This issue of The Angelus considers some of the challenges that Catholics face when moving from the Novus Ordo world to traditional Catholicism. It seeks to assist them on their way in a journey that is not always easy.
Letter from the District Superior:
Dear Reader,
The title of this issue of The Angelus contains a paradox: being new to something old. When Catholics speak of Tradition, they refer to what has always been in the Catholic Church: the same beliefs, the same worship, the same structure. These things have been with us 2,000 years now, and so are quite old!
Because, however, Tradition has been kept from “modern man” in the past half-century, many Catholics have had to seek it out and find it for the first time. Pope John XXIII famously called for an aggiornamento or updating of the Church when he called the Second Vatican Council. If the updating had been about employing more modern means for spreading perennial Catholic truths or about finding effective ways of converting secular nations in a revolutionary world, then it would have been a faithful modernization of the Church. After all, Our Lord says that the wise householder of the kingdom of heaven brings forth from his treasure things new and old (Mt. 13:52).
Vatican II, however, was much more about outdating Tradition than updating it. It substituted something entirely new for Tradition; it was not a renewal but a replacement. New liturgy, new social teaching, new ecclesiology, new catechism. As Archbishop Lefebvre expressed so frequently in Open Letter to Confused Catholics, it was a “new religion” (see pp. 57, 83, 131).
This left Catholics confused and lost because Catholicism is, by its very nature, traditional. It is a handing down of what was given to the Apostles by Our Lord Jesus Christ, not a creation of something new.
By founding the Society of St. Pius X, Archbishop Lefebvre provided to the Church a haven where disoriented Catholics could find, in an integral state, what Catholicism has always been and always will be. Throughout the decades, various causes have led faithful to seek and find Tradition, such as scandalous liturgies and heterodox behavior on the part of the clergy.
The influx of Catholics into SSPX chapels, however, has been greater than ever before in the past five years. Two main causes have led them to seek Tradition: their abandonment by their shepherds in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, and the multiplication of scandals in the pontificate of Pope Francis. So many have been discovering anew the old faith with its traditional practices and are being refreshed in their souls. This old faith has a timeless vigor that gives supernatural life, including modern men of the twenty-first century. Tradition is flourishing!
This issue of The Angelus considers some of the challenges that Catholics face when moving from the Novus Ordo world to traditional Catholicism. It seeks to assist them on their way in a journey that is not always easy.
May God grant to the traditionalist movement continued growth in this crisis of the Church, so that Tradition may regain its true position, for the glory of God and the benefit of souls.
Fr. John Fullerton
Featured | ||
| New Trad Syndrome & Its Antidote | Fr. Ian Andrew Palko, SSPX | |
| Scandalized by Scandal | Fr. Shane C. Pezzutti, SSPX | |
| The New Trad’s Guide to Staying Sane in Tradville | Sean McClinch | |
| Helpful Resources to Grow in Traditional Catholicism | Sarah Damm | |
| Getting Better Acquainted with the Traditional Latin Mass | Michael J. Miller | |
| New Trad Syndrome and the Sacrificial Life | Michael Jordan | |
| In Hope We Are Saved | Angeline Tan | |
| Tolkien’s Traditionalism: Conveniently Forgotten? | Julian Kwasniewski | |
Culture | ||
| REVIEW | The Mass: A Literal, Historical, and Dogmatic Explanation of Its Prayers and Ceremonies | Fr. Paul Robinson, SSPX |
Faith | ||
| FROM THE ARCHBISHOP | Serenity and Fidelity in the Combat | Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre |
| SERMON | On Praying the Psalter (ca. 1403) | Radulph of Rivo, translated by Zachary Thomas |
| LITURGICAL STUDIES | Lex orandi, lex credendi: Four Ways in Which the Prayers of the Novus Ordo Differ from those of the Traditional Latin Mass | Matthew Hazell |
| THEOLOGICAL STUDIES | Tradovacantism? A Correct Understanding of Obedience | Fr. Jean-Michel Gleize, SSPX |
| INTERVIEW | My Path to Tradition | Justin Muzzy |
| QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS | Fr. Paul Robinson | |
The Last Word:
What Is New? Tradition!
Let “the Youth of God” Rise Up
St. Vincent de Lérins in his famous Commonitorium teaches that the Church is tradition: “All possible care must be taken that we hold as true that which has been believed everywhere, always, by all,” he writes.
Catholic tradition is nothing other than the transmission of the teaching of Our Lord, under the beneficent guidance of the Church of Rome upon which the Savior Himself bestowed the privilege of infallibility.
This infinite respect for the divine teaching is expressed in a magisterial way by St. Paul. Not only does he adjure his disciple Timothy to keep the deposit of the Faith, but he is even more explicit when addressing the Galatians: “Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a Gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema.”
Everything that amounts to a novelty in the Church gives off as it were a rotten odor.
There does however exist a healthy homogenous evolution within tradition. This explains why certain popes such as Pius IX or Pius XII proclaimed the dogmas of papal infallibility and the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Indeed, tradition is an unfathomable treasure thanks to which each generation deepens its faith. It is a source ever overflowing with life. The soul that drinks at it will always find a doctrine that is sure and…new!
The soul finds there a doctrine that is sure, for tradition does not transmit ideas, which are changing by nature, but realities. An idea is nothing more than an element of a man’s thoughts, which are essentially variable, whereas tradition transmits a divinely revealed doctrine that is the highest and surest form of the real. It is. And it can never vary because it participates in the immutability of God.
And nonetheless, tradition is a doctrine that is ever new, not in the sense that it teaches novelties that reek of heresy, but in the sense that it is profoundly and really true.
Indeed, the truth is always new for the soul that feeds on it, for he finds in it an original freshness that rejuvenates him and fills him with joy. Errors are nothing but a stew of old sophisms refuted and condemned many a time already.
A century ago, modernists boasted proudly that they were rejuvenating the Church with their new doctrines. St. Pius X defined this heresy in decisive terms as “the sewer of all heresies.” Their doctrine was not new; it was anything but that. It was simply updating old lies issued by the devil’s agencies.
The truth is a gushing spring water; error is a stagnant pond in which heresies proliferate like so many deadly germs.
We leave it to General de Charette to express in a few eloquent words this oldness of the world and to praise the youth that rises up to defend the truth like the promise of a new dawn rising in the heart of the Tradition of the Church.
“…it is as old as the devil, this world that they call new and that they want to build upon the absence of God…Old as the devil…They tell us we are the lackeys of old superstitions; we can only laugh! In the face of these demons that are reborn century after century, we are the youth, gentlemen! We are the youth of God.”
In Christo Sacerdote et Maria,
Fr. Yves le Roux
District Superior of Canada
