There are always extremist fringes to any groups sharing a set of beliefs. This applies to any religion, as well as to politics and much else besides. I suppose one does not want to push them out, unless they become a disproportionately destabilising influence on the rest, which so far does not seem to be the case. I suspect time is on the Church's side, in that the appeal of this crank version of Catholicism must be mainly to the very old.
There is just one respect in which the influence of these people may not be entirely malign: music. I was a great supporter of Benedict XVI's efforts to revive the musical tradition of the church. Sadly, many of the more modern types of Catholic cleric seem to be almost deaf to its musical heritage and to neglect it tragically. It would be a terrible shame if that priceless treasure were to come to be associated with nutters.
I do think that one of the great appeals of the church is its sense of timelessness. I find the feeling of continuity with Christian humanity, represented by reciting the same words and singing the same music as people long gone, 500 or even 1000 years ago - in effect holding hands with past generations - is wonderful and consoling. Perhaps the existence of these nutty fringes is partly a symptom of this role of church worship becoming overlooked in favour of perceived "relevance".
A well written and insightful post, thank you.
I myself am a "
traditionalist" in terms of liturgical tastes, in that I favour the solemn beauty of the Extraordinary Form of the Tridentine mass over the
Novus Ordo in certain respects.
It can be quite a humbling experience to realise that you are the heir and keeper of something immemorial (or with an air of being
'time immemorial'): a custom that has a deep history of moral meaning, passed down from one generation to the next. There's a real beauty to that and in being able to introduce the next generation to the same traditions that shaped oneself growing up.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with having a preference for the language, music and pattern of an older style worship.
But the kind of "
traditionalism" at play here is quite different. It is an attempt to return the church to an inward retreat from dialogue with the outside world, to resurrect the psychological walls of a siege mentality. As a family, we have no right to calumny one another as heretics for practising the same faith and holding to the same deposit of faith in a different way.
That is less "traditionalism" and more an example of inordinate "traditiolatry". It is precisely due to the fact that the tradition is timeless that it cannot be tied down to one particular time-conditioned, culturally contingent "style".
There was a famous linguistic tussle in late antiquity over the precise definition of the Latin word
religio (from which we derive 'religion'). According to the pagan rhetorician and Stoic-influenced moralist Cicero (106 BC – 7 December 43 BC), 'religio' was derivative of '
relegere' ("
to re-read") which entailed 'rote learning', meaning that to be 'religious' was to studiously and uncritically retain the ancestral cultic traditions and customs of one's forefathers. Therefore in his dialogue,
De natura deorum, one of the main interlocutors Aurelius Cotta, affirms: "
For my part a single argument would have sufficed , namely that it has been handed down to us by our ancestors...I think that I should defend those opinions which we have received from our ancestors about the immortal gods, and the cults and rites and religious duties. I myself will indeed defend them always and always have defended them" (Cic.
Nat. D. 3.9).
The early church father Lactantius argued that
religion was not derived from
relegere "
to re-read" but on the contrary from the root
ligo "
to bind".
As Lactantius explained in his
Divine Institutes (translated below in the Catholic Church's New Advent collection of the Church Fathers):
CHURCH FATHERS: Divine Institutes, Book II (Lactantius)
It is therefore right, especially in a matter on which the whole plan of life turns, that every one should place confidence in himself, and use his own judgment and individual capacity for the investigation and weighing of the truth, rather than through confidence in others to be deceived by their errors, as though he himself were without understanding.
God has given wisdom to all alike, that they might be able both to investigate things which they have not heard, and to weigh things which they have heard.
Nor, because our ancestors preceded us in time did they also outstrip us in wisdom; for if this is given equally to all, we cannot be anticipated in it by those who precede us. It is incapable of diminution, as the light and brilliancy of the sun; because, as the sun is the light of the eyes, so is wisdom the light of man’s heart.
Wherefore, since wisdom — that is, the inquiry after truth — is natural to all, they deprive themselves of wisdom, who without any judgment approve of the discoveries of their ancestors, and like sheep are led by others...
The Catholic tradition combined
relegere with
ligo into a new holistic understanding of religion.
On the one hand, the very implication of being part of a "
sacred tradition" is that you are the heir to and recipient of some rich inheritance from the past. And of that, we Catholics certainly are.
Ours is the heritage of the apostles - through the apostolic succession, as we so regard it, the 'laying on of hands' from one generation of bishops to another in unbroken lineage - the deposit of faith and the seven sacraments, the ecumenical councils, the intellectual patrimony of the church fathers, the spiritual reservoir of the desert fathers and the great mystics, the analytical treatises of the scholastics and the Jesuits, and much else besides that time would fail me to enumerate.
However, the tradition is never "static" or in a steady-state of fossilisation. With every new generation has come a renewed wealth of insight and understanding into that 'deposit of faith' which has progressed in time through the ages and which we believe to be an inexhaustible source of 'newness' in knowledge. The analogy often used is that of a tree slowly growing from the original acorn into a small sapling and then into a great oak.
All Catholics, each in our own way - whether Latin rite, Eastern rites, Tridentine Mass or Novus Ordo - are heirs to and preservers of the one sacred apostolic tradition.
What many self-identifying traditionalists forget is that Vatican II actually
revived traditions from the early church in its reformed liturgy - such as the sign of peace and certain words of institution adopted from St. Hippolytus's
Apostolic Tradition orders of the late second century - that represent a far more primitive mode of worship than the Tridentine Rite.
The tradition, though, cannot be "fossilized" into one sacrosanct and immutable socio-cultural manifestation.
In the first century, the early Christians worshipped in synagogues and sacrificed in the Jerusalem Temple alongside other Jews. The first liturgy was Jewish and synagogical in nature.
After the collapse of the Temple in 70 A.D., in the centuries that followed, new liturgical styles sprouted up in the Latin West, Byzantine East, Alexandrian Coptic, Syro-Malabar Indian, Maronite Lebanese, Ruthenian, Russian etc. etc.
None of these liturgical styles has a monopoly on the faith.
An unprejudiced analysis of Pope Francis's pontificate would demonstrate that he has done no injury to the church's sacred tradition but is a faithful student of the Patristics and a profound adherent of the mystical theology of the medieval church, such as that of the Franciscans, as well as the glories of his own Jesuit order.
