Some Catholics have yet to forgive Martin Luther for splintering the church universal. In his 1973 novel Catholics, Brian Moore memorably portrayed a heroic abbot, faithful to the Latin Mass in the face of a trendy church that was abandoning core Christian tenets, who wonders “when certainty had begun” in the church. Perhaps with Vatican II, he reflects, “and long ago, that righteous prig at Wittenberg nailing his defiance to the church door.” Yet surprisingly, Catholic traditionalists like the fictional Abbot are increasingly finding Martin Luther to be a figure worth emulating rather than deriding.

Even before the Pope’s visit to America last week, many conservative Catholics were filled with angst about the more progressive direction Francis was taking the church, with a renewed emphasis on social problems like inequality as well as the urgency of tackling climate change, combined with a move to soft-pedal divisive social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. This anxiety has only heightened after Francis’s addresses to Congress and the United Nations, where sexual issues received far less attention than climate change, economic inequality, and the death penalty.

Some conservative Catholics, like Pat Buchanan and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, have been sounding more and more like “that righteous prig at Wittenberg,” making Luther-like threatening noises about defying the Pope and even airing the idea of schism (with breakaway churches having their own popes, as memorably happened in the Middle Ages during the Avignon Captivity). The increasing frequency with which conservative Catholics talk about schism as a real possibility highlights how central issues of sexual morality are to this faction within the church. It also suggests that these conservative Catholics already have more in common with evangelical Protestants than with progressive Catholics.

Schismatics have traditionally been regarded with horror by faithful Catholics. Unity is a core Catholic value, as can be seen by the very word “catholic” itself, not to mention the sacramental rite of communion. In Dante’s Inferno, schismatics are near the very bottom of Hell, in the eighth circle, where they are repeatedly torn asunder by demons as punishment for sowing discord. Schism is no small matter, yet we hear writers like Buchanan and Douthat talking about the church in terms that suggest at a minimum virulent disputes with the church hierarchy, and at worst the nursing of schism as an option.

Writing in The Week, Michael Brendan Dougherty, one of the most thoughtful writers on the Catholic right, argued in May of last year: “Sometimes, the duty of a faithful Catholic is not just to rebuke and correct those in authority in the church…but to throw rotting cabbage at them, or make them miserable…” In the British conservative magazine The Spectator, Damian Thompson suggested that if the church moves to accept same-sex marriage, some traditional Catholics will just create “the modern equivalent of Avignon and we’ll have two popes.”