The present needs the past

Right now some clamor for everything in the Church, all her doctrine, liturgy (which is doctrine), law, structures… everything… to be “reinterpreted” in light of the “spirit” of Vatican II and the “spirit” of ongoing “synodality” (“walking togetherity”).

From the indominable Laudator.  My emphases…

Linking Up the Present With the Past

Ronald A. Knox (1888-1957), Occasional Sermons (New York: Sheed & Ward Inc., 1960), pp. 47-48:  (A different edition HERE)

[E]very new thing in human history is built against the background of some older thing which went before it. As the picture gallery of some great house preserves the memory of its ancestry, tracing down to the latest instance the persistence of the same characteristics, and linking up the present with the past; so the greatest institutions of the world are those which combine something ancient with something new. And among these, even the Catholic Church.

It is a human weakness of ours to be always crying out for complete novelty, an entire disseverance from our past. Our old traditions have become so dusty with neglect, so rusted with abuse, that we are for casting them on the scrap-heap and forgetting that they ever existed. The Church conserves; she bears traces still of the Jewish atmosphere in which she was cradled; traces, too, of the old heathen civilization which she conquered. And in her own history it is the same; nothing is altogether forgotten; every age of Christianity recalls the lineaments of an earlier time. People think of her as if she kept a lumber-room; it is not so; hers is a treasure-house from which she can bring forth when they are needed things old as well as new.

And again… for those who think that one mustn’t, can’t, dassent ever disagree with “Peter”.

Ronald A. Knox (1888-1957), The Pastoral Sermons (New York: Sheed & Ward Inc., 1960), pp. 430-431:

No, there is nothing distressing to the Christian conscience, either in the fact that St Paul should have disagreed with St Peter, or in the fact that St Peter should have been on the wrong side. Nor is it historically accurate to think of St Peter as a man wedded to old ways of thought, over-anxious about what other people would think; the account given of him in the Acts of the Apostles is enough to prove the contrary. But we may, if we will, concentrate our attention upon this particular scene in the lives of two great princes of the Church, and trace in it the age-long conflict between two forces in the history of the Church. Let us not call them two contrary, rather two complementary forces, the resultant of which is the well-being of the Catholic community. One is the tendency to strike out on new lines, try new experiments, assert, wherever it may be lawfully asserted, the principle of freedom. The other is a jealous regard for tradition, for established precedent; a reluctance to be stampeded by the fashion of the moment, to barter away, for some momentary advantage, a long inheritance of accumulated wisdom. Call them, if you will, the Liberal and the Conservative tendency; but do not forget that those words have modern associations which will confuse our thought, if we are not careful in the use of them.

I shall be told that the Catholic Church is not alone in feeling, century after century, the strain of that conflict. It is all around us; in a changing world, all our debates can easily be summed up under the formula, “Is it wiser to go forward, or to protect what we have?” But we Catholics, it must be remembered, cannot approach these questions so lightly, or with such free hands, as our neighbours. It is the first business of the Church to safeguard a deposit of revealed truth handed down to her, for all time, by a divine Founder; let her prove false to that trust, and the Church unchurches herself.

Abandon the past, let go or – quod Deus avertat – reject a divinely revealed deposit, and the Church is unchurched.