Satan’s ways are endless: Catholic restorationists between Peter’s usurper syndrome and QAnon

Among the conspiracy theories that have flourished during the pandemic, one of the most suggestive is that which has arisen within sectors of Catholic traditionalism (especially American), which among other things has shown a "natural" connection with respect to the variegated world of the No-vax. There is no doubt that often such Catholic conspiracy theories are simply an instrumental motive in the hands of certain sectors of the Church and the Curia in their anti-Bergoglian battle. But this is not only their motive and purpose. Indeed, underneath this superficial layer, we seem to discern a series of deeper and archetypal motives related to the concept of Primordial Evil and the concept of apocalyptic purification, which perhaps lend an even stronger and more identitarian meaning to the mere political battle. After all, in fact, many sectors of this Catholic traditionalist universe identify Bergoglio as the culmination of the great plot that the Enemy is allegedly conducting to take over the throne of Peter, forcing the "true" followers of the "true" Church to fight the last great battle for the salvation of the world. From this angle they see in the great pandemic, or rather in the phenomenon they consider the "fake" par excellence, the sign of the Time, the extreme attempt of the great conspiracy to dominate the world and thus the confirmation (precisely) of the imminence of the final battle. The discourse proposed here works on an initial mapping of the conspiratorial bangs within the Catholic Church, distinguishing between 1) scattered groups reconnectable in various ways to the reactionary right-wing antagonist galaxy (especially in Italy); 2) Lefevrian traditionalists; and 3) sectors of the ecclesiastical and cardinal hierarchy definable as conservative." Evidently, this is the most relevant and powerful part, the part that belongs to two important cardinals such as Raymond Burke and Carlo Maria Viganò, who in turn are closely connected to the world of conservative Catholicism in the United States, intertwined with the neocons and Trumpian Republicans. Second, an attempt is made to initiate the observation of the communicative behavior of these sectors (particularly the third), especially with reference to: 1) the re-mediated use of the television medium (the case of the Eternal Word Television Network, the most important Catholic TV channel in the world); 2) the use of social media and the construction of real "echo chambers" systems that allow oppositional closure with respect to the dominant mainstream. In this case, some facebook groups will be analyzed in an attempt to identify traces of the underlying imaginary therein. Finally, one last question. Is the imaginary emerging from these sectors the result of an eccentric position or do they fit, albeit in an extreme and disjointed way, within a broader tradition of Catholic conservatism? The answer is twofold. It seems to be safe to say that, even in its fundamentalism, this stance fishes in the depths of the Catholic imaginary, selecting its most apocalyptic aspects, while at the same time finding confirmation of part of its ideas in the vast terrain of American Protestant evangelicalism within which it perforce finds itself living and moving.