Tradition and the signs of the times

God doesn’t get reported in the news, and the experts in the media question or deny him and everything about him. So how do we get people—how do we get ourselves—to feel that He is more real than anything else?

(Image: andreas160578/Pixabay.com)

How can Catholics most help the world?

The obvious answer is that they would help most if they became saints. If you as a Catholic want to “make a difference,” cultivate sanctity and wholehearted love of God and neighbor.

A better world needs better people, and we all know where that has to start. That is why G.K. Chesterton said the right answer to the question “what is wrong” is “I am wrong.” As he noted, “Until a man can give that answer his idealism is only a hobby.”

That should give all of us enough to keep busy. But the advice raises the question of what, specifically, we should keep busy doing. In other words, what leads to sanctity?

That can vary a great deal. Saint Paul, Saint Louis, and Saint Benedict all lived very differently. So, the first answer that comes to mind is “whatever works for you.”

That seems pretty much the same as “whatever you are called to.” But few of us have a Road to Damascus moment that lays out the course we should follow. What do the rest of us do, as sanctity can seem far off and hard to reach?

There are pitfalls. Human inertia and other weaknesses are problems, but trying too hard can also be a problem. That was the point of Simone Weil’s (characteristically extreme) comment: “We should do only those righteous actions which we cannot stop ourselves from doing.” The Chinese philosopher Laozi put it more moderately: “He who strains his strides does not walk well.”

Most of us muddle along. We look at what has helped others, and pursue the practices that seem rewarding. Some ask for spiritual guidance, but for many of us even that seems beyond our energy level. The best we can think of is to keep on trying, and get up again when we fall down.

We must all make our own way. Even so, a larger perspective can be helpful. We are dependent on each other, and love of our fellow man is part of saintliness. So we should pay attention to how people affect each other.

As St. Paul noted, “Evil communications corrupt good manners” (1 Cor 15:33). If we live among unholy people most of us will be dragged down, and if we act badly we will drag others down. So we should ask about what leads to sanctity not only for ourselves but for the rest of the world, and become part of whatever that might be.

Love of God seems most immediately connected to worship, love of neighbor to active charity. What to do about these things has been a point of contention in recent decades. The arguments often become mixed up with arguments over the Second Vatican Council: what its documents say, what it intended, and how we should understand it as times change and experience accumulates.

Some issues are outward-turning. When we deal with non-Catholics, should we concentrate on what we have in common or what we add that they don’t already have? Which should we emphasize: the authority of doctrine, individual subjectivity (“lived experience”), or common action with others to build a better society? And on the last point, what promotes a better society?

All this is too complex to discuss in a single column, so I’ll just make a few remarks on something people think is more inward-turning: worship.

Disputes about worship have become surprisingly bitter. Is the New Mass better? Or the Old Mass? Some people complain about the former, others think the latter should be crushed, especially if it looks like more and more people are becoming attached to it. Are traditional devotions helpful, or are they distractions—manifestations of a “self-absorbed promethean neopelagianism” that substitutes form and ritual for love of God and neighbor?

Current disputes over such things remind me of nothing so much as the struggle over icons and iconoclasm in the eighth and ninth centuries. I don’t think anyone was canonized for defending icons. Even so, those who did so defended the Church on an important point.

Then, as now, a basic question was whether we should strip the Faith down to its essentials. Does attachment to particular images, rituals, and observances lead us to forget God in favor of substitutes? Or do they work together to remind us constantly of God and neighbor by giving the Faith a concrete enduring presence in our lives?

Today’s experts mostly like abstractions and simple systems, so they usually prefer a stripped-down faith. People should concentrate on the basic points—immediate love of God and neighbor. So, why make a fuss over things that might be distractions?

The argument would be a good one if we knew that people’s attention could somehow be guaranteed. But it cannot. That is one reason secondary things matter a great deal for people who are not already saints. We need reminders.

To some extent it’s a matter of personal gifts. There are people who don’t need to be reminded about love of God and neighbor, and want only the freedom to express them. Some were born to become hermits in the desert, far from bells and incense, or to become medieval Cistercians, praying in plain unornamented churches in remote valleys. Others, with no special flourishes, become everyday saints who redeem life in the world.

But that’s not everyone. Emerson noted: “It takes a great deal of elevation of thought to produce a very little elevation of life.” With that in mind, it seems that constant reminders of the highest things are something most of us need very much. Rites and observances matter.

Most of us live in the world immersed in its sights, sounds, incidents, and temptations. All those things are part of the world God made, and to a saint would likely appear in that light, but to most of us they do not.

For such people the Faith isn’t likely to remain present spiritually unless it maintains a solid and established physical presence, with its own sights, sounds, and observances. That’s especially true in our commercialized, bureaucratized, and media-drenched age.

People have come to believe that if something isn’t reported in the news and affirmed by experts it’s not real. God doesn’t get reported in the news, and the experts in the media question or deny him and everything about him. So how do we get people—how do we get ourselves—to feel that He is more real than anything else?

That is a question that traditional liturgies and devotions help answer. In a world that is too much with us, they point stubbornly to things that are neither of this time nor of this world, and they insist that those are the things that matter most of all.

Many point out that assiduous devotions can conceal hypocrisy and hard-heartedness. That’s true, of course, but so can denouncing neopelagianism. There are many forms of virtue-signaling hypocrisy. And failure to make any gesture at all in the direction of God and the Good, Beautiful, and True also has drawbacks.

Today, when people forget the Faith altogether, and visible Catholic piety is hardly a route to social advancement, the dangers of devotion to rosaries, scapulars, eucharistic devotions, and ancient forms of the liturgy seem minimal. They speak to an obvious need—and attraction to them is far more likely to be a good than bad sign.

With that in mind, it’s shocking that there are pastors of the Church who want to suppress such things. If some of the faithful want to put their faith in the Real Presence on display to the world through public eucharistic adoration, or they find they best connect to God and the Church throughout eternity through the traditional form of the Mass, why wouldn’t it be pastoral to encourage them?


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About James Kalb 155 Articles
James Kalb is a lawyer, independent scholar, and Catholic convert who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of The Tyranny of Liberalism (ISI Books, 2008), Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It (Angelico Press, 2013), and, most recently, The Decomposition of Man: Identity, Technocracy, and the Church (Angelico Press, 2023).

12 Comments

  1. About relics as “visible Catholic piety”:

    “It is idle to talk about the wreck of Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.”

    (Whittaker Chambers [Quaker convert from communism, and author of “Witness,” Random House, 1952], in a letter to William Buckley, August 5, 1954, in “Cold Friday,” Random House, 1964).

    • That is the point. Tradition is a gesture that carries forward what we have lost, so that some day the dry bones may once again live.

      • The dry bones of civilization might not live until “some day”, but the dry bones of the individual can begin to live immediately.

  2. James, I think that Catholic Religiosity was more profoundly palpable when the age old enemies of salvation were clearly identified: the world, the flesh and the devil. The church embarked on a new mission in the mid-1960’s one of “accommodating” modern man (as if a reference to the times makes some kind of profound change to the essence of mankind). The church has lost sight of its enemies. As a consequence, it is suffering an identity crisis of monumental proportions. The Traditional Mass helps keep the proper focus – that focus being ON GOD. There is just too much “horizontal” in the modern N.O. Church and not enough transcendence. God bless your work and your endeavors!

    • “The TLM helps keep the proper focus …on God.”(?) When you attend the Novus Ordo are you there to adore, worship, love and unite with Christ Jesus, the source of love and mercy made present on the altar? Or are you busy looking for negatives, critics, offenses and condemnation because your heart is not in it? At VatII the Church Fathers desired to opt for the “holy sacred Simplicity” for the two most urgent issues of Unity of Christians and evangelization; a holy Simplicity like the last supper and the early church. Both proofed successful in the world. The Church is not alone European or American but global. From Adam offering burnt sacrifices to God, to David’s kingdom where he was singing and dancing before the holy Arc, we are made to praise God and to bring Him glory. Why do traditional mass goers always condemn the New Mass? If the TLM lifts your heart to the Prince of Love and Life what a gift. My heart is set on fire in the new mass and I know it is global to reach many souls, and we also have many rites within the Church. We live in the great apostacy, and as John Paul II the Great Pope put it: “This is the time of the Christ and the Antichrist, the gospel and the anti-gospel.” Satan’s last battle is raging against the Church, the family and creation itself. June is the month to honor the Sacred Heart of Jesus; may the Prince of Love and Life increase in us love and charity for Him and each other. God bless!

      • “At VatII the Church Fathers desired to opt for the ‘holy sacred Simplicity’ for the two most urgent issues of Unity of Christians and evangelization; a holy Simplicity like the last supper and the early church. Both proofed [sic] successful in the world.” Good heavens! What is your definition of success? Empty churches? A collapse of vocations? Vanishing religious orders? The wholesale apostasy of Catholic teaching institutions? The embrace of contraception and abortion by the overwhelming majority of Catholics? You must be living in a parallel universe.

        • Timothy, I was talking about the past 60 years – the 25 years of JPII who visited over 100 countries, and the 7 years of Benedict XVI teachings. We went from 500 million to 1.3 billion members of the Catholic Church. I am looking at a global church and I am enjoying all the great contributions of converts from other denominations that enriched the church. Looking at the Western church loss of faith and truth is staggering. What hurts the Church most is the disunity.

      • Mention of St. John Paul II brings to mind a key ambiguity in the Novus Ordo Mass…
        As one who does value and always attends the Novus Ordo, I still do notice the adequate-but-deficient wording that the Mass is a “memorial” of the passion Christ. Memorial? Not to “condemn the new Mass,” but in his “Prayer before Mass” St. John Paul II recognized more clearly that the Mass is the “renewal and extension [!]” of the one sacrifice on Calvary: “…we all join in offering this Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, this unbloody renewal and extension of Christ’s Sacrifice on the Cross for the following intentions…”

        How many of the current generation even know the absolute difference between this and an easily misunderstood “memorial”? If they did (CCC 1374), would the low percentage getting to Mass then be less weakly that it is, and more weekly?

        • good point! This generation barely knows that the mass is a sacrifice and not only that but that we are asked to unite to the sacrifice of Christ made present on the altar. And Saint Franci added: “and hold nothing back”.

        • I read it in different commentaries and Signs and Symbols of Catholicism. To tell you the truth I have read little of the documents but I was an attentive reader and listener of JPII and Benedict XVI and their strong belief in VatII and the preferred Holy Sacred Simplicity of the holy mass with unity of Christians always in the forefront of necessities. Bergoglio is a disaster for the Catholic Church. I am praying for a holy pope filled with the Holy Spirit to accomplish “HOLY UNITY. God bless!

        • Sacrosanctum Concilium calls for “noble simplicity” and the expression has been used pretty often otherwise.

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