How Catholics Can Regain a Proper Sense of Tradition| National Catholic Register
Every Catholic must be, by definition, some version of a “traditionalist.” Our faith is grounded in the absolute truth of God’s Revelation in Christ and that Christ founded his Church upon apostolic authority.
As we read in John’s Gospel, after his resurrection, Jesus appeared to the Apostles and said, “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.” He then breathed on them, imparting the Holy Spirit, and gave to them the power of binding and loosing sins (John 20:21-22).
Therefore, the mission of those Apostles was not to invent a new revelation of their own, but to preserve and “hand on” (the literal meaning of the word “tradition”) God’s Revelation down through time. This has many ramifications and nuances, but one thing is clear: the Church’s Tradition, composed of many layers, is one of the mediations of Revelation that makes the historical Christ present in the here and now. In word, teaching and sacrament, the Holy Spirit is with the Church, guiding it and making the risen Christ available to all with the same full force as with those first Apostles who knew him personally.
Thus, the Church’s tradition is that which unlocks Christ from being a prisoner of the first century, important in his time, but now simply one more “great man” from the past and ever receding into the fog of a long-ago history. Therefore, no Catholic should ever assert that we are now free to hit a reset button and to treat this Tradition as a plastic and malleable human creation that we are now free to reshape as we see fit. In particular, no Catholic should ever claim, as happens so often these days, that Vatican II represented a kind of “year zero” in the Church, which represented a rupture with Tradition and now grants us permission to continue the revolution of remaking the Church — and thus remaking Jesus himself — into the sock puppet of modern secularity.
Such attitudes and opinions are the very antithesis of the Gospel and its core assertion that God has spoken to us in a definitive way in Christ, that his Revelation has been gifted to the Church, and therefore that we are not free to invent new Christs more to our contemporary tastes. To make such claims is a horrific act of theological violence against Christ because latent in such an assertion is the claim that Christ was merely a “man of his time” whose teachings on such issues as divorce and remarriage, human sexuality, the evils of wealth, the need for radical conversion and an ascesis of material simplicity, are mere artifacts of his era but no longer binding upon us today.
And after such a surgical dissection of the Gospel, one is left with the impression that this kind of theological revisionism is not so much a reparative retrieval of something living but rather more like an autopsy on a cadaver. Because if the Church’s living Tradition is not an organism — a living participation in the Body of Christ — then it is nothing but an ill-assorted mélange of purely human opinions from men now long dead and of no lingering consequence.
Obviously, one of the tasks of the Church’s magisterium is the ongoing task of interpreting Revelation and of deepening our understanding of it. Therefore, sometimes, in order to be faithful to the Tradition, one must, in the light of new historical realities and advances in human knowledge, tease out of Revelation nuances and truths that were not noticed before. Thus, there is a necessary element of creativity (e.g., the coining of new theological terms like “transubstantiation” and “consubstantial” and even “Trinity”) that is required precisely in order to remain faithful to the core message of the Gospel.
In other words, the slavish handing on of the Tradition in a literalistic manner is paradoxically to fall into the Protestant error of reducing the mediations of Revelation to a reading of Scripture and nothing more. Much of the magisterial unfolding of Revelation in the patristic era and beyond, mostly in ecumenical councils, involves theological interpretation of scriptural truths as well as not a little metaphysics and philosophy. Indeed, one of the first issues that had to be decided at the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325) was whether it was a violation of Tradition to go beyond biblical terminology in defending the full divinity of Jesus through the coining of the new term “homoousios” (consubstantial).
Therefore, those modern Catholic traditionalists (sometimes called “radical traditionalists”) who are deeply suspicious of any kind of theological novelty, which they reject as just so much “modernism,” are actually not being very traditional at all. They accept that earlier councils can invent new terms like transubstantiation (a good term which I fully embrace as well), but then cast a jaundiced eye at modern popes and Vatican II when the Church sought to develop new ways of speaking about such issues as religious freedom and ecumenical outreach.
There is a danger in such movements of an almost equal measure of theological violence against the historical Christ as that of the progressives. And this is so because, as with progressivism and its privileging of the modern, the historical Christ is eclipsed as an ongoing living reality in the Church. Among traditionalists this happens by elevating one historical epoch of the Church — usually the 12th to the 16th centuries — over all others, thus rendering Tradition into an ideological tool for the furtherance of antecedent theological commitments, rather than the unfolding in time and space of the living Christ. It is, in short, a form of ecclesiolatry, and of a very truncated sort.
In his magnificent book, Principles of Catholic Theology, written in 1982 and while still a cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger, reflecting on the reception of Vatican II, states the following about the “traditionalists” of his day:
“Was the Council a wrong road that we must now retrace if we are to save the Church? The voices of those who say that it was are becoming louder and their followers more numerous. Among the more obvious phenomena of the last years must be counted the increasing number of integralist groups in which the desire for piety, for the sense of the mystery, is finding satisfaction. We must be on our guard against minimizing these movements. Without a doubt, they represent a sectarian zealotry that is the antithesis of Catholicity. We cannot resist them too firmly.”
These are strong words from the future pope. Their force is predicated upon a view of Tradition that is completely faithful to the truths of Revelation, admitting of no watering down of the faith to suit popular modern fads of thought. At the same time, it is also a view that embraces the necessity of a creative fidelity to those same truths, which sometimes requires the Church to adopt new approaches and even make minor corrections to previous non-infallible teachings. Not all Church teachings are infallible, and the claim that the Church can never correct some small aspects of previous teaching is really tantamount to saying that every teaching is irreformable and infallible.
The irony is that this kind of infallibility bloat is not what the Church teaches about the authoritative nature of her teachings. There is a hierarchy of doctrinal truths and varying levels of authoritativeness that require careful theological and historical analysis and discernment. Not all teachings are equal, and some may even contain fallible elements that stand in need of correction.
Therefore, a true traditionalism will eschew both those who embrace endless flux in a manner that would make Heraclitus blush and radical traditionalism with its selective infallibility bloat, which applies only to Church pronouncements from the preconciliar era. This is why one of the kissing cousins of the traditionalist movement is sedevacantism in terms of the sheer logic of the theological dissonance created by such a bifurcation between preconciliar and postconciliar magisterial teachings, no matter how small the actual numbers of adherents to sedevacantism might be.
All that said, I would be remiss if I did not point out that Cardinal Ratzinger, immediately after his harsh words for the traditionalists of his day, noted that not all of their complaints are wrong, and that their movement into a kind of insular sectarianism contra the whole Church was most likely occasioned by the gross nonsense of so much Church life after the Council. He states:
“Why have they lost the feeling of being at home in the larger Church? Are all their reproaches unfounded? Is it not, for example, really strange that we have never heard bishops react as strongly against distortions in the heart of the liturgy as they react today against the use of a Missal of the Church that, after all, has been in existence since the time of Pius V? Let it be said again: we should not adopt a sectarian attitude, but neither should we omit the examination of conscience to which these facts compel us.”
This is an unhealthy dialectic between progressivism and traditionalism that is harming the life of the Church today. It is imperative, therefore, that the Church recover a proper sense of Tradition. How timely, therefore, was the announcement that Cardinal Newman is now a Doctor of the Church. The Holy Spirit apparently still abides in the Church. And that should never be forgotten.
