Is Traditionalism an Essence or a Reaction?

The way younger people talk about discovering traditional Catholicism and the Latin Mass is not unlike wandering into a record store as a teenager and finding that unknown LP, pressing play, and being blown away. That’s what happened to my friend (who is coming into the Church at Easter) when he first stepped into a TLM as a non-Catholic last year. “This is the real deal, man. This is holy.” For him, it was an essence of the real, the holy, the raw energy of Catholicism at its most restrained liturgically.