Another selection from His Grace's recent book.
Chapter 1 appeared in our August issue.
The rest of the book is available here.

Chapter 17: What Is Tradition?

MODERNISM UNDERMINES the Church from within. It did so in the past; it is doing so today. Let us look again at the Encyclical Pascendi for descriptions of this heresy corresponding to what we are now seeing in the Church: "As it is entirely spiritual (so goes the argument of the Modernists), religious authority should strip itself of all exterior apparatus, of all that showy display which it exhibits as if on the stage. In this way they (the Modernists) forget that religion, while it has to do so properly with the soul, is nevertheless not limited to the soul, and the honor paid to religious authority reflects back on Christ, Who instituted it."

Paul VI put away his tiara under pressure from these "purveyors of novelties." For the same reason the bishops took off their violet cassocks and even their black ones, as well as their rings. Priests appear in secular clothes, most of the time with a studied casualness. There is nothing among the general reforms already put into practice or vigorously revived that was not included in St. Pius X's list of the "crazy" desires of the Modernist reformers. You can recognize some of them in this passage: "As regards public worship (they wish) to reduce the number of devotions or at the very least to stop them from increasing. Church government should become democratic; part of it should be in the hands of the lower clergy or even the laity; authority should be decentralized. Reform of the Roman Curia, especially the Holy Office and the Index, etc. There are even those who, mimicking their Protestant mentors, wish to see an end of priestly celibacy."

You can see that the demands are the same; there is nothing new. In Christian philosophy and the formation of future priests, the reformers in the time of Pius X wanted to abandon scholasticism, which they would relegate to "the history of philosophy, as one of the outdated systems." They proclaimed that "we should teach modern philosophy to young people as the only true philosophy, the only one suited to our times. So-called rational theology should be the foundation for modern philosophy and speculative theology the basis for the history of dogma." On this point, the Modernists got what they wanted and more. In what passes for seminaries, anthropology and psychoanalysis are taught; Karl Marx replaces St. Thomas Aquinas. They reject the principles of Thomistic philosophy and use instead uncertain systems which recognize their own inability to explain the working of the universe, as they are posited on the philosophy of the absurd. One revolutionary thinker of our day, a muddle-headed priest held in great esteem by the intellectuals, puts sex at the center of everything and does not hesitate to state in public lectures: "The theories of the ancients in the scientific realm were pure nonsense, and it was on such nonsense that St. Thomas and Origen founded their systems." Soon afterwards he fell into complete nonsense himself by defining life as "an evolutionary chain of inexplicable biological facts." How does he know this, if the facts are inexplicable? How can a priest, furthermore, ignore the one true explanation, which is God?

The Modernists would be reduced to incoherence if they had to defend their vagaries against the principles of the Angelic Doctor, with his concepts of potency and act, essence and existence, substance and accidents, soul and body. In eliminating these notions, they rendered incomprehensible the theology of the Church, so that we read in the Motu Proprio Doctoris Angelici, "The result is that students of the sacred disciplines do not even understand the meaning of the words in which the dogmas revealed by God have been set forth by the Magisterium." They had to attack scholastic philosophy, therefore, if they wanted to change dogmas and undermine Tradition.

But what is Tradition? It seems to me that the word is often misunderstood — confused with the "traditions" found in business, family and secular life: the tree attached to the roof when the construction of a building is finished, the ribbon cut to inaugurate a public monument, etc. This is not what I mean. What I mean by Tradition is not the customs inherited from the past and preserved out of loyalty to the past, even without good reasons. Tradition is the Deposit of Faith handed down by the Magisterium from age to age. This Deposit has been given to us by Revelation; i.e., the word of God entrusted to the Apostles, to be transmitted by their successors.

Now the reformers want everyone to "do research," as if we did not already have the Creed, as if Our Lord had not come to bring us the truth once and for all. What do they hope to discover with all this research? Catholics who are pestered by these exhortations to question everything and by the temptation to "give up their certitudes," should remember this: the Deposit of Revelation ended with the death of the last Apostle. It is complete and cannot be altered from now until the end of time. Revelation is irreformable. Vatican Council I said so explicitly: "The teaching of the faith revealed by God is not offered to human minds as a philosophical invention which can be developed, but which has been entrusted as a divine deposit to the Bride of Christ (the Church) that she might faithfully preserve it and infallibly teach it."

But, you might say, the dogma of Mary as the Mother of God dates only to the year 431, transubstantiation to 1215, and papal infallibility to 1870! Are these not examples of evolution? Not at all. Dogmas defined in the course of the centuries are contained in Revelation; the Church simply makes them explicit. When Pope Pius XII defined the dogma of the Assumption in 1950, he clearly stated that the truth of the translation into heaven of the Virgin Mary, body and soul, is contained in the Deposit of Revelation, in the texts revealed before the death of the last Apostle. Nothing new can be introduced into this area, not a single dogma can be added, only those already there can be explicitated ever more clearly, more beautifully, more loftily.

This is so certain that it is the standard for judging the errors which crop up every day and which are to be wholly rejected. Bossuet said it with vigor: "When it comes to explaining Christian morality and the essential dogmas of the Church, anything not contained in the Tradition of the ages, and especially in antiquity, is therefore not only suspect but positively evil and abominable; this is the basic principle on which the Fathers of the Church and the popes condemned false teaching, as there is nothing more hateful to the Roman Church than novelties."

The argument which they want to foist upon the browbeaten faithful is: "You are hung up on the past, you are dinosaurs. You must live in your own times!" Some get disoriented and do not know how to answer. But the answer is simple: There is no past, present or future here. Truth transcends time; it is eternal.

To batter down the walls of Tradition, Holy Scripture is hauled up, as in Protestantism. The Gospel is claimed to be the only book which counts. But Tradition is anterior to the Gospel. Granting that the Synoptics were written much earlier than they would have us believe, even before they had achieved their final form, several years had passed, during which the Church was already in existence. The first Pentecost had passed, with its many conversions — 3,000 the first day — as the Church emerged from the Upper Room. What did they believe in then? How could Revelation be transmitted except by oral tradition? They could not subordinate Tradition to the sacred text and thus reject Tradition.

In all this, let us not be deceived into believing that they have an unlimited respect for the inspired word. They argue over what should be included: "What is inspired in the Gospel? Only those truths necessary for our salvation." Consequently, the miracles, the infancy narratives, the deeds of Our Lord are relegated to the category of more or less legendary biography. There was debate at the Council over the phrase "only those truths necessary for salvation." Some bishops wanted to boil down the historical accuracy of the Gospels, which shows how far the clergy have been corrupted by Neo-Modernism. Catholics should not let themselves be imposed upon in this way. They should hold to the truth that the entire Gospel is inspired. Those who wrote it were truly under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, in such a way that the whole is the word of God, the Verbum Dei. We cannot pick and choose nowadays and say, "I accept this but reject that." To choose is to be heretical, according to the etymology of this Greek word.

The heart of the matter is that Tradition gives us the Gospel, and it belongs to Tradition, to the Magisterium, to explain to us what is in the Gospel. If we have no one to interpret it for us, we can come up with a meaning completely at variance with the word of Christ. Thus we end up in the private interpretation of Protestants and in the free inspiration of the contemporary charismatic movement, which is taking us into the uncharted seas of religious fantasy.

All the dogmatic councils have given us a clear expression of Tradition, a clear definition of what the Apostles taught. This is irreformable. One cannot change the decrees of the Council of Trent, because they are infallible, written and published as official acts of the Church. Vatican II was different, as what it taught was not infallible. The popes did not wish to engage their infallibility. No one can say to us, "You are hung up on the past, you are stuck on the Council of Trent." Because the Council of Trent is not the past! Tradition is vested with a timeless character; it belongs to all times and all places.