A Homily for the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

+ Tradidi enim vobis in primis, quod et accepi… the Apostle Paul insists in the Epistle of this Holy Mass: I delivered unto you first of all [that] which I also received. The use of this phrase by a famous twentieth-century archbishop, abbreviated to read tradidi quod et accepi (I handed on what I received) has given it an increased importance in recent decades—it gives rise to the tag “traddies” or to the label “traditionalists”—and we would do well to ponder its content a little.
 
St Paul is insisting that the foundation of the teaching he gave to the Corinthians was something that he himself had received from others, in tradition. That is to say, the gospel he preached was not something of his own construction, but something which he—someone unfit to be an apostle, as he later insists—received by the grace of God’s mercy and which it was his solemn duty in turn to hand on to others intact and undefiled. This is of the essence of the Catholic Faith. We receive the Faith of the Church that is faithfully handed on from the Apostles to our own day—a fact beautifully expressed in the ancient rite of handing over the Creed to catechumens before baptism. Neither we nor the successors of the apostles nor their co-workers (ordained or lay) have the right to edit, rewrite or otherwise change or dilute it.
 
Thus, to be Catholic is of its very essence to belong to the tradition of the Truth of Jesus Christ: to receive it, to strive to live according to it and faithfully to hand it on to others, be that in the privileged vocation of Christian parenthood, ordained ministry, the witness of monastic or religious consecration, the vocation of the Christian teacher or that of lay witness in the world. Tradition is not an idea— it is not reducible to a set of words nor even less to an ideological programme—it is living fidelity to the person of Jesus Christ and His definitive revelation of God in history.
 
Certainly, in her living out of that fidelity the Church has given birth to uniquely privileged and divinely inspired expressions of her Tradition, foremost amongst which we must count the collection of Sacred Scriptures that we call the Holy Bible. The Creeds, too, rank uppermost, as do the Sacred Liturgies of the East and the West. Rooted in the soil of the Faith handed down by the apostles, the Creeds and the liturgical rites have grown up over the centuries giving the realities of our Faith both form and expression in a singularly privileged sacramental manner. The liturgical rites are not simply ornaments that may (or may not) please our tastes or massage our temperaments: they are the God-given means in and through which we encounter Christ living and working in His Church today (cf. Vatican II, Sacrosanctum Concilium n. 7)
 
Thus, what may appear to a rational mind simply to be expressions of the Faith are in fact privileged vessels of Tradition, of the Catholic Faith. This may be said in respect of the Western and Eastern liturgical rites as a whole, and at least of their principal elements in particular. The best example is perhaps the Roman Canon, described by Blessed Ildephonse Schuster as “a given element of Tradition” and “a prayer unaltered and unalterable” (The Sacramentary I, p. 317). It is not of divine origin or revelation—there was when it was not [!]—but it is, in the West, such a towering pillar of the living Tradition of the Church that it unthinkable to cancel it (in fact, as was proposed some decades ago, or in reality, as has been done by the construction and insertion of parallel canons).
 
Of course, in the Tradition of the Church some liturgical forms fall away and are lost, often for good reason, and others are added as the life of the Church brings forth new and beautiful fruits which give greater glory to Almighty God. This growth, appositely described as organic, is incremental in its continuity. Pruning is possible, even necessary sometimes (as the history of the calendar of saints attests). What is unthinkable is root and branch rupture: the wholesale deracinating of all that has grown up in Tradition for the purpose of ideological editing in order to create a freshly designed cut-and-paste product in the possibly vain hope that it will take root.
 
For whilst St Paul did not have to address the liturgical turmoil of recent decades, he certainly had to assert the fundamentals of the Faith to his Churches, and to instruct them in the required orthodoxy and liturgical behaviour. His letters make it utterly clear that an à la carte approach to the Catholic Faith is utterly unacceptable. We receive the Faith in Tradition and in doing so we also receive the duty of ourselves handing it on intact. Mutatis mutandis this applies equally to us in respect of the Sacred Liturgy, respecting the fact that some elements may change and develop, but that it must always be in substantial continuity with that handed on in Tradition.
 
Let us not cease to correct, and if necessary to combat, the à la carte approach to faith, morals and the Sacred Liturgy: it is a true cancer in the Body of Christ and it is widespread. Let us renew our own participation in the Sacred Rites, ancient and ever new, that have grown up in Tradition, that we may be witnesses to their value and efficacy today and thus hand them on to the generations to come as the utterly vital treasures that they are. +