We remain the Church of Tradition
Following their exchange in October, author Moyra Doorly and theologian Aidan Nichols discuss what true fidelity to Tradition consists of

25 December 2009

John Paul II, pictured in St Peter's Basilica in 2004. He accused Archbishop Lefebvre of displaying 'an incomplete and contradictory notion of Tradition'

Dear Fr Aidan,

"We are ready to write the Creed with our own blood," wrote SSPX Bishop Fellay in his December 15 2008 letter to Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos. Now I don't know about anyone else, Fr Aidan, but to me this assertion is almost heart-stopping. After all, when was the last time in this apathetic and lukewarm age that a man of the Church spoke in such terms?

I mention this because the subject here is "The Concept of Tradition", the first topic being discussed between the SSPX and Rome. And also because it is the SSPX's adherence to Tradition, they claim, that has led to their estrangement from a Rome imbued with the spirit of liberalism and modernism embraced by the Second Vatican Council and imposed on the Catholic faithful following the Council.

In his 1988 Motu Proprio Ecclesia Dei Afflicta (para 4) which announced the excommunication of Archbishop Lefebvre and the four SSPX bishops, Pope John Paul II wrote that the root of Archbishop Lefebvre's "schismatic act" in carrying out the episcopal ordinations was "an incomplete and contradictory notion of Tradition. Incomplete because it does not take sufficiently into account the living character of Tradition".

And so the SSPX is accused of misunderstanding the concept of Tradition and its living character, while the SSPX in turn claims adherence to the 2,000-year teachings of the Church and accuses the Council of introducing new teachings contrary to the Catholic Faith which, they say, have proved disastrous for the Church in the post-Conciliar period as all the statistics suggest. So naturally this raises the inevitable question - what is Tradition and what is meant by the term "living" in this context?

According to Archbishop Lefebvre in his 1986 Open Letter to Confused Catholics: "Tradition does not consist of the customs inherited from the past and preserved out of loyalty to the past even where there are no clear reasons for them. Tradition is defined as the Deposit of Faith transmitted by the Magisterium down through the centuries. This deposit is what has been given to us by Revelation; that is to say, the Word of God entrusted to the Apostles and transmitted unfailingly by their successors."

As SSPX Bishop Tissier de Mallerais explained in his discourse "The True Notion of Tradition", given at Versailles (May 19, 1995), Tradition is immutable just as God is, because God and the saints who adore Him exist in eternity which, unlike time, does not change. Thus, new teachings are not added to the Deposit of Faith, or derived by assimilating elements foreign to it. Instead they are formulated through progress in precision, as the qualities inherent in a rough diamond are revealed by the gem-cutter, and through development in explanation, as the truths contained in the revealed deposit unfold like a bud which blossoms but remains, in essence, the same flower.

By this development, truths already contained in the deposit pass from being implicitly believed to explicitly stated. Eventually a point which cannot be surpassed is reached, the point at which truth is defined ex cathedra by a pope, as was the Immaculate Conception by Pope Pius IX, or the Assumption of the Most Holy Virgin by Pope Pius XII. Defined truths are therefore irrevocable and no longer susceptible to development.

Thus the Mass codified by Pope St Pius V in his 1570 bull Quo Primum, represents this unsurpassable summit according to Bishop de Mallerais. The result of centuries of liturgical development, it is the full expression of the dogmas of the Mass. In contrast, the new Mass is a regression rather than a development, since the dogmas are less clearly manifested, the Real Presence less affirmed, the propitiatory sacrifice sidelined and the sacrificing character of the priesthood played down.

Immutable Tradition has an admirable capacity for application to all contingent circumstances, Bishop de Mallerais also points out. Catholic application involves no change, no mutation of the principles, but instead allows for the development of different applications of the same principles. Tradition is living because it is lived by the faithful, and alive because it applies the eternal and unchanging principles to the problems and necessities of each century. "But Vatican II let the principles fall, under the pretext of adaptation to the thinking of the modern world," Bishop de Mallerais claims.

Therefore Tradition is "living", is alive, as long as the Deposit of Faith is accurately transmitted. But the new theology adopted by Vatican II has falsified, adulterated and disarmed Tradition, so that sterility and not fecundity is the mark of the Conciliar Church, as evidenced in the dearth of vocations, the widescale abandonment of the Faith, and empty churches.

The Council's professed aim of embracing modern thought and rendering the rites and worship of the Church more suited to the modern age has, according to the SSPX, opened the door to liberalism which denies original sin and insists that human beings are fundamentally good. Accordingly, it is external factors alone which prevent human beings from attaining their fullness, factors identified with the oppressive structures inherent in traditional societies, families and the Church.

Acknowledging no authority other than individual conscience, liberalism insists that traditional and hierarchical institutions warp the human spirit and pervert man's natural tendency to the good. Now that man has at last come of age and realised this, the task in the modern era is to re-fashion the world by dismantling the outdated structures of the past. Since this process involves the vilification of everything traditional, outdated and no longer relevant, the Church before Vatican II is presented as "out of touch and impotent", wrote Archbishop Lefebvre in A Bishop Speaks: Writings and Addresses, 1963-1976. What's more: "The traditional Church is guilty in her wealth, in her triumphalism; the Council Fathers feel guilty at being out of the world rather than of the world. They are already blushing for their episcopal insignia; soon they will be ashamed of their cassocks."

At the same time, the SSPX sees at work the Modernism condemned by Pope Pius X in his 1907 Encyclical On the Doctrine of the Modernists. "We are now being told that man does not receive truth but constructs it," claims Archbishop Lefebvre in An Open Letter to Confused Catholics. Man constructs truth, say the Modernists, because his desire for the divine originates in his unconscious and manifests itself as a religious feeling which is then converted by the intellect into formulas and dogmas which do not contain the truth but instead are its mere images and symbols.

Believers then come together by sharing their religious experiences and combine to create a society in order to preserve and develop the dogmas they have formulated. In this way the Church is formed as an emanation of the collective unconscious of its members, necessarily limited in expression by time and place and therefore not applicable to all times and places. Continuous change, not homogenous development, is inevitable as the collective unconscious of the faithful continues to manifest itself in the evolution of belief and its symbols.

Interestingly, the modernist architecture adopted by the Church in recent decades owes its spiritual heritage to Theosophy, a 19th-century movement which claimed that the different religions of the world are all necessarily limited manifestations of man's longing for the divine. The aim, therefore, is to pass beyond the restrictions of a particular religion's signs and symbols and attain a true encounter with the one, universal being.

So the participation liturgy promoted by the 20th-century Liturgical Movement and adopted by Vatican II is most suited to those heartsink churches, where the signs and symbols traditionally associated with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass are notably absent, and the Mass as a memorial meal is celebrated with new ones - pottery chalices, tables for altars, bare brickwork. It is the mystery beneath the symbols that must be encountered through a collectivised liturgy. Statues, rosaries, beautiful high altars - they just get in the way. Original sin, the doctrine of Christ's vicarious satisfaction - they belong to yesterday.

Meanwhile, collegiality democratises Church hierarchies and undermines papal authority; the inspirations of the Holy Ghost to an individual bishop are subjected to the vote of the bishop's conference; the Church's status as the sole ark of salvation is played down in the name of dialogue. Yes, traditional teaching is found in the Council documents. But the modernist way, so the SSPX argument goes, is to combine truth with error as Pope Pius X pointed out.

Turning to Archbishop Lefebvre again: "It is because we believe that our whole faith is endangered by the postconciliar reforms and changes that it is our duty to disobey and keep the Tradition ... the greatest service we can render to the Church and to the successor of Peter is to reject the reformed liberal Church. Jesus Christ, Son of God made man, is neither liberal nor reformable."

God bless,

Moyra


Dear Moyra,

Thank you for your letter on the idea of Tradition - currently one of the points in dispute between the Holy See and the Society of St Pius X. I liked its opening, with the quotation from Bishop Bernard Fellay, very much indeed. The proto-martyr of the Dominican Order is St Peter of Verona who, according to tradition - that word again! - died in just the sort of way the bishop describes. Peter Martyr died writing the Creed with the blood from the wounds received by the assassin's axe. You may notice that, when writing the word "tradition", I used the capital form of the initial letter for the first time I used it, but lower case type for the second. This expresses a distinction which will be crucial to my reply to you, but meanwhile, may I make one further comment on Bishop Fellay's words? Without in any way wishing to impugn the admirable zeal they attest, I think it should be said that the martyrs who have watered the field of the Church since the end of the Second Vatican Council have not been, so far as I am aware, members of the SSPX. Rather, they have been ordinary Catholics, whether clergy, Religious, or laity, in such countries as (most recently) Iraq, Algeria, and Somalia. In Aid to the Church in Need's latest report on Christians oppressed for their faith, the Apostolic Administrator of Somalia, Bishop Giorgio Bertin, is reported as saying: "I do not want to offer my head on a plate too easily. If martyrdom does eventually come, I ask for the strength to go through with it." That is a rather more likely outcome than that Bishop Fellay will be pierced with a stiletto on Eurostar by a leader-writer in the London Tablet. If readiness to accept martyrdom for the sake of the faith is a crucial sign of belonging to the Church of Tradition, the honours would appear to be, at best, divided between the Society and the mainstream Catholic body.

What is the principal sign of the Church of Tradition? Putting this question brings me to the main topic of your letter. Up to a point, I can appreciate Archbishop Levebvre's anxiety that, placed on the wrong lips, Pope John Paul II's phrase "the living character of Tradition" might be weasel words. What dippings and duckings, shifts and shiftiness, may not be hidden behind that seemingly innocent adjective "living"? For John Henry Newman, so we have heard (and heard perhaps rather too often), to live is to change. If so, may not a "living Tradition" change so much as to transmute into something else, and ultimately change beyond all hope of recognition?

"My dear boy, I am the kind of person who turned the Last Supper into a Solemn High Mass" are words attributed to the late Mgr Alfred Gilbey, when explaining the elaborateness with which he packed an overnight bag. But just as Newman, in describing development, was concerned to show how the Catholic Church, at all points of her history, is self-identical with her first creation at Pentecost (or if you will, on Calvary, when she was constituted in the Mother and Handmaid at the foot of the Cross), so for Mgr Gilbey the Supper of the Lord, when he instituted the sacrament of his saving Sacrifice, and the rites for that sacrament's re-enactment as described in Fortescue and O'Connell or the Sarum Pontifical, put before us one and the same reality.

What has changed in the Church's life, including her worshipping life, is the presentation of the essence to the milieu, the manifestation of the reality to the circumstances. Not every metamorphosis is a deformation. Indeed, the principal sign of the Church of Tradition is precisely, I would say, that she undergoes metamorphosis without deformation in giving to the world the Revelation bestowed by Jesus Christ and his Spirit on the apostles - a Revelation she presents in ever-changing ways that leave its essence intact.

The difference between "Tradition" with a capital "T" and "tradition" with a lower-case "t" is that the first refers to Revelation as transmitted in the Church's life, while the second refers to the "ways" in which the Church presents it. The way in which the Church presents Tradition may vary in its conceptual idiom, or its liturgical expression, or its artistic style. It can vary in the literary forms it favours, or the spiritualities it uses, or the charisms it deploys. Tradition can be expressed in rigorous ways, as in the "tradition" of Scholastic theology, or ways that are more relaxed in their attitude to strict canons of evidence and proof, as in the hagiographical "tradition" that St Peter Martyr died writing the Creed in his blood (I throw this in because the lives of the saints are themselves monuments of Tradition).

It is part of the richness of Catholicism - of the "Catholic tradition" - that it luxuriates in such variety. Not for nothing are we a Church made up of numerous ritual churches, Eastern and Western, with which (I hope) a church of Anglican Catholic tradition will one day be numbered. To limit the Catholic Church to those ways of presenting Tradition typical of a Scholastically oriented Latin Catholicism in the middle decades of the 20th century cannot be right. This was Archbishop Lefebvre's mistake.

But to belong to so richly varied a Church - varying in the ways in which it presents Tradition, through time and across space - comes with a price attached. There must be unceasing vigilance to ensure that "traditions" (lower-case "t") - whether ancient and inherited, or emerging and thus relatively novel - genuinely permit "Tradition" (upper-case "T") to make its appearance, really allow Tradition to enter minds and hearts. The tail must not wag the dog, the medium control the message. And this is where Archbishop Lefebvre was exactly right. If Tradition is Revelation itself as transmitted in the Church (and in that sense it may be said to include Scripture, just as in another sense it can be described as complementing it), then the continuance of Christian truth turns crucially on the authenticity of the manner in which this process of transmission is carried out. That is why the Pope and bishops, as, by Christ's will and determination, the chief witnesses to Tradition have a duty to "guard the deposit".

Was the deposit guarded at the Second Vatican Council? This will need to be the subject, Moyra, of another exchange. For the moment, it will have to suffice to say that the doctrinal Modernism combated by Pope St Pius X seems to me to play no role at all in the documents of the Second Vatican Council. The place to find it, were it to exist, would undoubtedly be the Council's Dogmatic Constitution on Revelation, Dei Verbum. In speaking of how "the tradition which comes from the apostles develops in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit", Dei Verbum explains such development (para. 8) as "a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down". There is here accretion in understanding through - we are told - contemplative study (on the model of Our Lady at Nazareth) and mystical insight, and this finds sanction in the preaching of those who have received the "sure gift of truth" (a quotation from the second century St Irenaeus) in episcopal consecration. There is no suggestion in this text of accretion in the deposit itself. I see nothing here remotely reminiscent of Pascendi, no bubbling up from the depths of the collective subconscious, no insinuation that doctrines are only symbols of truth rather than triumphant acquisitions of truth. I find no spirit of accommodation to what Jones, or the man on the Clapham omnibus, can swallow.

That in the situation of anomie in the still not fully resolved crisis in our Church episcopal guardianship has often been lacking, I have no doubt. Nor do I think Neo-Modernism is merely a chimera. But I am equally convinced that the Church of the post-conciliar popes remains the Church of Tradition. What we need now is to recover, for the sake of their great serviceableness, many of the venerable traditions - conceptual, liturgical, and the rest - in which Tradition has been presented. I am speaking of their serviceableness to a Gospel which must, by ever-new inventiveness, be preached to unbelievers in the world of today. This was what was done by the scribe of the Gospels whom the Lord commended for bringing from his treasure chest things both old and new.

Dear Moyra, I hope there is something helpful in these words.



Yours very sincerely in Him,

Aidan Nichols