In the eyes of conventional wisdom, the intellectual battle going on in the Catholic Church is centered on the present. Whether it is the New Mass, the Second Vatican Council, or other various different doctrinal controversies, it is assumed the problem is over how we approach the events of today.
While a compelling narrative, it is ultimately unsatisfactory. This narrative ignores the very real challenges of the problems the Church faces today. The issue of how to understand the papacy alongside that of Bishops is something that has been a heated discussion not just since Vatican II in the West, but a discussion several centuries old. Vatican II hasn’t “fixed” this problem. (Indeed, despite calls for collegiality and decentralization, the papacy is as centralized as it has ever been, for better or worse.)
This narrative also places far too much importance on what is happening right now. The Church founded by Christ is 2,000 years old, and that was merely the continuation of God’s people that stretches back to the calling of Abram. In addition to the sheer length of time, Christ’s Church is a gathering of all peoples, classes and cultures. What works in one instance can be a disaster in another. Faced with such constraints, our understanding of the importance of the present is often wrong, sometimes spectacularly so.
The real issue at hand is not how we understand the present. It is how we understand the past. For the author of Ecclesiastes (the Qoheleth or teacher), his biggest regret is that society isn’t even including the past in the discussion. A sign of a good society will be how it properly understands the past. Yet how we should we understand it?
To later generations, Israel’s exodus in the desert was one such ideal society, about as close as you could get to a people faithfully following the precepts of the Lord. Yet if you read the actual accounts of that time (from Exodus to Joshua) you find a different story being told. While you read stories of great individual holiness, the people as a whole are a “stiff-necked people” (Exodus 32:9) perennially one step away from God washing his hands of the whole Israelite experiment and starting over. The Sacred Scriptures recount these days as Israel constantly falling short of even the most basic of duties (don’t dance naked in front of statues of animals, don’t copulate in the temple, don’t have homosexual prostitutes in the inner regions of the temple), and only limited instances of the rare individual doing something right in the eyes of God even when it caused a bit of discomfort.
As you read through history, you find that the only thing notable about this sentiment is how common it is. Even in the greatest of times, golden ages reach surprisingly few. The majority (or at least a substantial minority) continue on in their complacency at best, apostasy at worst. There have always been utopians seeking to return Christianity to a “purer Church” of this or that time frame. Not only do these movements never catch on, they frequently devour themselves when their imperfections become apparent to all.
Yet if the past is full of such mediocrity, why is understanding the past so vital to knowing who we are, and who we will become? We tend to believe that the problems we face are unprecedented. Every day a new unprecedented problem presents itself, and new solutions are inevitably proposed. Yet since many of these solutions fail to take into account the lessons of the past, they not only fail, they make things worse. (For a prime example, look no further than the so called Protestant “Reformation.”) A proper understanding of the past reminds us just how ordinary most crises actually are. When your sample size is billions of people over 2,000 years, genuinely unprecedented problems are a possibility, but a rare one.
Yet if crisis is ordinary, so is the way out of that crisis. Throughout history there is a golden thread that ties together various people, ages, and cultures. Though it is expressed in different ways, the truth is always the same. That truth is not heeded by all, but in ages of reform and flourishing, that truth is accessible, and there are always stark examples of it. This could even be a way of understanding the truism that the Church is at its holiest when under persecution. When under persecution, that way to truth becomes even clearer.
That golden thread is what is called tradition. It is handed down through the ages, and has the ability to transform our lives so that we as well may hand it down. If we wish to make that golden thread our own, we must understand what it is made of. One of the great difficulties of today is that this thread is seldom handed down. Yet when it is handed down, the Church thrives. The faith is represented with joy, large families, and booming vocations in these circumstances. Are things perfect in these communities? Of course not, they deal with the same problems everyone else does. The difference is they have thousands of years of tradition to rely on in helping to solve that problem, and there’s a great peace that comes from the assurance your problem is not unique, nor is the resolution.
