be doubted in the old; new Ladies will appear to local children.In the basement​ of the Oratory, the people wanted to dance. The bride liked country music, which her mother – my older sister, Christina – refused to play, so silence reigned until the wedding party returned from taking pictures in Forest Park. At that point, a microphone was set up, and what I can only describe as a wedding toast open mic commenced. As the wedding party ran a little younger than usual, the toasts ran a little longer. The groomsmen told stories about pooping and the bridesmaids cried. In the bathroom, I overheard a woman telling her granddaughter that she had caught a cold from her goats. I emerged to find my sister seated at the DJ station and singing a gold spindling lullaby. My father, still wearing his cassock and perhaps on technical duty, was next to her.Why don’t they make things, I always wonder about my father and my older sister. She buys strings of beads by the hundred and never makes a necklace; he buys electric guitars and just lets them sit. Both of them built recording studios where they never recorded music. It seems perverse. But I suppose things are perfect before they are born. It’s coming through the tunnel that makes something handmade.The codes abound, and you may find you still know them. ‘I thought that sermon was very hard,’ a woman said to me by the nacho cheese station, as we stirred the cheese to prevent it from forming a skin. We had earlier gone looking for a pen for the advice cards; we shared a tacit understanding of what needed to be done. And something else – in the church basement you are carried immediately into the conversation of life. There is no irony and no such thing as oversharing. She was being treated for stage-four breast cancer and missed sharing a bottle of wine with her husband in the evenings. ‘I thought that was hard,’ she continued. ‘There are people who can’t …’ She was holding out her hand. I extended my own in return, and confided that my younger sister had lost a daughter, and that I myself had never been able to have children.At this mention of infertility, her husband, a short, trim man with a military haircut, got so excited that he saluted me repeatedly. ‘You’re executing the process! You’re executing the process!’ he shouted, as I had shouted to the nun on the plane. ‘At no point did you refuse. You got to offer a sacrifice that my wife never got the chance to make!’ He went on to conjecture that I might have had ‘eighteen one-week, two-week miscarriages’ who had gone on ahead of me, and whom I would get to meet when I got to Heaven. His wife advanced me a small, meaningful look, but in fact I was delighted. In that moment what I liked was his imagination – which had been strangely furnished, but still. One of the languages you remember how to speak is that of James Tate’s Jesus on muleback: ‘Hell, I love everybody.’ And hadn’t he ventured further into strange country than I had? Hadn’t he imagined Heaven, and the far more remote possibility that I might go there?I was asked what it was like to meet Pope Francis, and I described the tall careless heap of art behind him – the way one of us would approach and hand him the fruits of our artistic labour and his right-hand man would dispose of it on a pile. How pleasant, how proportional, how fitting that was. I thought, too, of the many clanging objects, medals and rosaries and milagros and pebbles and super-absorbent tampons with which I loaded my person to be blessed, ironically or otherwise, by his hand. ‘Coraggio, Americano!’ the pope might have called, as I turned and jangled my way back home.I thought of the seminarian who shared my father’s rectory with us during the months I chronicled in my memoir, Priestdaddy. How would his clear pleasure at speaking Spanish to his Spanish-speaking congregation square with ICE raids? (The story of Juan Diego, told in Death Comes for the Archbishop, is first related in a tract called Huei Tlamahuiçoltica and contains a sentence quite as beautiful as anything in Cather: ‘You yourself spoke in Nahuatl to a poor Indian and painted yourself in his ayate, thus showing you are not displeased with many languages.’) At the bar, I cornered a young recruit in a long cassock – similarly dark, similarly serious – and tortured him with conversation until he admitted that he didn’t think French people could be saints. ‘Not even Joan of Arc?’ I asked, as happy as I was when I learned I was going to meet my miscarriages in Heaven. Emphatic no. I asked if he had ever seen Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion, but he demurred; he didn’t much like movies. Disappointing. You used to be able to count on these men for an aesthetic sense, at least. I asked him what his favourite was: Air Force One.Would it be possible for an outsider to imagine this scene? Probably not. Whenever I whacked him on the arm and called him a bitch, he piped up in a playful voice: ‘Careful!’ ‘It’s your bedtime,’ I observed, noting that we had been in that basement for seven hours. No, he still had to make the rounds. ‘Kissing hands and shaking babies’, he called it, with some indulgence. ‘But you don’t care about babies,’ I said, surprised. He sensed danger and moved his head in a gesture of neutral assent. ‘If a baby were screaming, you wouldn’t be the one to go pick it up.’ That would be me, like the nacho cheese thing. He backed away slightly, recognising that I had sprung into the alarming rhetorical mode that he considered his domain. I pointed my scary woman finger. ‘You’re trying to ritualise life on the altar, but life is in the pews.’What I was saying: I have imagined your life; I have had to imagine it. What he was saying: it would be dangerous for me to imagine yours. Now, with the acuity of an eagle carrying a flask of Smirnoff in its beak, I thought back to the friend he had made fond mention of earlier in the conversation, and suddenly I understood. You have, I think, a particular friend, who is French? So it would seem. Yes.At long last music had begun to play. On the dance floor, a dozen anonymous infants lurched to and fro. ‘Ew,’ a groomsman was overheard saying, as one of my nieces stripped down to her nappy – the one who eats avocados through the bag and asked for pasta for Christmas. If you have enough nieces and nephews, you understand that people are just themselves; they come out that way. ‘Are we the same?’ I asked one of the God’s Gang people in attendance, as the babies on the dance floor beat everyone at limbo. Funny that we call it that – though now, of course, it’s been abolished. Easier. Just bend back, duck your head under the bar and you’re through.I was dancing with a tattooed goth called Jazzy, who, it transpired, was the mother of one of the children. ‘Jazzy, your baby’s got rhythm!’ I called out, clapping. ‘Girl,’ she said, ‘you already know.’ Moments later, I fell flat on my back to Flo Rida’s ‘Low’ but leaped up again so quickly I never dropped the beat; down for the count on ‘Apple Bottom jeans’, up again in time for ‘boots with the fur’. Flo Rida and I, both card-carrying members of the group that looks ahead.Jason​ is usually the one who keeps a level head in these situations, but he finally breaks. It’s just too Catholic. The last thing I see him doing before we exit the church basement is take a shot of Kirkland Irish whiskey, aged three years, purchased by my mother at Costco. It’s past midnight and we’re in a dead-nowhere part of town. I realise as soon as the chill air hits us that Jason is tipsier than I’ve ever seen him. ‘Why are you drunk?’ I hiss – more of a philosophical question, and one he might plausibly have put to me more than a thousand times. We are alone, really alone, outside the Oratory; emptiness pealing in its bell and the stillness swaying. I stand shivering at the intersection, propping up my husband, finally grateful for those thick-ass tights that must have so pleased Jesus.One thing about men: they will maintain a slight air of superiority even when you catch them sleepwalking at 2 a.m., very carefully peeing into their Pride trainers.I rise blearily from bed when his shape passes, only to realise that he’s removed his shorts and is sitting down in the bottom of the closet with a look of near religious peace on his face. That expression, I’ve seen it before – when my older sister used to try to climb into the washing machine and my mother had to haul her out by her elbows. ‘ARE YOU FUCKING PEEING?’ I yell, forgetting that you’re not supposed to wake a sleepwalker or they might die.He rolls his eyes and scoffs as a puddle of human champagne begins to make its way across the floor. ‘Go to the bathroom, Tricia. Go to the bathroom.’‘YOU’RE FUCKING PEEING!’ I yell again, as he turns his urinary attention to his second pair of shoes. Luckily the man is clinically overhydrated; luckily the shoes are made for all weathers. I hose them down in the shower and place them side by side at a jaunty angle, as if they might start dancing on their own. Mountain-top philosopher remains the same as the day he was born; I must assume I do as well. Awake at dawn, 22 years into our own child marriage, we reconstruct the events of the evening. Later that morning my mother wordlessly hands me Jazzy’s phone number written on a THANK YOU FOR COMING! card that asks for our ADVICE and BEST WISHES for the Mr and Mrs.