Does Tradition have a tradition?

God, who at many times and in various manners spoke in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he has appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds… (Hebrews 1: 1-2)

Lesson I: A Ship and an Identity

Introduction

Suppose you owned a wooden boat. And you moored that boat at a wharf. Over time you noticed that planks of wood used in its construction began to rot and decay; and so, you decided to replace them as they wore out. And let’s say, that after many years, you had replaced every single piece of wood used in its original construction. You replaced everything- the hull, the mast and the deck- to the point, that there was not one single piece of the original boat left. Would the boat you owned now, be the same boat that you owned many years ago? It would still be your property, no doubt, but it would be made of entirely different material. Is it still the same boat? But let’s complicate matters a little more. Let’s say you had a son and he too loved your boat. And he had over the years carefully collected and stored every piece of discarded timber from the boat, until one day he rebuilt the boat using exactly all the discarded material from the original. Now there are two boats. Which would be the original boat you owned? The one where you replaced all the individual parts? Or the one your son rebuilt using only the original pieces?

Most students of philosophy, or even just well-read individuals, would recognise this as the Ship of Theseus^[1]. Some others may recognise still, that the addendum of the son’s boat, is the complication introduced by Thomas Hobbes^[2]. It is a paradox used to get philosophy students to consider the idea of identity across time and whether there can actually be such a thing when there is material change. The question at the heart of the paradox is how much can a thing change before it is no longer the thing it originally was. The idea is often applied to human identity, given the nature of cellular regeneration in the human body. An analogous problem can be applied to the Church.

Let’s say something obvious. There will not be one Catholic alive today who will be alive in 150 years’ time. Not the most uplifting thought I know, but one that is true nonetheless. Will it be the same Church in 150 years’ time as it is today? I think most Catholics would instinctively want to say yes. The Church will possess the same doctrines, have the same number of sacraments and will still read the same Scriptures. The people will all be different, but the Church will still be made up of clergy and the faithful. But what if we applied this same thought experiment, but only going backwards in time? There is not one apostle, or even a first disciple of Jesus who is alive today. None of the Fathers of the Church nor the fathers from the ancient ecumenical councils are with us. These men are not just casually those who happen to be Catholic at any point in time- they are the foundations on which the Church is built. Is the Church of our day the same Church as it was in any period of history prior to our own? That is the problem of identity through time as applied to the Church in a nutshell. But let’s complicate the question a little more.

Catholics, and indeed most mainline Christians believe that the Church comes into full existence at Pentecost. It was prophesised in the Old Testament, proclaimed in the preaching of Christ and formed by his selection of the Twelve. But She is born by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit fifty days after the Resurrection. Is the Church of Pentecost the same Church that was at the Council of Nicaea, Lateran and Vatican I? Again, most Catholics would say: “yes, this is exactly the same Church- One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. It is the same and could not possibly be a different Church.” But here is the complicating part- not all of the doctrines that the Church holds to be true were held at Pentecost. And I am not simply referring to the fact that we had not yet defined the duality of Christ’s two natures or the Divinity of the Holy Ghost. I am referring to the fact that not all of the dogmas of the Church were historical facts. For example, at Pentecost, since Our Blessed Mother was in the room with the Eleven, she clearly had not been assumed into heaven. It is not the fact that we had not defined her Assumption, that would not take place until 1950- her Assumption had not even happened.  

Now, even this little wrinkle, might not disturb a thinking Catholic, for he knows that revelation only concluded with the death of the last Apostle. So, the fact that the Assumption had not historically taken place, is really neither here nor there as far it concerns the content of revelation. But herein lies a problem- how do we have a fully formed Church at Pentecost if all her doctrines had not been revealed? This issue, I think, is made even more clear at the end of St. Matthew’s Gospel when the Lord enjoins his Apostles to go to the ends of the earth and to teach them everything that he has taught them (Mt 28: 19-20). How is that going to be possible, if the Apostles had not yet been taught everything they would need to hand on? The Church had Her mission, but not all Her teachings. After all, we stated earlier that the Church at Pentecost is the exact same Church at Nicaea, Constantinople and our present day. And if they are the exact same Church; then by necessity, they need to believe the exact same things. And I would also add, not just believe them, but must be founded upon the exact same truths. And that, historically, is not possible. We do not posit different Churches in AD 34 and in AD 2024. How do we account for a Church that in any period of time is identical to the Church of Pentecost, when certain dogmas of faith, were not even historical realties? This is the problem of identity through time, complicated a little by questions of historical fact. We will have more to say about this question, a little later on.

The Current Crisis

No one I know, who takes his faith seriously, thinks that the Church is in a good place. Statistics about Mass attendance, levels of confidence in the episcopacy^[3] and strength of adherence to certain doctrines^[4] all tell a similar story- the trend is towards decline. But statistics only tell us so much. I do not believe the current malaise is really captured in the fact that there has been a marked decline in religious practice since COVID^[5], or that only 63% of Mass goers in the pews believe in the Real Presence^[6]. Now, these are not things to celebrate- but they do not tell us where we went wrong. They only tell us where we have ended up. It is a little like sifting over the wreckage after an accident- it tells you where the debris has landed, it does not tell you what caused the crash in the first place. But there is always some kind of morbid curiosity that surrounds trainwrecks. And so, we are irresistibly drawn to the stats, but unable to move beyond them.

Our present situation usually elicits two different types of very unhelpful reactions. The first is the historical retort; the second is the pious knee-jerk. The great problem with both these two camps is that, strictly speaking, they are not entirely wrong. And because there is a truth to their claims, they are somewhat right, but in a very misleading kind of way. They do not mislead because their facts are faulty, they mislead because they misread the culture and put the rest of us at a disadvantage. There are such things as true lies. What do I mean by this?

The historical retorters will argue that there have been bad times in the Church’s past and that the Church has always found a way to right Herself. This is very true. When people say there are “issues” in the Church, whatever those issues may be, they are hardly ever likely to be new to the Church. They are however, likely to be new to you and me. The main problem with the historical retort is its blindness to the actual risk of any real crisis in the Church’s life, because they imagine the only thing in jeopardy is the survival of the Church. This is the one thing that is not at risk because we have the Lord’s promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against Her (Mt 16: 18-19). And He will not fail His Bride (Eph 5:29-32). However, the Lord did not promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against you and me. The mistake the historians make is they think because the survival of the Church is not at stake- nothing is at stake. The survival of the Church is not in question, but your entry and mine into the Kingdom of Heaven is. The Church will not fail, but you and I can be misled. All crises in the Church have come and gone, but they have all come and gone at the price of souls. 

The second misleading response is the pious knee-jerk. I know many devout souls who, when confronted with the statistics of church decline, immediately pivot to some local bright spot or other in the Church. It is a knee jerk reaction on their part- you point out the obvious- they point to Africa. “Things are great in Africa,” they will tell you- or India or China or somewhere else so far away from your experience that you couldn’t possibly object, because you couldn’t reasonably know. Most of these people are well enough intentioned- only a few do it in order to preserve their own comfort. They are a minority. The majority however, are actually wrong. 

They are wrong because there are always good things happening in the Church. To assert otherwise would be to admit that God has abandoned His Church. And most likely, it would also be a sin against the theological virtue of hope. But good things are hardly the point; because there are always good things happening. That is the truth part. Even amidst the chaos of original sin and the fall, Eve gave birth to a son. The point we need to emphasise is that these good things are not the norm; they are not the truth of the story that modern Catholicism is telling. And herein resides the lie. So, when people push back against the reality of decline, we need to remind them that these good things are the exception, they are not at present, the rule. Our task is not to give into the negativity, as it were, but rather to make good things the custom. And that is where these people, the pious kneejerk crowd, are wrong- and they are doing us a disservice. For when they say that there is a new seminary in the Congo with 1000 seminarians- we say, thanks be to God; but we need seminaries to be strong everywhere seminarians are needed. A few isolated examples are not proof positive that things are like this all over. The knee-jerk crowd are wrong, because you cannot extrapolate to a generality what they point to as a particular- this is the fallacy of faulty generalisation. We should not allow ourselves to be deterred because people of good intentions think it is ill mannered to bring up the difficult and the unpleasant. That is why we walk a very tight line between the truth of where we are and the reality of the faith and hope we call our way of life.

The Current Battle

If statistics only tell us so much about the current situation- how are we best to understand it? I think the most instructive way of understanding the present situation is not found in what has gone wrong, but rather, in our dogged inability to put things right. I believe the true measure of the crisis of where we are is found in the fact that we can’t seem to move beyond it. We do not seem to know how to reverse the decline, despite the efforts of the last several decades. We had the New Evangelisation of St. John Paul II and the New Orthodoxy of Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI). Both these initiatives, even if they have not completely disappeared, have largely been forgotten. Even in my own diocese of Rome, we do not speak or hear much of either any more. And I believe there is a reason why these two initiatives have not brought about the renewal we so clearly need. And until we have figured this reason out, we will continue in our present holding pattern while we circle the drain. 

The great theological and intellectual battle in the Church and her culture in our day is over the true nature of Tradition. And the question of Tradition regards her identity. How much can things in the Church change before she no longer is the same Church she once was? All of the most recent issues in the church regard her Tradition: can the Church ordain women as deacons? Can she bless same-sex relationships? Can she declare all religions as paths to God? All these questions, although quintessentially contemporary, regard the nature of the Church’s identity. But the converse to all these issues- is not just how much can she change before She ceases to be what She was- but what keeps the Church together? What is the principle of unity that gives the nascent Church at Pentecost everything She needs to be in order to be the same identical Church in the present time? Whatever that present time may be. 

The battle over Tradition is a battle over the Church’s identity and it will come to define this era. Its origins lie in the Reformation and the Council of Trent, but it was rekindled somewhere around the time of the First Vatican Council and continued into Munificentissimus Deus and then into Vatican II. It has reached a zenith in our present day. In a rather different form, it occupies the heart and mind of many a seriously minded Catholic right now. This battle over Tradition is to us what the Christological controversies were to the 4th and 5th centuries. And like those battles, this battle will need to be as equally theologically sophisticated, and I would argue, that it will need to be as equally theologically broad as well. For just as the person of Christ touches every aspect of our Catholic Faith, so too does the Tradition.  At present however, we are at the time of the opening of the Third Council of Smirmium in the year 357. And much like the time of that Council, we too have no Athanasius to resist the heretics. Athanasius had been condemned at the Council of Milan and was exiled the year prior. But we need an Athanasius today to do for the understanding of Tradition what he did for Christology. As in all critical moments in the Church- this is a crisis of saints.

The Current Series 

But saints are not created in a vacuum or by chance. The emergence of any saint in the Church is not the product of mere happenstance. It may look random to us whether there is Catherine in Siena or a Theresa in Avila. But this is just how it may appear- it is not how it is. Saints arise in a response to Grace, but always under the influence of some of the most unassuming instruments of Grace- fathers. Scholastica had Benedict, Augustine had Ambrose and Chiara had Francesco. Saints often seem to come in pairs. But what is essential is that there are no saints without fathers. And there are no fathers without tradition.  

This will be a series of twelve articles under the title: Does the Tradition have a tradition? Its sole purpose is to make explicit the richness of the Church’s Tradition as both a principle of unity in the Church’s identity, as well as a source of sanctity for each Catholic soul. Your soul- my dear reader. Some of the articles will be more heavily theological than others. We will explore the Tradition of the Church and whether or not, the Tradition itself has a kind of tradition- a pedigree if you were, that is discernible throughout the course of history. We will examine tradition in the Jewish religion and how it dealt with the Hellenising influence of the ancient pagan world thus providing a context for how the Apostles themselves would understand the Church’s Tradition. We will look at Tradition in the early Church and the challenge that the Judaizers represented. We will examine how the Church’s Tradition is a pilar of Western Civilisation, how it influenced Shakespeare, the Common Law and married life. The principal idea that we want to demonstrate is that the Church’s Tradition has a tradition. It was not invented out of thin air by the Apostles, the Popes or the pious. Tradition is the golden thread of Catholicism that weaves revealed truth into the Catholic Faith. 

In next month’s article, we will take up the question that I outlined at the start of the article- how do historical facts and the Church’s faith come to coalesce in the Church’s Tradition? In particular, we look at the historical development of Sacred Scripture in the early Church and try and make sense of an historical fact- how can the Church at Pentecost be fully the Church when one of Her foundations- Sacred Scripture- had not even been written?

[1] Plutarch, Life of Theseus 23.1

[2] Hobbes, Of Identity and Difference

[3] Catholic University of America (Department of Sociology) and The Catholic Project, October 2022, “Well-being, Trust, and Policy in a Time of Crisis: Highlights from the National Study of Catholic Priests.”

^[4] Pew Research Center, September 2024, “Many Catholics in the U.S. and Latin America Want the Church to Allow Birth Control and to Let Women Become Priests” 

[5] Pew Research Center, March 2023, “How the Pandemic Has Affected Attendance at U.S. Religious Services” 

Asked directly whether they now attend religious services more or less often than they did before the pandemic, more Americans indicate that their attendance habits have declined than risen. But it’s a complicated picture: As of November 2022, 20% say they are attending in person less often (while 7% say they are going in person more often). On the other hand, 15% say they are participating in services virtually more often (while 5% say they are watching services online or on TV less often).

[6] Pew Research Center, August 2019, “Just one-third of U.S. Catholics agree with their church that Eucharist is body, blood of Christ”