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True Catholic tradition means handing on God’s Revelation in Christ — not freezing it in one age, nor reshaping it to suit modern tastes.
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.
Continued below.
www.ncregister.com
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.
Continued below.
How Catholics Can Regain a Proper Sense of Tradition
COMMENTARY: True Catholic tradition means handing on God’s Revelation in Christ — not freezing it in one age, nor reshaping it to suit modern tastes.
