Many Traditional Catholics have likely heard the concept of “living tradition” in connection with John Paul II’s rebuke of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in the July 2, 1988 apostolic letter, Ecclesia Dei:
“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 . . .”
The alleged “schismatic act” in question was Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s consecration of bishops on June 30, 1988, and John Paul II asserted that the root of Archbishop Lefebvre’s decision to proceed with the consecrations was an in complete account of the “living character of tradition.”
Francis’s response seems to say: “You may not like what I am trying to do to your Church but I am simply using the tools that Blondel, de Lubac, Vatican II, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI bequeathed to us. If you have a problem with me, take it up with them.”
Archbishop Lefebvre obviously understood the legitimacy of homogenous development of tradition, consistent with the criteria set forth by St. Vincent of Lerins. What, then, was Archbishop Lefebvre’s “incomplete and contradictory” idea of tradition? Perhaps the most eloquent and holy expression comes from Archbishop Lefebvre’s sermon for the June 30, 1988 consecrations:
“I am simply a bishop of the Catholic Church who is continuing to transmit Catholic doctrine. I think, and this will certainly not be too far off, that you will be able to engrave on my tombstone these words of St. Paul: ‘Tradidi quod et accepi—I have transmitted to you what I have received,’ nothing else. I am just the postman bringing you a letter. I did not write the letter, the message, this Word of God. God Himself wrote it; Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself gave it to us. As for us, we just handed it down, through these dear priests here present and through all those who have chosen to resist this wave of apostasy in the Church, by keeping the Eternal Faith and giving it to the faithful. We are just carriers of this Good News, of this Gospel which Our Lord Jesus Christ gave to us, as well as of the means of sanctification: the Holy Mass, the true Holy Mass, the true Sacraments which truly give the spiritual life.”
This is the true Catholic Faith. It is why so many saints throughout the centuries have chosen to become and remain Catholic — true Catholics believe that they have the same Faith that Our Lord transmitted to His Apostles. And yet John Paul II denounced this notion of tradition as incomplete and contradictory.
As Fr. Dominique Bourmaud described in his One Hundred Years of Modernism, Henri de Lubac — who would become influential at Vatican II — developed his concept of “living tradition” through his interactions with Maurice Blondel:
“At the beginning of his career, de Lubac had been fascinated by the obscure Blondel, whose sensibility was so like his own. The contact of the two men established a veritable symbiosis of thought between them, as de Lubac and Blondel came to share the same ideas, the same friends, and the same enemies. In reality, what they had most in common was the same doubt, the same lack of intellectual vigor, and the same inferiority complex before modern man, infected with skepticism and subjectivism. They chased after the same mirage of reconciling a pseudo-philosophy with the Faith. They cried out in chorus the same notion of truth, entirely travestied. They defined it as the mind’s correspondence with life, hence infinitely progressive and infinitely variable.”
Who was Blondel? For a succinct description of his relevance to this discussion of “living tradition,” we can look to the Society of St. Pius X’s October 1993 SiSiNoNo:
“In 1946, the celebrated Dominican theologian, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange publicly refuted Blondel's errors and privately wrote to him asking him to ‘retract his (false) definition of truth before dying - if he didn't want to spend too long in Purgatory.’ Publicly, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange had said: ‘It is not without a serious responsibility that he (Blondel) has called the Church's traditional definition of truth, which has been accepted for centuries, a figment of the imagination. Furthermore, by substituting this true notion of truth with an erroneous notion of truth, will inevitably bring error to anything that is built upon that false notion.’”
So Blondel was opposed directly by the great Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, and opposed at least indirectly by St. Pius X, with his battle against Modernism. As Fr. Bourmaud explained, Henri de Lubac took Blondel’s errors even further:
“De Lubac did not stop there . . . Behold one of de Lubac’s master discoveries, worthy of the best of the modernists — the art of emptying a Catholic expression of all its meaning while giving it a new and ambiguous signification. He explains that the river of Tradition cannot reach all the way to us if its bed is not perpetually cleared of old silt and sand. What precisely is this living Tradition? It is the code-name for de Lubac’s dogmatic relativism and its automatic rejection of all dogma received from without in any set form.”
For most Catholics who have no reason to delve into the debates over Modernism, so much of this may seem relatively insignificant, but Fr. Bourmuad highlighted how it impacts our entire religion: “Behold one of de Lubac’s master discoveries, worthy of the best of the modernists — the art of emptying a Catholic expression of all its meaning while giving it a new and ambiguous signification.” Once the enemies of the Church can abuse Catholic thinking in such a way, nothing can remain secure.
Francis’s Synod on Synodality is the hideous embodiment of this “living tradition,” one that we can no longer ignore.
Fr. Bourmaud’s description of de Lubac’s “intellectual heirs” helps us understand the impact of living tradition today:
“De Lubac’s intellectual heirs, Ratzinger and John Paul II, avidly took to his theory. Once modernism had finally triumphed in St. Peter’s Square, living Tradition became one with the conciliar Church, with no necessary link to any transmission of past Revelation. Living Tradition today labels as false the truth of yesterday, and truth today what was then falsehood. Living Tradition is remarkably convenient, allowing theologians to discount at will twenty centuries of constant and consistent magisterium, and label the infallible condemnation of religious freedom, as well as the anti-modernistic decisions at the beginning of this century, especially the decisions of the Biblical Commission, as ‘provisional dispositions.’ It justifies the excommunication of the few bishops who actually do remain faithful to Tradition. The neo-modernists can take a legitimate pride in this stroke of genius that kills two birds with one stone: protecting modernism and dealing the death blow to apostolic Tradition, both in the name of living Tradition!”
It might be easier to dismiss this were it not for the fact that John Paul II did indeed excommunicate Archbishop Lefebvre while attacking his failure to appreciate the “living character of tradition.” As for the future Benedict XVI, Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais quoted Cardinal Ratzinger’s commentary on Gaudium et Spes in his 1995 discourse on “living tradition”:
“The problem of the 1960s was to acquire the better of the values drawn from two centuries of ‘liberal’ culture. There are in fact some values which, although born outside the Church, can find their place purified and corrected in its vision of the world. This is what has been done.”
Here is what Bishop Tissier had to say about these words from the future Benedict XVI:
“Thus, under the pretext that Tradition and divine Revelation should be adaptable to the contemporary mentality, they want to introduce into Catholic doctrine these contemporary ideas, these false principles of the contemporary spirit, which is to say the liberal, revolutionary spirit.”
This is a powerful critique of Benedict XVI, but we tend to not care so much about these seemingly arcane theological debates until they involve a clearly visible deviation from what the Church has always taught. And, under, Benedict XVI, we generally saw considerably less deviation from Catholic tradition than we saw from his predecessors. Conversely, with Francis, we see countless deviations from tradition but comparatively little that resembles serious theology.
Clearly Fr. Rush, Francis, and the Synodal leaders have chosen the “dynamic” understanding of tradition — the “living tradition” — because they want to introduce changes completely incompatible with what the Church has always taught, much to the delight of the Church’s enemies, first and foremost Satan.
For better or worse, though, Francis’s response to the recent Dubia from the five Cardinals involves a collision of the theological debates with matters that rise to the attention of many faithful Catholics. Here is the first question from the Cardinals:
“Following the statements of some bishops, which have neither been corrected nor retracted, we ask whether the Divine Revelation should be reinterpreted in the Church according to the cultural changes of our time, and the new anthropological vision promoted by these changes.”
Clearly the answer to this should be “no,” but here is how Francis responded:
“The answer depends on the meaning you give to the word ‘reinterpret.’ If it is understood as ‘interpret better,’ the expression is valid. In this sense, the Second Vatican Council affirmed that it is necessary that with the work of exegetes - and I would add of theologians - ‘the judgment of the Church may mature’ (Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum, 12).”
Francis cited Vatican II’s Dei Verbum in this portion of his response — here is the extended quotation:
“The living tradition of the whole Church must be taken into account along with the harmony which exists between elements of the faith. It is the task of exegetes to work according to these rules toward a better understanding and explanation of the meaning of Sacred Scripture, so that through preparatory study the judgment of the Church may mature.”
With this reference to Vatican II, there is an element of cruel mockery in Francis’s response, which seems to say: “You may not like what I am trying to do to your Church but I am simply using the tools that Blondel, de Lubac, Vatican II, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI bequeathed to us. If you have a problem with me, take it up with them.”
Even worse, Francis’s Synod on Synodality is the hideous embodiment of this “living tradition,” one that we can no longer ignore. In fact, Fr. Ormond Rush’s October 23, 2023 “theological reflection” on the Synod’s “Synthesis Report” provides a valuable (albeit skewed) synopsis of the entire conflict between Henri de Lubac’s “living tradition” and the Church’s actual view of tradition:
“What Joseph Ratzinger saw during Vatican II as the source of tension here were basically two approaches to tradition. He calls them a ‘static’ understanding of tradition and a ‘dynamic’ understanding. The former is legalistic, propositional, and ahistorical (i.e., relevant for all times and places); the latter is personalist, sacramental and rooted in history, and therefore to be interpreted with an historical consciousness. The former tends to focus on the past, the latter on seeing the past being realised in the present, and yet open to a future yet to be revealed. The council used the phrase ‘living tradition’ to describe the latter (DV, 12).”
Clearly Fr. Rush, Francis, and the Synodal leaders have chosen the “dynamic” understanding of tradition — the “living tradition” — because they want to introduce changes completely incompatible with what the Church has always taught, much to the delight of the Church’s enemies, first and foremost Satan.
For decades, well-meaning shepherds have exposed their flocks to danger by accepting the ideas of de Lubac. This may not have seemed so bad before, but now Francis has shown us where it leads. Living tradition has turned ugly, but the reality is that it was always an abomination.
As Fr. Davide Pagliarani, the SSPX Superior General, said in a January 2022 talk, these particular fruits of following a living tradition may not have been foreseen decades ago, but those who abandon the proper understanding of Catholic tradition are cut off from the truths Our Lord entrusted to His Church:
“[W]ith the notion of a Living Tradition, what do we end up with? It was difficult to foresee it in 1988. However today, we have Amoris lætitia, we have the worship of the Earth, and we have the Pachamama. And there are other consequences that we don’t know about yet, because with this dynamic and evolutionary notion of Tradition, you can end up with absolutely any result. In truth, they are in another dimension. They are cut off from the Tradition that is rooted in the Apostles and in Divine Revelation, and which is itself a source of Revelation.”
Those who preached “living tradition” for decades brought us to this moment because the first deviation from tradition is already an abomination. This is why St. Pius X included the following in his Oath Against Modernism:
“I entirely reject the heretical misrepresentation that dogmas evolve and change from one meaning to another different from the one which the Church held previously.”
This is the rejection of “living tradition” that we need to rediscover now. Many faithful Catholics who decry Francis’s abuses yearn for a return to the days of John Paul II or Benedict XVI. How, though, would that solve the underlying problem caused by the flawed vision of Catholic tradition, which ultimately means a flawed vision of both Catholic truth and God?
God is permitting this unprecedented crisis in the Church for a reason. For decades, well-meaning shepherds have exposed their flocks to danger by accepting the ideas of de Lubac. This may not have seemed so bad before, but now Francis has shown us where it leads. Living tradition has turned ugly, but the reality is that it was always an abomination. Now is the time for the remaining faithful shepherds to have the fortitude to reject the lies that brought us to this point. Those who do so can be counted among the great heroes of Church history; those who do not will be helping Francis and the Church’s enemies lead souls to hell. Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!
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