Tradition and the new path

One of the wisest things anybody ever told me about the Catholic abuse scandal was said to me by my dear friend Father Wilson, who is as fine a priest and friend you could hope to have. He explained several years back that you could not understand the sex abuse scandal in isolation. It was only the most outrageous, or at least sickening, manifestation of the general crisis in Catholic life and practice in this country. Father Wilson would cite the big falloff in mass attendance over the last forty years, and talk about what was taught in seminaries, and in parish life, and how the bishops (and not only the bishops) forgot that the Catholic faith and tradition is supposed to mean something.

It's a long and complex story, and it doesn't bear repeating here, but I should say that everything Father Wilson told me about the story of the decline of US Catholicism is explored in depth and sobriety in Phil Lawler's "The Faithful Departed." Phil is an orthodox Catholic, but his is not a hot-headed polemic. There are things in there that serious-minded liberal Catholics might well agree with. I don't mean to sound like a commercial for Phil's book, but it really is one of the few books I have read that placed the scandal in a wider context of American Catholic life over the last two generations.

I don't want to go over heavily plowed ground, but I do want to use this to make a point about tradition, a point that's not only relevant to Catholicism, but to all religions.

It starts with this 2004 observation by Diogenes on the Catholic World News site. In it, he explains why it's so enraging to sit through masses that abuse the liturgy. Here's the heart of his complaint:

I once read an article in a lefty newsletter called Miriam's Song that laid out the campaign very neatly. The author noted how, on the campus of Ohio State, students would not keep to the sidewalks but take the most direct route between buildings, thereby wearing out a footpath in the grass. Eventually the grounds crew would acknowledge the fait accompli and lay a concrete sidewalk over the course already marked out by pedestrians who didn't stick to the "approved" ways. The author used this as an analogy to encourage her readers to "make a path by walking on it" in the liturgy -- i.e., to start doing at Mass what they want it to become, confident that sooner or later the Church will bow to necessity and declare officially that the innovation (joining in the priest's prayers, say, or having a lay minister communicate the celebrant) is liturgically licit. The Mass becomes an exercise in agit-prop.

Now, taken more broadly, this is what happens when tradition is willfully ignored and subverted. People forget. Tradition is not just something written down in dry and dusty books; it has to live, to breathe, to be incarnate in the life of the community. Someone once wrote that modernity is a "perversion of the demands of stewardship," or something close to that phrase. That is, the modern spirit is precisely defined by its antagonism to tradition, to the "dead weight of the past" limiting, prescribing and defining human conduct. If people don't feel a sense of obligation to steward the authoritative traditions they're handed, those traditions will die. If, as in the case of Catholicism, tradition is meant not for its own sake, but to preserve certain eternal verities, the community to which that tradition has been entrusted has an immensely serious responsibility.

This is why so many orthodox Catholics are so angry over the sort of things that strike many liberal and moderate Catholics as petty matters. They see their traditions being pissed on and pissed away, often by the very clerics and bishops who are given the sacred responsibility of defending them, preserving them and passing them on. The orthodox know that theirs is not simply a matter of taste, of aesthetic preference. They understand intuitively that there are some things you can't muck around with without altering the belief -- and if you alter belief, you risk altering the community's identity, and, far worse, eternal destiny.

When there's liturgical abuse, when there's heresy taught from pulpits, when the truth does not get taught for whatever reason or the other, you inculcate within your people an indifference, or hostility, to tradition and its demands. You inculcate a hostility to legitimate authority. When people lose their sense of authority, they come to see claims to authority being only a pretense for power. They don't understand why they should obey authority in the first place. They become their own authority. And Catholicism atrophies, and maybe even dies, even though it still calls itself Catholic.

This isn't, of course, just a Catholic problem. It is the nature of institutional life, and the nature of tradition, in the face of modernity's corrosive individualism. I don't want to be understood as saying that It's All The Fault of the 1960s And Vatican II. As many people have pointed out, if the church was all that strong prior to the council, it wouldn't have collapsed as quickly as it did. I'm sure a good argument could be made that an overreliance on traditional claims to authority in the preconciliar decades caused the Church's authority to be hollowed out from within. It could be the case that the Church thought it was upholding tradition, when in fact it was living by traditionalism (Jaroslav Pelikan: "Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.") Among the Orthodox in America, Fr. Alexander Schmemann criticized traditionalism as being a barrier to fully living out the tradition.

The dividing line between modern Christians runs not between Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants, but between modernists and traditionalists in every church (recognizing, of course, that the vast majority of people aren't conscious of the division). Is Christianity primarily about what man says about himself, as the modernists believe? Or is it about what God says to man about Himself? That is, does tradition have any claim on us, or can we make it up as we go along, as we choose to?

It matters, because ideas have consequences. Neuhaus's Law: Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed. Substitute "tradition" for "orthodoxy," and you see the point of my post.