The Great Good of Social Dancing: A Reply to My Critics

. . . with many readers weighing in!

Auguste Renoir, Bal du moulin de la Galette (source)

The usual weekly roundup will resume next Friday. I believe it to be more important to revisit and complete my treatment of this topic. -PAK

An avalanche of opinions

When I published the trio of articles last week entitled “Why Catholics Should Learn to Dance,” little did I realize what a nerve I would be touching! The post quickly surpassed, in all statistics of engagement, any post that has appeared at this Substack since it began in April 2023. The comment box rang with the clashing of opposing views, and I had to restrict comments to avoid the accumulation of treatises by self-appointed Savonarolas. On Facebook and Twitter, the post was “liked,” shared, and commented on by the hundreds. Clearly, this is a topic people need and want to hear about.

I discovered many things as part of sifting through the reactions, and these are the points that will occupy me today.

1. What surprised me the most was the discovery of just how vehement is the minority opposition to any and all social dancing between unmarried men and women. People who hold this position have persuaded themselves that “all the saints” and “the Magisterium” condemn dances altogether — a gross exaggeration and an unsustainable avenue of argument, as we shall see.

2. On the flip side, I learned that the vast majority of traditional Catholics support well-regulated and chaperoned social dancing as a healthy recreation for people of all ages. It is, happily, a pastime well represented in our communities, and there is enthusiasm for introducing it where it does not yet exist.

3. I learned that nearly everyone who opposes dancing has no concrete, personal, repeated experience of the kinds of dances that I described; instead, they have a twisted imagination of what dances look like and the immoral behavior they lead to, do not understand the losses incurred from not having dances (especially at this time in the degeneration of Western culture), and adopt a moral pessimism and rigorism that should be rejected by Catholics as bordering on Calvinism.

There is a lot to cover, so I will plunge right in.

General remarks

It is almost a cause of despair to see how poorly people read nowadays. Perhaps the naysayers simply did not attend well to the original articles that Julian, Dorothy, and I wrote with care (but yes, also with passion, because the position we are arguing against is precisely the sort of thing that discredits traditionalism). Catholic Tradition is a far broader category than some of our internet inquisitors — who show a strange kinship with Jansenists, Puritans, and Quakers — seem to realize.

We had made it clear that we exclude many forms of dancing as unsuitable, either because they are formless, graceless, and crass (e.g., freeform ‘dancing’ in nightclubs, jive,¹ moshing), or because they are too sensual (e.g., slow dancing where a couple is pressed up against each other the entire time). We made it clear that we are referring to formal social ballroom dancing and especially country dancing and contra dances (think: Virginia Reel; Jane Austen flicks). In fact, I even admitted a preference in this regard for group dances over couple dances, because they tend to be more fun and less awkward for those who still feel awkward in the presence of the opposite sex. (This awkwardness, by the way, is something that should be gently overcome, not prized as some sort of virtue, which it isn’t.)

We also made it sufficiently clear that we are praising dances that are well-regulated as to the music and types of dances chosen, involve chaperones for teens, and have requirements for modest dressing. Good heavens, has any of the objectors here actually been to the kind of dance I’m describing — the kind shown in the pictures? Have they danced an English country dance, or a Virginia Reel, or learned the waltz (as it is typically done nowadays, which is not a body-to-body hug), or the swing? I highly doubt it, because if they had, they would see how quickly their arguments melt away.

Julian’s article argued directly against the claim that any contact between unmarried persons of opposite sexes is a near occasion of sin and therefore immoral — a position that absolutely cannot be defended in moral theology. This position leads to absurdities and therefore is not compatible with a religion that prizes the harmony of faith and reason.

The situation of our young people in 2024 is much different than it was in earlier times. They do not have many healthy opportunities for morally upright in-person mingling, as modernity has atomized and fragmented our societies (our “villages” have been nuked, as it were). They are stuck on the internet, confined mostly to their homes or working jobs with long hours, and maybe, if they are lucky, seeing their friends at a Sunday TLM. The argument here very much depends on seeing that dancing has a social context and that such contexts can and do change over time. Taking what St. John Chrysostom said in 4th-century Constantinople or what St. John Vianney said in 19th-century Ars and applying it like a store-bought template to a social ballroom dance in 2024 is a glaring violation of how moral argumentation should be made.

Finally, if someone is inflamed with concupiscence by the mere sight of a lady, let alone by an arm’s-length touch or the holding of her hand as part of a group dance, then I believe he should schedule an appointment with a priest and/or a psychiatrist, as he has a lot of work to do to heal a damaged and diseased psyche. If there is someone who finds even a well-regulated ball an occasion of sin, he should not attend it; but that says more about him than it does about dancing as a healthy recreation.²

If we are talking about the sort of young people I’ve met all over the world in traditional Catholic communities, they are already aware of the need to be pure and chaste, they want to be virtuous, and, if anything, they could use some more self-confidence in interacting with the opposite sex. The assumption that our young people are seething cauldrons of lust ready to erupt into fornication is an insulting pessimistic caricature. Your typical American secularized college student could be described that way, but not the boys who rose through the ranks of altar serving or the girls who grew up wearing mantillas and helping mom with the baby or the cooking.

I am not saying that the young people of our traditional communities are free from the struggles of disordered concupiscence. No one could be so naive. We all must fight the battle for chastity, which some find harder than others. I am merely saying that we need to know the communities and persons we are dealing with, and not (as it were) paint them black on the basis of exaggerated assumptions of human depravity.

Concerning this matter of dancing, there are five schools of thought:

• rigorist: all dancing is sinful; there can be no extenuating conditions or circumstances

• semi-rigorist: most dancing is sinful; sometimes it can be tolerated

• moderate realist: well-regulated social dancing is not only not sinful, it is morally virtuous — an exercise of charity and temperance — and a civilizing art-form

• semi-laxist: most dancing is good; one should assume it is good rather than the contrary

• laxist: any and all dancing is good; there are no moral issues to consider whatsoever

Of these, it is probably true to say that the extremes (rigorism and laxism) cannot be held by a Catholic; the next pair, semi-rigorist and semi-laxist, could be defended but are guilty of exaggeration; the Catholic mean of moderate realism is where we should be.

Later in this post, I will make a thorough reply to the objection that “the Magisterium and the saints teach that dancing is immoral.”

From a dance at TAC East

What would Jesus do?

Did Jesus and His Mother attend a wedding feast? Yes. Was there plenty of drinking? Yes; as the Gospel of John makes clear, He produced a huge amount of the best wine even after they’d drunk through all their supplies. Was there dancing? Yes, of course. There has never been a culture without dancing. It is one of the most normal and healthy human activities: it is the body’s natural response to rhythmic music. But now our prudish moralists are coming along and telling young Catholics they must not dance, and must not have dancing at their wedding! Behold, the pernicious influence of false moral theology on full display.

I am fully aware that Jewish dances are not for couples but for groups. And I think there is room for conversations about what kinds of dances should be promoted and what kinds should be avoided. However, what there is no room for is a blanket condemnation of dancing. What we should strive for, rather, is the revival of good dancing.

I bring up drinking because the same sort of Catholic who is opposed to all dancing will also hold (or be tempted to hold) that all drinking should be avoided; in other words, teetotalism. The reasoning is the same: fallen, sinful human beings are too weak to resist the allurements of drink, so they should avoid it altogether. Similarly, fallen, sinful human beings are too weak to resist the allurements of the flesh, so the unmarried of opposite sexes should never intermingle in a way that involves them holding or touching each other, regardless of how they are dressed, the company they are with, or the activity they are pursuing.³

Our Lord would rebuke both of these Calvinist attitudes as an offense against the goodness of His creation and man’s legitimate need for recreation and pleasure in the company of others.

In my original article I noted that the historic Jansenists developed asceticism into “Puritanism” by maintaining that everything sensibly pleasant is sinful or suspect. Msgr. Ronald Knox observes:

Disapproval of dancing…or of the theatre was a mark of Jansenism long after Jansenism had ceased to be a genuine religious inspiration. And such disapproval is so far removed from our present Catholic attitude that we are tempted to ask whether, here, Port Royal had not been taking lessons from Geneva [i.e., from Calvinism]…. What Jansenism did was to exaggerate this protest [against Humanism]; out of all proportion, most of us will think, and rendering a disservice to Christendom. A Counter-renaissance was needed, but no so violent a swing in the other direction.⁴

You see, the Jansenists had a deeply pessimistic view of the corruption of human nature. You are perverse and you will never be anything other than perverse — unless divine grace strikes you with conversion from the world and you flee its pomps and works.

For this reason, the Jansenists also strenuously argued against frequent Holy Communion. They rejoiced when priests would report fewer Christians going to Communion (!), since to them it is obvious that almost no one could be worthy of receiving the Sacrament.

And guess what — their great theoretician Arnauld supported their point of view with batteries of quotes from the Church Fathers. Indeed, one of the most salient characteristics of the Jansenists was their inflexible antiquarianism. As Knox drily puts it, they replaced the Protestant emphasis on Scripture alone with an emphasis on Patristics alone (chiefly Augustine). This is why they were in favor of a radical simplification of the liturgy, among their other meddlesome projects (cf. the Synod of Pistoia).

I think if the anti-terpsichoreans (as I will refer to this group) were fully consistent, they should discourage frequent Communion quite as much as they discourage dancing, because the two positions have the same anthropological and soteriological root. Perhaps an ideal wedding would be one at which no one received Communion, no one had a drink or a toast, and no one danced!

Note on the video above: I don’t approve of the fashion of some of the dresses, but that problem could be easily overcome by advertising a specific dress code for a Catholic ball. My interest is in the dancing itself, which is splendid, a high cultural achievement far removed from clerical caricatures, past and present.

Reader reactions

Readers who have experienced the positives of social dancing poured out their common-sense reactions on various platforms. I can share only a few of these, but I’d say the following are representative of the majority of them.

A good friend forwarded me your article on dancing, Thank you so much for writing it! We have been hosting monthly dances alternating between young adults (open to older adults) and teens for the last 2.5 years. They have grown so much! We are hosting our first ball in honor of Christ the King in October. Our family’s initiative is called “One Dance at a Time,” as we are dedicated to the restoration of Catholic culture, one dance at a time.

We recently encountered objections from some faithful Catholics after a talk by a Franciscan priest regarding whether Catholics should swing dance went viral and many took his message to mean that all dancing was off the table.

Sadly, some people will hold tight to their erroneous beliefs, despite clear evidence to the contrary. If the devil can’t take us out on the left he’ll try on the right. ‘Radical’ traditionalism can corrupt something truly beautiful. We see it in the lack of charity shown to some women whom others believe not to be sufficiently modest according to their own judgment. I’ve seen it do more harm than good and ruin the faith of many young women, turning them away from the Church altogether.

Same with the men who have a distorted notion that they all need to be drinking hard liquour and smoking cigars in order to be men. There’s nothing wrong with either in moderation, but I and others have seen how family gatherings can quickly turn into drunken fests and men can fall into alcoholism because, well, that’s “what traditional Catholic men do” when they gather.

We have to remember that we walk a fine line. Stray but a little… We need to find balance.

From a mother:

We have been to dances like the one pictured above. I really think most people have not. They are family affairs. Everyone is dancing with everyone else. I have danced with other people’s husbands, I have danced with my sons, I have danced with other people’s little children and teenagers. It is not romantic or sexual in any way. They are a lot of fun, and completely wholesome. And they are a nice way for young people to get to know each other better in a platonic and supervised way.

Another:

Our family was very blessed last year at our Regina Caeli Academy when a student who is a ballroom dancer and competes in these dances offered dancing instruction and opportunities for her fellow upper-school students. I encouraged my teens as an opportunity to converse with the opposite sex while learning a beautiful art.

We had some amazing conversations afterwards about the class on all sorts of topics like sweaty hands, boy/girl awkwardness, the music, etc. Not only did this class give my teens growth in maturity and confidence in themselves, it offered me opportunities for very important parenting conversations on growing up.

Perhaps stating the obvious, Leila Marie Lawler commented:

Dances need to be community affairs. Parents need to go! and babies too. Parents need to encourage each other to be vigilant and have standards that they discuss with their children often. The thing is, there will always be occasions of temptation and even misbehavior. But it’s better to have a joyful culture with conviviality and yes, fun, than a dour one where only the secular ideas of what those are prevail.

A priest wrote:

THANK YOU for adding a voice of reason to this! I am constantly shocked at how many and how often devout so-called traditional Catholics seem to take whatever is basically the most strict and extreme position on these things! Then, they dogmatically declare and act as if it is the defined teaching of the Church! As a priest, it is truly worrisome to me. Another example, one of my pet peeves, is the recent outright condemnation of any and all celebration/commemoration of Hallowe’en. Another example is the playing of cards. What I have been able to ascertain is that all too often young Catholics who have unjustly been deprived of their birthright and cultural traditions, look for anything at all; yet all too often run to Protestant takes. More and more often, frighteningly, I have found many seminarians and priests who are not only ignorant of a vast array of history and culture, but even worse, seem to have little to no desire to learn or recoup any! I hope and sincerely pray that this trend begins to turn around; and quickly, lest it grow any worse — or else, I fear that a significant portion of the next generation [among traditionalists] will find themselves in a similar situation to our previous “boomers” who simply rejected the Church’s riches for a mess of pottage.

Another man likewise pointed out the subterranean link with Protestantism:

The obsession of American Traditionalist Catholics (and I am one) with automatically embracing the most extreme views of just about anything, the rejection of pleasure (not to be confused with the disciplining of the body and base desires, which is a good and noble thing), and the seeming competition we have between ourselves to see who has the “strictest” rule of life or pious devotions is, frankly, disgusting. It goes against the authentic Catholicism we claim to be searching for and living. It is not Catholic in any sense. Luther/Calvin would welcome these folks into their folds with open arms.

A lady lamented:

What is really needed is the reclamation of dancing! It used to be that all towns and villages held dances, so did churches. Now our only hope is a Catholic classical school or homeschool co-op. No one really dances anymore — not even at weddings. I would love for Catholics to re-take the culture and make dancing wholesome again! A bunch of young people making poor decisions happens because they don’t have opportunities to make good ones: we have atomized society and blown up any semblance of courtship rituals, so they can only grasp at what is left behind. God bless my weird parents who started my school and made all of us kids learn line dancing, and held regular dances for us through middle school. It was great fun!

A gentleman exulted:

I have nephews/nieces who attend Christendom College & are involved with Newman Centers. They have wonderful dances & there isn’t a more wholesome way, save at Mass, to meet quality Catholic people.

A European living in America wrote:

Good music and modest dress give young people the opportunity to socialize and not be awkward with each other, the way today’s teenagers are, who have (most of them) a totally unhealthy relationship with the opposite sex. By calling all dancing immoral, we are robbing ourselves of a healthy and joyful exercise for mind and soul.

A woman opined:

This discussion wouldn’t be complete without a shout-out to Hollywood movies that depict every swing or ballroom dance scene as a wildly raucous orgy, or at the very least overly sensual. I wouldn’t be surprised if people who haven’t experienced a dance in person think that this is what swing and ballroom dancing always entails.

That is so true. What the movies exhibit with their professional dancers is very far removed from your humble local dance, where most of the time kids are laughing as they bump into each other, boys are trying to get over the “two left feet” handicap, and people of several generations enjoy spending time together.

Another observer:

There was a formal dance for young Catholics in my former diocese and it was incredibly popular. Everyone dressed up, beautiful manners and elegant.

(Apropos that last remark, Dietrich von Hildebrand, in volume 1 of his Aesthetics, devotes a few pages to what he calls “Bearers of Elegance: Clothes, Dance, Ballet, Music.”)

Norman Rockwell, “Pardon Me” (1918) — here’s a boy who needs to learn how not to step on a girl’s foot!

An experienced couple weighed in:

My husband and I are vintage ballroom dancers (dances of roughly the 1820s through 1940s, so like those in the article’s videos). We’ve even taken classes with Richard Powers, the gentleman who created that amazing dance program at Stanford. The people I’ve met through dancing are some of the nicest and most decent I’ve ever met, and while you’re expected to change partners throughout the evening, there is no hint of lasciviousness. The stories of impropriety are outnumbered vastly by wonderful takes of people finding their life partners through dancing. For at least a century, chaperoned couple dances were the primary way for young people to get to know one another. Social dancing should be reinstated in our towns today, I firmly believe, for all the reasons stated in the article.

And still another:

We all believe that both our young adults, and ourselves, should learn how to dance, not only ballroom dancing, but the dances of our countries, such as Hungarian, Irish, Polish, Greek, all of which we have done. The youth and older generations of our Latin Mass Society have had the opportunity to participate in many dancing venues amongst our families, and there is no one that we know who is against dancing, quite the opposite!

A friend of mine, Jamie Bogle, Esq., contributed a more extended comment:

It is perfectly ridiculous for supposed “trads” to deprecate dancing. It is ludicrously redolent of Jansenism and Puritanism. It is the height of fanaticism to deprecate all dancing.

Having said that, there is acceptable dancing and unacceptable dancing. The unacceptable includes the kind of diabolical gyrating in the dark which is the characteristic of much modern nightclub dancing more appropriate for the unrestrained and feral leaping and swaggering of heathens, than the pursuit of civilised Christian people.

For anyone of a genuinely traditional Christian outlook, nothing could be more elegant, cultivated, chivalrous and civilised than the kind of dancing that is promoted in the books of Jane Austen. Miss Austen and her novels could stand as the very arbiters of social etiquette, politesse and public and private morality in any society Catholic or otherwise. Indeed, English high society was considered to have the very highest standards of social manners and behaviour in all Europe (and therefore the world), Anglicans seeking to make up for anything lacking, compared with Catholic society, by excelling in manners.

In London some vestige of those civilised days is preserved in the form of balls and dances that try to revive and restore the elegance of those days. The Russian summer and winter balls, the Imperial ball and the Russian Imperial ball all seek to do so and I have attended a number of them. In 2015, we celebrated the remembrance of the Duchess of Richmond's Waterloo Ball, held on the eve of the battle. We did so at the castle of a Belgian Count and so I attended in my military uniform, that of a full colonel on the staff.

However, the most regular and best attended form of civilised dancing that we engage in here in London is Scottish reeling or Scottish country dancing. Here is the commencement of the Caledonian Ball in 2013 held at the Grosvenor House hotel in Park Lane, Mayfair, and often attended by royalty and even her late Majesty the Queen, on occasion:

One fellow said quite succinctly:

Structured dance is a facet of high culture. Form over chaos.

Indeed, Denise Trull, in a wonderful short article “The Music of the Spheres,” suggests that the “dance” of the solemn traditional liturgy might be the source, and in any case is the exemplar, of all folk dances.

Exaggerating “the Magisterium”

The biggest argument against my position is that “the saints have condemned dancing, and so has the Magisterium.” But we need to be careful here.

If by “the Magisterium has condemned dances” we mean that at this or that moment a regional council or Vatican department has outlawed dancing for reasons known to the people at that time (and not necessarily correct reasons), this has no more timelessly binding authority than the Fourth Lateran Ecumenical Council’s prohibition of secular work, plays, taverns, and games of chance for all clerics and its requirement that they wear a tonsure and linen clothes, or its decree that Jews and Muslims in Catholic societies must wear special clothing to mark them off and must stay confined in their houses during the Triduum. None of this was ever rescinded, but it’s been ignored for centuries. (This is good news when we consider how much baloney has been legislated in the past sixty years, and how worthy of being ignored it is.)

The regional Council of Laodicea (c. 363) condemned dancing — but it also condemned eating with unbelievers, clerics entering taverns, and anyone singing in church except the appointed cantors. Those who invoke a council for one provision ought, out of consistency, to invoke it for the others too; or else they should admit that provisions like this are susceptible to change.

Prudential judgments are, of necessity, fitted to a given set of circumstances; even so, they can be wrong sometimes; and certainly their applicability can change over time. What is permitted or encouraged in one age may be discouraged or forbidden in another, and vice versa. This is not modernism; it’s just the way practical judgments about contingent affairs work.

Moreover, we need to be thoroughly fair. Tom Nash points out that when balls are condemned, one may often see “in the fine print” how it is objectionable aspects of them that are singled out for disapproval:

Note that the Church has concerns about ballroom dancing that involves women wearing low-cut dresses (décolleté) and “masked balls,” in which the identities of dancers are not readily apparent. In addition, the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore (1866) warned against dances as “at present carried on” not because ballroom dancing is intrinsically wrong. It is those dances that “are revolting to every feeling of delicacy and propriety,” not ballroom dances necessarily, let alone dancing in general.

Nash concludes:

Some groups of Protestant Christians categorically ban dancing, not the Catholic Church, though the Church warns against the moral perils of some types of dancing, including because of the immodest clothing of the participants.

Dorothy Cummings McLean elaborates on these points in her blog post, “Not as in wantonness,” in which she discusses the Baltimore strictures (and, more intriguingly, stories of saints who danced in exultation; granted, not ballroom dances, but still…).⁵ In a follow-up, “Benedict XV & American Catholic charity balls,” Dorothy provides the first-ever complete translation of the supposed condemnation of all balls and flags a number of aspects that problematize the claims made about a “magisterium” on the subject. There is, quite simply, no such thing, certainly not at the present time, whatever past local discipline for clerical involvement in promoting dances might have been.⁶

Let me make it absolutely clear for all readers: I am convinced that modesty is of paramount importance and I would be the first to advocate against balls or dance events in which participants would be ill-dressed, or in which they would be listening to music that is incompatible with Christian virtue (be it rock, pop, rap, heavy metal, techno, etc.).⁷

The above video was taken at the reception after my son’s wedding on September 14th.

On navigating the sayings of saints

There are thousands of canonized saints, and of them, only a small number have expressly condemned dancing. Some of the quotations one reads are clearly motivated by misogyny. I kid you not, a correspondent quoted at me Origen’s remark: “The devil sometimes wars against men by the sight of woman; sometimes by the sound of her voice; other times by touch; but in dances all these combined are used.” I’m not sure a man who was rumored to have castrated himself ought to be trotted out as an auctoritas! Other quotations are marked by the telltale signs of rigorism and moralism.

But there is a prior problem that needs to be acknowledged more often than it is, namely, that just about any extreme position one might wish to take can be supported by a flotilla of quotations from saints, if one is diligent enough to search them out. It is worth dwelling on this point for a moment.

Is sacramental baptism with water necessary for salvation? Why yes — if you follow the statements of dozens of saints quoted by the Feeneyites.

Is the playing of musical instruments, whether outside the church or inside the church, immoral? Why yes — if you consider the “vehemence and uniformity” of “the antagonism which the Fathers of the early Church displayed toward instruments,” as musicologist James McKinnon discusses. They even said at times that people who learned how to play instruments should be excommunicated. (Interestingly, the reason is the same as that given for the prohibition of dancing: to the Patristic mind, instrumental music was inseparably connected with paganism and sexual sin. And we can say, sadly, that the Patristic critique regains its relevance when it comes to a lot of the music you’ll find as you dial through the radio stations.)

Was the Virgin Mary conceived with original sin and/or did she ever commit a sin? Why yes — if you take St. Basil the Great, St. John Chrysostom, St. Hilary of Poitiers, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and St. Thomas Aquinas, among others, as your guides.

Should we receive communion only very rarely, perhaps once a year or once a month AT MOST? Why yes — if you selectively quote saintly authorities (as Arnauld did in his 1643 book De la fréquente Communion) on the unimaginable purity and holiness needed for receiving the Lord Himself! These folks would have said to St. Pius X, “Go jump in the Tiber!”

Of all the categories of saintly sayings, the one about which we need to be the most cautious, especially today, I would argue, concerns the subject of obedience to superiors. I am sure I need to offer no lengthy proof that the saints, for centuries, indeed pretty much unanimously, advocate immediate and total obedience to one’s superiors in the hierarchy or in a religious community. They often go so far as to say this obedience should be blind and unreserved; that the subject should be “like a corpse” that can be thrown here or there. They will say this is THE KEY to spiritual perfection.

Yet, as many authors have shown,⁸ and as some of us have experienced firsthand, this doctrine of obedience, developed above all by Jesuit authors, has played in modern times a key role in facilitating enormous and catastrophic evils in the Catholic Church. The sexual abuse crisis would have been inconceivable without it. The liturgical revolution was carried out “under obedience.” Devout communities of religious were perverted and even dissolved by modernists hiding behind the mask of authority. In short, the axiom corruptio optimi pessima — the corruption of the best is the worst — was never more on display than in the abuse of obedience for evil purposes.⁹

This does not mean obedience has ceased to be a virtue, even a very great virtue. What it does mean, however, is that following the advice of saints to “be like a corpse” in the hands of one’s superior is, shall we say, not the conception of obedience we need at this time. Rather, our obedience should be, as St. Thomas Aquinas more modestly conceives it, intelligent, conscientious, and keenly aware that a lower authority’s commands must harmonize with the demands of truth and justice, or at least not obviously conflict with them.¹⁰

In short: you can compile a catalog of a hundred saints saying that we should be absolutely obedient at all times to our superiors, but this won’t provide you with an adequate understanding of when and how obedience should be withheld when something goes wrong — as can always happen with rulers who are not God, as our times have, tragically, made plain.¹¹

(It’s especially ironic when traditionalist priests insist that we must all follow low-level, circumstantially targeted magisterial interventions on dancing, when they themselves reject much higher-level churchwide magisterial documents issued by postconciliar popes, such as Paul VI’s Missale Romanum or Francis’s Amoris Laetitia or the DDF’s Fiducia Supplicans. Surely they must know that reams of quotations from Leo XIII, Pius X, and Pius XII can be compiled declaring that every Catholic at every moment must submit to be guided by the Holy See without a whimper of protest, much less the temerity of disobedience. They should drop their traditional liturgy and, for that matter, traditional doctrine at a moment’s notice if the pope wills it. All this is stock-in-trade for the sedevacantists, who, when they see a pope deviate from the faith, declare him not a pope and wash their hands of the affair. I am beginning to wonder if our anti-dancing brigade are closet sedevacantists, for that is exactly where the logic of their position should carry them — giving them yet another similarity to the Jansenists, who were notoriously anti-Roman.)

You see what I am driving at. Many Catholics think that just become someone has “St.” attached to his name, therefore all his opinions must be true; and because someone doesn’t have “St.” attached to his name, his views must be dubious or negligible. There is, in this attitude, such confusion that one hardly knows where to begin. Saints disagree about a lot of things; indeed, the Church Fathers themselves disagree. Recognizing this is a step towards growing up and having a mature theological outlook. Obviously, we revere the Church Fathers and follow their consensus, to the extent that we can find it; we respect all the saints and do not treat their views with contempt. But we are realistic about the limits that this consensus and this witness have, and we know that disputed matters cannot be settled simply by compiling a list of our favorite quotes.

St. John Vianney was right on the question of dancing inasmuch as he was targeting bad local practice. He judged that this was the message his flock needed to hear at that moment. To turn his advice for 19th-century Ars into a universal condemnation for all places and all times is ridiculous. Who made St. John Vianney the creed, catechism, and consistory on the subject of dancing? Certainly not the actual Magisterium of the Church — either the universal ordinary Magisterium or the extraordinary Magisterium of popes and ecumenical councils. When Catholics latch on to sayings of saints and wield them like inerrant Bible verses or conciliar canons and anathemas, they betray great confusion both about how theological argumentation is to be conducted and about the nature of practical moral reasoning. Moreover, they may for this reason miss out on the opportunity to identify and remedy the most serious evils of the present day.¹²

Bartolomeo Pinelli, “Dancing Peasants in the Neighborhood of Rome” (source)

Why social dancing is uniquely well-suited to the present time

Yes, St. Francis de Sales warns against balls (though he does not condemn them outright).¹³ But his times are not our times. Our young people, scattered across suburbia and caught in the worldwide web, are absolutely starving for healthy social recreations and we give them NOTHING. Nothing but their stupid smartphones, their internet “friend” groups, and maybe an occasional outing somewhere if they’re lucky. What a depressing life. Mark my words: the trads who are condemning dances today will live to see some of their children or former parishioners leave the Faith — not just because of dancing, of course, but because of an entire killjoy attitude hardly better than Puritanism. Trads can, and must, do better than this.

It’s as if the anti-terpsichoreans were saying: “Our world is saturated with sexual objectification — so, in response, we must cut off all opportunities for young men and women to learn how to relate normally to each other as persons!” In acting thus, they are doing the most damaging thing they can do to young people. As Julian argued so well, forbidding dances because women are deemed to be nothing other than sources of sexual temptation for men only supports our culture’s objectification of women (and the same could be said in the other direction: forbidding dances because men are deemed to be nothing other than sex-obsessed predators supports our culture’s widespread denigration of them as louts and losers).

Let me put it as directly as I can: it is because of the danger of pornification, of a sexualized world, that we must provide decorous and controlled social occasions centered on personal interactions. This is a custom-made cure for that problem. The fact that some people do not (or will not) see this astonishes me.

What about the dangers that may sometimes be associated with dances? First, we should do our best to minimize those dangers by (a) insisting on a modest dress code; (b) utilizing exclusively traditional formal dances for groups and couples, with only traditional music to dance to; (c) encouraging habits of politeness in the matter of inviting, escorting, bowing, etc., (d) ensuring the presence of chaperones who can take note of problematic behavior and address it appropriately.

However, let us say that some evil still manages to worm its way in, thanks to the disordered concupiscence or rebellious spirit of this or that participant. Would that be a reason to call off dances altogether? No, and for the same reason St. Thomas Aquinas gives as to why Divine Providence does not simply prevent all evils from happening in the world. He says that if all evils were prevented, certain greater goods would be thwarted. God permits the evils in order to make room, as it were, for goods that could not otherwise exist.

We all understand this point intuitively: if you try to prevent your kids from ever getting injured by keeping them indoors all day, every day, they will be miserable human beings who fail to develop all kinds of skills and virtues they need for a well-rounded life. Courage, for instance, cannot be developed apart from facing risk, overcoming difficulty, and bearing pain. As a friend of mine said, if you could prevent all injuries by wrapping everyone in bubble wrap from the time they are toddlers until their twenties, this would still not be worth doing, because the loss of many goods that such an approach would cause vastly outweighs, in its badness, the evils that might be avoided.¹⁴ The same is true of dancing. To rule it out because certain evils may arise and sometimes do arise is a disproportionate response, blocking the goods it yields for those of good will.

I would go so far as to say that, at this moment in history, priests who burden consciences with prohibitions of well-regulated social dancing are in danger of committing sin themselves, and will need to answer for the Catholics who drift away from traditional Catholicism, perceiving it to be something like a rigoristic sect. And when a priest counters: “I know of cases where immoral things have happened at or after dances — vocations lost, and boys getting girls pregnant!,”¹⁵ I can easily respond with “I know of cases where Catholic youths have abandoned Tradition and even the Faith because of the oppressive environment in which they were raised — and this includes the parish environment, not just the family.”

It’s easy for everyone to make assertions based on “what they’ve heard or seen”; it’s far more difficult to demonstrate necessary and universal causal connections or a threshold of certainty about what level of risk is too much risk (since there is no course of action without some attendant risk).

I am doubling down and I will double down on this subject, because well-regulated social dancing is not only natural, healthy, and good, it is nearly obligatory at this time in our civilizational decline.

Appendix 1: A blog not to be missed

For those who wish to delve more deeply into the subject of why we dance, why it’s important, and what we should make of particular dance types, I cannot recommend too highly Dorothy Cummings McLean’s splendid blog, Mrs McLean’s Waltzing Party.

What is dancing all about? She answers:

Dancing expresses emotion through movement. Two of the dances I promote — swing dance and ceilidh dancing — express joy. Swing dance, which creates joy in the dancer, is a celebration of joy itself, shared by the dancing couple and anyone watching. Ceilidh dancing, which creates both joy and a sense of community, is also the expression of joy in a community and in a tradition. At the end of every ceilidh I attend, I’m so happy to be living in Scotland, so proud of my (multi-ethnic, BTW) Edinburgh community and my Scots ancestry, and so full of love for my Scots-Canadian mum and grandma that I have to fight back tears as everyone around me sings “Auld Lang Syne.” I’m closer to heaven, where I hope and pray I will meet my own again.

And on the waltz:

Every partner dance is a mutual project... When both partners are novices, the dance is like a puzzle to be solved together. When they have had enough practise, the dance might become a conversation. In the Lindy Hop, for example, you can dance shared jokes. Let us put to rest, please, this idea that all social dances are a gateway to sexual sin, or even that they are an inexorable precursor to romance. Dancing in general is the physical generation and expression of emotion (usually joy), and the waltz, as it is danced today by Christians, is the physical expression of chaste friendship between, and the complementarity of, men and women.

On propriety in dance:

The Roaring Twenties have the reputation of being wonderfully (or ignobly) wild, but English were still very interested in respectability and Christian morals. They valued “restraint, control, order, elegance, grace, lack of exhibitionism and a democratic approach as embodied in the ideal of the dancing partnership acting as one as they moved.” Such was the renewed and Anglicized waltz. Many people in England disapproved of African or African-American style dances like the ragtime and then jazz, and many were disgusted by the Latin tango…. Many of the new dance moves clearly went against such values as control, order, and “lack of exhibitionism.”

On discernment:

There has always been a tension in the Church between the joyful dancing epitomized by King David and the immodest (wanton) dancing of Salome. The problem is sorting out, for every era, which is which…. There are a number of people, places and activities today that are clearly an occasion of sin for some, and perhaps even most, people. My argument is that this is almost never going to be dancing a waltz, polka or foxtrot in the company of fellow Catholics in a church hall at 10 PM. Only the very unfortunate could sin against God, society, family and themselves simply by attending such an innocent, joyous gathering.

Swing dancing at Thomas Aquinas College (East), Mardi Gras 2024

Appendix 2: Swing and a miss

Among my correspondents are those who approve of social dancing in general but who have a particular problem with the swing, considering it to be on the edge of the descent of dancing into its current forms of nightclub grossness. Let me address this topic head-on.

As should be clear from last week’s articles and today’s, I do believe there is a hierarchy to dances, with group and folk dances at the top, formal couple dances in the middle, and modern “dancing” at the bottom. The first should be privileged, the second allowed, the third forbidden.

It has been objected that, due to the intensity of swing and the movements of the female, it is almost impossible to maintain Catholic propriety in a dress. In response, one must note that there are different official types of swing dancing — Lindy Hop, West Coast Swing, Collegiate Shag, Charleston, the too-close-for-comfort Balboa — but there is also what’s called the “social” swing and then there is performance/competition swing. The crazy aerial moves, where the girl leaps into the air, and the boy pulls her between his legs, and her skirt goes every which way, are not part of “social” swing. They are for contests or shows, and have no place on the social dancing floor. If a girl’s skirt is long or heavy enough, it’s not going to show anything it should be concealing.

Swing dancing in its heyday was always accompanied by decent music. It was never meant to be danced to rock music; if that happens, it happens because of the corrupt tastes of uneducated DJs. While big-band era music is not the best dance music of all time, it’s easy to tell it apart from later rock and pop genres: it follows the natural order of rhythm (emphasis on the downbeat, instead of the weak beats); melody, harmony, and rhythm are well-proportioned to each other; it uses good instrumentation, not distorted or electrified; it is often purely instrumental, and when there are words, they are usually unobjectionable. It has, in short, the strengths and weaknesses of 1950s culture. Naturally, the lyrics of any song should be vetted before being added to a playlist.¹⁶

Because the swing is a high-energy dance, it seems to me basically incompatible with movements of concupiscence. There may be internal desire towards a partner on account of beauty/handsomeness, and this may have bad consequences later on if virtue is lacking, but the dance itself is essentially a form of physical exercise. Even with crazy aerial moves, it’s hard to imagine either dancer would have time to feel titillated. Yes, the partners are touching, but it’s not like a slow two-step where they are hugging the entire time, or even like the original Austrian waltz that the British adapted to make it more modest.

We have to consider all these elements separately: (1) modesty in clothing and behavior; (2) modesty in choice of music; (3) modesty in dancing techniques. It is certainly possible to get them all correct, but it’s also easy enough to let things slide in one way or another.

It must be frankly admitted that it requires more work to “get things right” with swing dancing — the proper type of swing, well-ordered music, and propriety in dress — than is typically the case with country and folk dances, which seem to “take care of themselves.” They tend to function without any pop-culture values slipping in. We might compare the traditional cultural dances to the TLM, and the swing to the Novus Ordo: the former comes ready-made and complete, the latter has to be micromanaged to achieve the “reverent Mass.”

Group dancing — whether that means country dancing with groups (and thus with ever-changing partners and low incidence of contact) or individual folk dances done in tandem — is what we should be emphasizing. It saddens me that the Catholic schools that promote “balls” lean so heavily into swing. By all means, let it be part of the program; but surely not the dominant note?

In any case, trads who are fighting against dancing are playing right into the hands of their enemies, and guaranteeing that at least some significant minority of young trads will “go over to the dark side” simply by the lure of it and by having absolutely nothing among themselves that can compete with it for “fun.” I believe it is perilous to neglect the element of fun. Needless to say, fun does not equate with swing dancing; those who dance to folk music will also have plenty of fun. Here I am merely commenting on the ferociously anti-dancing mentality I have encountered in sunless corners of Tradistan.

Thank you for reading and may God bless you!

1. Jive, which developed for early rock music, encourages much more swinging of the hips and leans towards body movement styles used in modern free-form dancing; it is inappropriate for Catholics.

2. I have immense respect for St. Robert Bellarmine as a theologian, but one may truly question his good judgment in stating the following (if indeed he did state it, as my source contains no citation): “A young man cannot dance with a young woman without feeling the sparks of an impure flame. If adultery and fornication are sins, the dance must be so since it leads to them.” I’m sorry, but that’s simply empirically false. In college I danced frequently without “feeling the sparks of an impure flame,” and so have countless friends of mine who enjoy dancing for its own sake as a social activity, to which we can add the testimony of all the correspondents in the past week who have stepped forward to reject the hypersexualized interpretation of dancing. I’m afraid that this would be another example of how, at times, celibate clergy do not have a good grasp of how things actually stand “on the ground.” Yes, they hear confessions — but obviously, only the confessions of those who have sinned. Would all the dancers who just had fun (dodging “the sparks of an impure flame”) go to the confessional to tell the priest that they had not sinned?

3. The analogy between drinking and dancing goes further. The worst possible approach one could take to alcoholic beverages is to ban the drinking of them altogether among young people. When parents give small quantities of beer or wine to their children and teens, alcoholic beverages, instead of being seen as “forbidden fruit,” become part of ordinary life, integrated into dining and socializing. The same should be true of dancing: if people were accustomed to dancing throughout their lives, it would not have the aura of something naughty or rebellious.

4. Enthusiasm, pp. 211-12.

5. I would only add that the pastoral judgment of 19th-century US bishops was not always above reproach. To take one infamous example, Archbishop John Ireland prompted a huge defection of Eastern Catholics to the Orthodox Church due to his stubborn insistence on celibacy for Eastern clergy, and, moreover, was the main mover and shaker behind the heresy of Americanism condemned by Leo XIII.

6. It is characteristic of the anti-terpsichoreans to take something meant for a given time and place and turn it into an eternal and universal decree, contrary to the way all canonists normally work with disciplinary documents.

7. I have provided a full argument against these forms of music in my book Good Music, Sacred Music, and Silence.

8. Particularly John Lamont: see “Tyranny and Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: A Jesuit Tragedy.”

9. See my lecture (available in video and in text), “The Corruption of the Best Is the Worst: When Obedience Becomes the Devil’s Tool,” also published in my book Bound by Truth: Authority, Obedience, Tradition, and the Common Good.

10. I have gone into all of this in my book True Obedience in the Church: A Guide to Discernment in Challenging Times.

11. See, for many examples, Dom Dysmas de Lassus, Abuses in the Religious Life and the Path to Healing.

12. As my co-author Dorothy Cummings McLean wrote in a comment here last week:

Saintly priests of old wrote sermons from which we can benefit, but their target audiences were their own flock. In France of 1824, a parish priest might be aware that dances in his own village (where there was alcohol, insufficient chaperonage, nearby woods, and other inducements to sin) were leading to violations of the 6th and 9th commandments. Having noted that the particular dances of that particular time were danced in a particular way (and not being an authority on the history of dance or knowing much about dance or, indeed, sports), he might well assemble an arsenal of texts to argue his thesis that dancing is wrong. His real target is fornication, but he believes dancing leads inexorably to fornication, so he is only doing his priestly duty. However, in 2024, the very opening of a computer can be, for some, an occasion for sexual sin. Souls may be falling like snowflakes into hell, but it’s not because they are frequenting chaperoned community dances in which dancers are instructed in traditional dance patterns and they are minding their steps and avoiding bumping into other dancers, smiling or laughing with real merriment — the closest we get, in adult life, to the merriment we felt as infants playing ring-around-the-rosy or the hokey-pokey. The violations of men’s and women’s souls in 2024 are occurring online, assisted by grotesque evils of pornography. In 2024, priests must warn their own specific flocks not against social ballroom or folk dancing, as it is practiced amongst their flock (if at all), but against abuse of the internet, including so-called “dating” apps like Tinder. In 1824, dancing might have been an excuse — or opportunity — for sin. In 2024, dancing takes the young away from the overwhelmingly obvious occasion for sin of our day: their own computers and smartphones.

13. I’ll just say it for the record: St. Gabriel Possenti was known for his dancing skills before he entered the Passionists. And it was not accounted against his piety, nor was he considered a public sinner.

14. A comment posted at last week’s article expressed this point well:

Leaving aside the theology here, human nature comes into play. There are myriad examples of activities being banned which generated a counterreaction, sometimes extreme. Prohibition [of alcohol], the banning of Christmas under the Puritans, banning or burning books, and more recently the banning of physical contact during covid-tide just being a few that spring to mind. As Catholics, we really don't need the Fun Police. If people can’t have natural enjoyment in life, they will not remain Catholics. Nuns and monks have a laugh and a joke in recreations (and have even been known to play party games), and Jesus certainly went to a few parties himself.

15. The claim has been made that holding dances cripples priestly and religious vocations. But if this were true, how can one explain the large numbers of vocations emerging from Newman Guide schools that hold frequent dances (e.g., Thomas Aquinas College, Christendom College, Wyoming Catholic College)? In fact, many of the students I knew who are now seminarians, priests, or religious were avid dancers. And this is good for everyone. We do not need brittle vocations of men and women fearful of and uptight about the opposite sex.

16. Rock should never be used for swings (including “Rock Around the Clock”). It’s really unfortunate that Catholic colleges like Thomas Aquinas College and Wyoming Catholic College will allow students to put on straight-up rock music for swings (that doesn’t even work well, since the swing depends on a strong downbeat). The best thing that can happen is when groups of young people band together to promote live music and traditional dances. There have to be enough of them to make their interests head. At a college, a group needs to go to the Student Life office and make a proposal about devoting X amount of time at the next dance to swings, polkas, foxtrot, country dancing, etc. It is possible but it requires initiative.