Tradition: From Return to Recourse

A quick and easy way of disqualifying Tradition is to say that it is simply a “step back”, and to belittle it even further, this “return” can be labeled “fearful”, or “chilly”. According to this sort of easy rhetoric, the priests and faithful attached to Tradition have left the living Church and strapped themselves into their time machine, safely away from the challenges of the post-modernity…

But if we step over this very “conciliarly correct” terminology and take a look at the reality of the Church in 2017, what do we see? A spirit of division that affects the Church at thehighest level: “When cardinals are silent or accuse their confreres; when bishops who had thought, spoken and written...in a Catholic way, but then say the opposite for whatever reason; when priests contest the liturgical tradition of the Church, then apostasy is established, the detachment from Catholic thought.” Who was it who voiced this severe judgment? A bishop of the Society of St. Pius X? No, a Roman prelate, Msgr. Nicolas Bux, in an interview with the National Catholic Register on June 21.

Does this mean that the specialist on the liturgy has become a “Lefebvrist”? No, he is simply paying attention to the facts which are not “Lefebvrist”, just persistent. And what does he propose? A return! A step backwards? No, a return to Catholic doctrine, for “obedience to the Pope depends solely on the fact that he is bound by Catholic doctrine, to the faith that he must continually profess before the Church”, recalls Msgr. Bux. The return to the Faith is a recourse, a remedy for the “detachment from Catholic thought”.

In Ecône, Switzerland, there stands a tomb on which this verse from St. Paul is engraved in Latin: “I have transmitted what I also have received” (I Cor. 15:3). Adhuc loquitur mortuus, the dead man continues to speak, his teaching as important as ever.



Fr. Alain Lorans