Traditional Used to be Modern, Right?

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Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com

Whenever someone makes a case for the restoration of elements of Catholic culture which became scarce in the 20th and 21st century, like Gothic architecture, Latin, or Gregorian Chant, you will hear people say a couple things in reply.

The first is that Jesus and the disciples, in the last supper, did not celebrate in Latin, they didn’t have fancy vestments, and they didn’t sing Gregorian chant.

They develop that argument further by pointing out that Gothic Architecture and Gregorian Chant were once new and modern too and the Church was happy to embrace them then so we should be just as willing to embrace new and novel ideas and cultural expressions in the name of progress today.

The first thing that stands out about this sequence of argumentation is how it refutes itself. Which is it? Should we be looking back to Jesus and the disciples and refusing to do anything that adds to that ceremony out of some extreme primitivism?

Or should we embrace progressivism and look to every new and novel idea to enhance our worship and theology? Because it can’t be both. Those two proposals are as diametrically opposed to each other as it gets.

But setting that glaring contradiction aside, accusing orthodox or even Traditional Catholics of being opposed to all things new because they are new and this is why we recoil from modernism and modern culture, is a gross strawman argument.

Tradition is about preserving doctrines and culture which have been shown to be good and worthy or conservation. Contemporary cultural or theological elements that seem to find their way into the Church today aren’t opposed by traditional Catholics because they are new – it’s because they contradict the faith.

Christopher Dawson, who was a writer of incredible depth but is somehow not well known among Catholics today, argued that culture is embodied religion. The way I’ve said it is that culture is the incarnation of beliefs.

Since every historical culture found its embodiment in religion, you can’t separate the religious question from all of this. What this means is that a culture will bloom outwards from a religious creed – or a lack of one. The analogy I’ve used in the past is like words are the embodiment of our thoughts. Our thoughts precede that materialization.

OK, so with that context in mind, lets revisit some of these competing cultural persuasions which feature in the liturgy wars of contemporary Catholicism.

The cultural elements that Traditional Catholics are so attached to are such because they blossomed out of a uniquely Catholic Culture. This was a culture that was inspired by the doctrines of Christianity and organized around those beliefs.

Cultural elements like Gregorian Chant and Gothic architecture were organically and naturally drawn from the bosom of the faith. The contemporary and pop cultural accessories that we try to shoehorn into the Church today come from the bosom of somewhere else, and if we have to use body parts for this analogy, I’d rather swap out bosom for something else.

Pop culture, modern music, modern architecture, these are the embodiment of the modern religion or rather the lack of true religion in the modern world.

They find their origin in a range of philosophies that aren’t just incompatible with Catholic Christianity, they are violently opposed to it. Philosophies like secularism, positivism, communism, nihilism, and modernism are all fundamentally opposed to the Church and it is they that inspire all the degrading fashions of today.

That opposition is explicit and unambiguous from the moment you start reading any of those currents of thought. Traditional Catholics aren’t opposed to everything contemporary, just that particular kind of contemporary that flourishes in the soup of modern philosophies that are contemptuous of Catholicism.

I’ve said in the past that trying to adopt another cultural persuasion while retaining your own creed is like trying to use someone else’s words to express your own beliefs but that’s not actually a strong enough statement. It’s more like trying to express your thoughts with the words of someone who earnestly hates you.

Just like you can’t separate an organ from one body and stick it an incompatible one and expect it to thrive. Not only will it not thrive, it will die. And anyone with an honest appreciation of what’s going on in the Catholic Church and Christianity throughout Western culture, has to admit, that’s what is happening.

We cannot discard our culture and the things that we uniquely produced in an era when the faith was wholly embraced by a people and expect to survive.

In the words of our Lord, “A house divided cannot stand!”