Svalbard and the Deposit of Faith

I know where Svalbard is, so the title of this essay was intriguing. It turns out to be a profound meditation on the Depositum Fidei.

From Catholic Stand

By Rob Marco

Somewhere between Norway and the North Pole, in a remote, permafrost-covered area of the Arctic called Svalbard, lies a vault. Named the “Global Seed Vault”, it is a kind of Noah’s Ark for millions of seeds from around the world. The mission of Svalbard is to preserve the genetic diversity of agricultural seed in the event of a global disaster. It does this by storing and protecting virtually every species of earth’s seeds from degradation.

When I first heard about what has also been called the “doomsday vault”, I thought to myself, “Hmmm. Sounds a lot like the Catholic Church and the Deposit of Faith.” In fact one of the proprietors of the vault had this to say about it: “[The vault] is like a holy place. Every time I come here I feel like I’m in a cathedral. This is a place to pause and to think. It’s a unique place, a very important place for humanity.”

The Need for Tradition

In contrast to our Protestant brothers and sisters who adhere to the doctrine of sola scriptura (“scripture alone”), the Catholic Church has always maintained that the true Faith has two co-equal dimensions: Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture. As the Catechism states, they are bound closely together and communicate one with the other, originating from the same source (CCC 80).

Sacred Scripture is the speech of God as it is put down in writing under the breath of the Holy Spirit. And Tradition transmits in its entirety the Word of God which has been entrusted to the apostles by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit. It transmits it to the successors of the apostles so that, enlightened by the Spirit of truth, they may faithfully preserve, expound and spread it abroad by their preaching. (CCC 81)

When I came to believe in Christ, I knew it was essential that I not be my own arbiter of divine law. I simply did not trust myself, nor did I have a sound enough track record to do so without danger. A relationship with Christ was essential and squared with my experience of personal conversion, but the “pearl of great price”, the seed of this divine teaching, had to be guarded carefully to ensure against mutations.

While I admired the way the Christians I knew lived their lives, I felt that doctrine and Tradition were important in some way to preserve authentic teaching, though at the time of my reception into the Church, I didn’t know to what extent.

Seeds and Mutations

As an amateur gardener, I am familiar with the importance of good seed. If you plant an heirloom variety of some vegetable (that is, the original open-pollinated seeds that can be traced back hundreds of years and which are usually passed down through generations), you can save the seed for next season’s use. Hybrid seed, on the other hand, is genetically manipulated to produce various results (disease resistance, higher yield, etc.) but cannot be saved and used for future seasons. Heirloom seed is often seen as old fashioned, your grandmother’s variety of seed, while industrial farmers rely on hybrid seed to maximize production and minimize risk.

The example of the Kakure Kirirshitan (“hidden Christians”) of Japan is an example of the mutations that occur when the Faith is severed from the protection of the Magisterium. Forced into hiding during the anti-Catholic persecutions in the 17th century, this Christian sect endured for hundreds of years maintaining a kind of quasi-Christian tradition that veered from the original missionary faith that St. Francis Xavier had brought to the island in the 16th century. In a kind of “whisper down the lane” style, the tradition was passed down but in a mutated fashion, so much so that after 300 years, it hardly resembled Catholic Christianity at all and looked more like a Japanese folk religion.

Western Mutations

We can point to our own expression of cultural Catholicism in America today as a kind of mutation. Today a good number of Catholics do not believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and deny, in theory or practice, core tenets of the Faith. Many try to make other (incompatible) practices compatible with authentic belief. They basically merge this kind of quasi-Catholic practice with neo-pagan and secular humanistic beliefs, and we get a mutation which is very obvious in the belief and practices of many western Catholics today.

The difference between our cultural mutations and those of the hidden Christians of Japan is that there doesn’t seem to be the same imperative to preserve and pass down this twisted tradition to future generations. Most tepid and improperly catechized Catholics today seem content to simply let the Faith die on the generational vine.

A Challenge for Today’s Catholics

If we are going to preserve the true Faith for future generations and work for its endurance, we need to keep it true to form and guard against such mutations. In fact, we must do so stringently and with ardor. We need to hold fast to both Scripture and Sacred Tradition – uncompromisingly – and work to defend doctrine against error. We must do this in addition to living out authentic expressions of Christian practice in our daily lives because our future as a Church depends on the careful guarding of this depositum fidei, or the deposit of faith (2 Timothy 1:4), as well as the living witness of the faithful for its transmission.

All martyrs die for Christ, but some actually die upholding Church doctrine against heresies that threaten it. Most of the martyrs of the early church died because they refused to offer sacrifice to pagan gods. That’s a defense of true doctrine. In the 1500s Sts. Thomas More and John Fisher died because they refused to accept perversions of the Church’s teaching on marriage and papal primacy. The twenty-one Egyptian Christians who had their throats slit on a beach in Libya in 2015 (the whole world saw the video) died violently after refusing to convert to Islam. There have been many others throughout the history of the Church who saw no division between doctrine and practice, between love of Christ and love of His Church; between the deposit of faith and the seed of conversion.

The vault of preservation, if you will, is the Church. Christ Himself gave her the divine authority to interpret Scripture, and it is our job to submit to her teaching on matters of faith and morals, in docility and obedience, not assuming the role of arbiter for ourselves.

Like Svalbard, the deposit of faith is indeed a unique place, a holy place, and indispensably important to the future of humankind.