A reader writes…

Lately, in my reading of various blogs and posts, mostly Catholic, I have become rather puzzled. I thought that I knew the difference between the “Tradition” of the Church, and ordinary traditions, but some of the comments I have been reading, mostly about torture, war and the death penalty, have confused me. These are subjects that are really not widely discussed in my neck of the woods because they seem to have been settled a long time ago. However, I have read people who are going through the history of the Popes and the Church (as well as the Old Testament – but I have already seen your comments about this) in order to find arguments, are maintaining, for example, that the Church has not always been very vocal or very clear in her objections to torture, and that therefore more recent statements by JPII, for example, against torture, are contrary to the Church tradition. Similar things are said about war and the death penalty. Some claim that the Catechism is detracting from the Church tradition about those matters. According to them, what was “the truth” hundreds of years ago cannot be changed in that way. The way I see it, what was done and said hundreds of years ago was probably appropriate to the culture and traditions (small “t”) of those times, but is not necessarily part of a tradition that is “carved in stone” and cannot possibily be improved on or given a more enlightened explanation as the Church, because Scripture is continually being studied and reflected upon, may sometimes come to a clearer understanding of some matters. In other words, that not everything is part of “the” Tradition.

If you have the time, I would appreciate being told if I am correct or not, and/or being directed to a couple of good articles (I already have the Catechism and in fact our local parish is presenting Fr. Corapi’s excellent (in my humble opinion) DVD series about the Catechism, one evening a week).

You are basically on the right track. One of the principal functions of the Magisterium is to discern the authentic heart of the Tradition and apply it to our time. So, for instance, the Church in Acts 15 takes a good hard look at the revelation given to Moses and realizes that Gentiles, being given the Spirit, are not bound by the letter of the law. The reaction of the Judaizers (who insist on keeping the ceremonial law of Moses) is the reaction of all people who mistake mere traditionalism (the dead faith of the living) with Tradition (the living faith of the dead). They condemn the Church for this new-fangled “heresy” and eventually hive off into sectarianism. Every doctrinal development ever since has similarly had its dissenters who insist the Church should zig where in fact she zags. And so today, we have a small group (globally speaking) of apologists for torture who try to appeal to the past, undeveloped, teaching of the Church against the present Magisterial teaching–as though that happy day will someday come when the Church will again return to the faulty prudential judgements of our ancestors and welcome the rack and the stake.

Ain’t gonna happen, any more than the Church is going to go back to saying slavery is okay under certain circumstances. Most of this is, as ever with Americans, driven by certain tribal political allegiances and will fade as the particular urgencies of American political currents change.

That said, don’t imagine too fondly that these or any other matters are really settled in your neck of the woods. Ask any American on 9/10/11 whether “modern people” should accept torture under certain circumstance as a policy of the state or suggest that Catholics were better disposed to the use of torture than ordinary Americans and you would have gotten a hot reply about how anti-American torture is and how anti-Catholic it is to drag up the crimes of our ancestors in the Spanish Inquisition. All it takes is a little fear, a little agitprop from powerful and rich men, and a little sophistry from the clever and your country, like mine, can succumb to the ugliest and basest temptations. We’re all cut from the cloth of fallen Adam and require but a touch to slide into temptations we thought we had “outgrown”. It is helped by the fact that we have acquired, in modernity, the mysterious habit of thinking that the time of day somehow makes certain beliefs incredible or immunizes us from certain evils. It’s a completely incoherent superstition, but it underlies everything from “Surely, you don’t believe in angels? This is 2011!” to “Torture is medieval!” Neither statement makes any sense at all given that the factuality of angels, like the factuality of rocks, has nothing whatever to do with the calendar and that torture is as contemporary as Youtube.

Don’t know if it will scratch where you itch, but here is a little piece I wrote sometime back called “What is Sacred Tradition?”