The Last Word
Fr. Yves le Roux
District Superior of Canada
Dear Reader,
What Is New? Tradition!
St. Vincent de Lérins in his famous Commonitorium teaches that the Church is tradition: “All possible care must be taken that we hold as true that which has been believed everywhere, always, by all,” he writes.
Catholic tradition is nothing other than the transmission of the teaching of Our Lord, under the beneficent guidance of the Church of Rome upon which the Savior Himself bestowed the privilege of infallibility.
This infinite respect for the divine teaching is expressed in a magisterial way by St. Paul. Not only does he adjure his disciple Timothy to keep the deposit of the Faith, but he is even more explicit when addressing the Galatians: “Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a Gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema.”
Everything that amounts to a novelty in the Church gives off as it were a rotten odor.
There does however exist a healthy homogenous evolution within tradition. This explains why certain popes such as Pius IX or Pius XII proclaimed the dogmas of papal infallibility and the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Indeed, tradition is an unfathomable treasure thanks to which each generation deepens its faith. It is a source ever overflowing with life. The soul that drinks at it will always find a doctrine that is sure and…new!
The soul finds there a doctrine that is sure, for tradition does not transmit ideas, which are changing by nature, but realities. An idea is nothing more than an element of a man’s thoughts, which are essentially variable, whereas tradition transmits a divinely revealed doctrine that is the highest and surest form of the real. It is. And it can never vary because it participates in the immutability of God.
And nonetheless, tradition is a doctrine that is ever new, not in the sense that it teaches novelties that reek of heresy, but in the sense that it is profoundly and really true.
Indeed, the truth is always new for the soul that feeds on it, for he finds in it an original freshness that rejuvenates him and fills him with joy. Errors are nothing but a stew of old sophisms refuted and condemned many a time already.
A century ago, modernists boasted proudly that they were rejuvenating the Church with their new doctrines. St. Pius X defined this heresy in decisive terms as “the sewer of all heresies.” Their doctrine was not new; it was anything but that. It was simply updating old lies issued by the devil’s agencies.
The truth is a gushing spring water; error is a stagnant pond in which heresies proliferate like so many deadly germs.
We leave it to General de Charette to express in a few eloquent words this oldness of the world and to praise the youth that rises up to defend the truth like the promise of a new dawn rising in the heart of the Tradition of the Church.
“…it is as old as the devil, this world that they call new and that they want to build upon the absence of God…Old as the devil…They tell us we are the lackeys of old superstitions; we can only laugh! In the face of these demons that are reborn century after century, we are the youth, gentlemen! We are the youth of God.”