Living Tradition: disastrous fruit of the New Theology

When Pope John Paul II promulgated his motu proprio Ecclesia Dei adflicta on 2 July, 1988, he claimed that Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, founder of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X (SSPX), did not understand the true meaning of Catholic tradition.

The motu proprio, which means 'written on the Pope's own initiative' reads

The root of this schismatic act can be discerned in an incomplete and contradictory notion of Tradition. Incomplete, because it does not take sufficiently into account the living character of Tradition, which, as the Second Vatican Council clearly taught, "comes from the apostles and progresses in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit. There is a growth in insight into the realities and words that are being passed on. This comes about in various ways. It comes through the contemplation and study of believers who ponder these things in their hearts. It comes from the intimate sense of spiritual realities which they experience. And it comes from the preaching of those who have received, along with their right of succession in the episcopate, the sure charism of truth".

Headstone at the grave of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.
It reads, 'what I received, I handed on.'

 The idea that Monsignor Lefebvre, probably the most fruitful missionary bishop of the last century did not understand Catholic tradition is laughable prima facie. Lefebvre served 30 years as a missionary priest, bishop, and Archbishop in French speaking Africa; baptized tens of thousands of converts; ordained hundreds of priests; founded 21 new dioceses and consecrated African bishops for each of them. He founded schools, convents, clinics, and seminaries. If anyone understood the root and germ of Catholic tradition it was Marcel Lefebvre.

Yet absolutely necessary to the revolution that culminated at the Second Vatican Council was this new understanding of tradition observed through the lens of evolutionary theory:

"Thus, the human race has passed from a rather static concept of reality to a more dynamic, evolutionary one. In consequence there has arisen a new series of problems, a series as numerous as can be, calling for efforts of analysis and synthesis." (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Second Vatican Council)

Therefore, in an 'evolutionary concept of reality', that which is newest is always best. In the Hegelian system, the dialectic between the thesis [Tradition] and antithesis [the novelties produced by the Nouvelle Theologie] produces a synthesis ['living Tradition'] that becomes the new thesis. This dialectical method will always leave that which is ancient, venerable, immutable, and eternal at a sort of distant reference point for the sake of history. But make no mistake: for those who have accepted Vatican II's theory that "the human race has passed from a rather static concept of reality to a more dynamic, evolutionary one," that which is newer (Vatican II) is better than everything that went before it.

This idea is of course the engine driving all the partisans of the Nouvelle Theologie of Henri de Lubac, Hans Kung, Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx, Dominique Marie Chenu, Yves Congar, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, and their coterie of Ressourcement theologians. Modern man would no longer be bound by the requirements impressed upon his conscience by objective reality and external authority; he now possessed new sciences that he believed rendered the Thomistic universe obsolete. This new Modern Man with his superior sciences required a new philosophy with which to approach the articles of divine revelation, and the neoModernist theologians were busy cooking up this very philosophy with the help of the Kantians and Cartesians.

Baptizing the theory of evolution was task number one for these innovators, and the prophet of their cause was Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.  Teilhard's theories were so bizarre that his own order forbade him from either teaching or publishing, a suppression which lasted until his death on Easter Sunday 1955. Teilhard studied in England under another Jesuit, Fr. George Tyrrell, whom St. Pius X excommunicated for the very same theological monstrosities which he named "Modernism" which was the "compendium of all heresies" that "ruins and destroys all religion" (Pascendi gregis, 1908).

About Modernism, St. Pius X warned,

"To finish with this whole question of faith and its shoots, it remains to be seen, Venerable Brethren, what the Modernists have to say about their development. First of all they lay down the general principle that in a living religion everything is subject to change, and must change, and in this way they pass to what may be said to be, among the chief of their doctrines, that of Evolution. To the laws of evolution everything is subject - dogma, Church, worship, the Books we revere as sacred, even faith itself, and the penalty of disobedience is death.

... Consequently, the formulae too, which we call dogmas, must be subject to these vicissitudes, and are, therefore, liable to change. Thus the way is open to the intrinsic evolution of dogma. An immense collection of sophisms this, that ruins and destroys all religion. Dogma is not only able, but ought to evolve and to be changed. This is strongly affirmed by the Modernists, and as clearly flows from their principles."

Pope St. Pius X, ON THE DOCTRINES OF THE MODERNISTS

This living religion which Pope John Paul II co-opted from de Lubac as 'living tradition' need not maintain any meaningful continuity with the capital 'T' Tradition of the Catholic faith:

"The advocates of the new theology follow the same current when, with Blondel, they define the truth as the mind's correspondence with infinitely variable and progressive life. And since truth is life and Tradition should transmit the truth, de Lubac concludes at the existence of a living Tradition. According to him, then, the ulterior beliefs of the Church need not necessarily be logically bound to what she has always explicitly believed from the earliest centuries."

Father Dominic Bourmaud, One Hundred Years of Modernism, Angelus Press, 2006, pages 248-249

(St. Thomas' definition of truth was the mind's correspondence with reality, not life, -editor.)

The conclusion to all this is obvious: for a religion to be true, it must be alive; and the sign of life is its changeability and 'progress.' The stable cosmos envisioned by the Church Fathers had to give way to the new theories proposed by Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein; the bold new scientific theories embraced by the Protestants must find acceptance in the Catholic Church as well. The philosophy and theology of St. Thomas had to be updated or even discarded with its objective realism and adherence to divine authority. What Modern Man needed was a living tradition that would prove to him that Catholics too, were constrained by the theory of evolution and that their religion was true because it too, was changing.

Now in a striking irony John Paul II himself is victimized by the contemporary adherents of living tradition. His firm commitment to traditional Catholic morality (paradoxically contained in a philosophical system which for him was quite dependent on man's subjective experiences) must now yield to Pope Francis' ethic of accompanying and listening to not only non-Christian religions, but to 'mother earth'! John Paul II's era is now passed; what he explained in Ecclesia Dei about the council is now coming to pass to leave him as history's casualty on the march to Teilhard's Point Omega.

John Paul II harshly condemned Archbishop Lefebvre for standing firm in what he received and faithfully passed on - the very definition of Catholic Tradition infallibly defined at the first Vatican Council in 1869-1870:

"For the Holy Spirit was promised to the successors of Peter not so that they might, by His revelation, make known some new doctrine, but that, by His assistance, they might religiously guard and faithfully expound the revelation or Deposit of Faith transmitted by the Apostles."

And now, even though canonized in a hasty display of Pontifical hubris, Pope John Paul II's moral doctrine gives way to the latest, newest manifestation of living tradition. The cycle of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is unending in the elastic world of evolution and perpetual flux. The demands of natural selection can never be contradicted. In fact, philosophical, theological, and moral change is the very signature of 'truth' and progress. Such is the living tradition bequeathed to us by the neoModernists.

In such an atmosphere where the tyranny of the new must always triumph, wisdom bids her children to stand firm with the maxim of Saint Vincent of Lerins:

"Moreover, in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all."

This and this only is Tradition. Tradition does not 'live' in any evolutionary sense, and always maintains the same sense and meaning. May God help us to hold fast to the Tradition - Divine, Apostolic, and Ecclesiastical - handed onto to us by the Lord's Apostles, the Fathers, the Doctors, the martyrs, confessors, virgins, Saints, and faithful Pontiffs.