Tradition or Annihilation

"Whatever you may think about what has happened since Vatican II, ... it is time to embrace reality, which is that we are in a self-inflicted Nuclear Winter."

From Crisis

By Kennedy Hall

If we want to avoid the Church’s effective annihilation, we must return to Tradition, in everything from liturgy to catechesis to public morals and even modesty in dress.

Recently, Crisis Magazine Editor in Chief Eric Sammons published an article outlining the dire state of the Catholic Church in America. He showed that for every 100 new Catholics, more than 800 people leave the Church. In addition, he proved that it is even worse than the numbers suggest when we do a deep dive into sacramental participation and the like. 

Simply put, the Church in America—and abroad because these trends are universal—is barely on life support and fading fast. To say that it is a crisis is an understatement; it is a super crisis, and Sammons is correct in saying that radical changes are needed. Now, my only criticism of his article is that he didn’t publish it while I was writing my forthcoming book on the crisis of Modernism, which would have made my research a little easier because he would have done much of it for me.

In any event, Sammons is correct that radical changes are needed. And he is correct to suggest a host of changes in practice, like reinstating Friday abstinence, returning to the Baltimore Catechism, and so forth. But I am going to go one step further than Sammons and say that if we want to avoid annihilation, we must return to Tradition.

This means a full return to the old ways in everything from liturgy to catechesis to public morals and even modesty in dress. We are on the edge of a cliff looking at a perilous fall, so perhaps it is time we turn around and walk back to regroup.

C.S. Lewis wrote: 

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

We are utterly lost at sea, yet our leaders keep telling us to paddle forward, which they apparently would rather do than simply turn around and go back to shore. It is like they prefer the idea of being caught in storms and being swallowed up by sharks over the security of the civilization we left on dry land.

Now, I foresee a few objections which I ought to deal with right away. Yes, I know, everything wasn’t perfect before Vatican II and the changes to the Mass. Yes, I also know that going back to old ways doesn’t mean that everyone becomes a saint. I am also fully aware that it would be extremely difficult to put a return to Tradition into practice, which would include a lot of construction and realignment, and so on.

However, this way of thinking misses the point: we are facing a 700 percent negative ratio between new Catholics and former Catholics, so whatever we have been doing isn’t working and must be stopped. 

Granted, the time before Vatican II wasn’t a golden age; if it was, we wouldn’t have had the revolution and aftermath of Vatican II. But, you know, wasn’t that the case before Vatican II? A 700 percent difference in Church membership. 

One of the most annoying platitudes is the statement, “correlation doesn’t equal causation.” Well, actually, it often effectively does. Think about it; if you surround your children with drug dealers and put them in a bad school, wouldn’t this be a cause of their becoming a drug addict? No one would say, “Well, sure, you put them in a school where everyone did drugs and they were around lots of drug dealers, but you can’t say this had anything to do with their new drug habit because correlation doesn’t equal causation.”

This way of thinking is stupid.

Whatever you may think about what has happened since Vatican II, and whatever your hopes may have been about New Springtimes and New Pentecosts, it is time to embrace reality, and the reality is that we are in a Nuclear Winter, and it is self-inflicted. We are in this mess because we rejected Tradition in all its forms and embraced novelty. The embrace of novelty has created an environment where we are told everything is new and everything is renewal and everything is restoration, yet in reality everything is decay, and rot, and destruction. The only parts of the Church that are truly healthy are the places where Traditional liturgy and catechesis thrive. 

Whenever I talk to Catholics who don’t attend an ancient liturgy but who say their parish is thriving, they invariably tell me that their parish either offers the Old Rite as well as the New Rite or that the New Rite is celebrated like it is the Old Rite in some way. In addition, their parish does processions, and they use old catechisms and perform other such traditional things. In other words, they do things the old way, and when they do certain new things, they do them like they do the old things.

Heck, even the most ardent defenders of Vatican II and opponents of “Traditionalists” almost never attend the Novus Ordo; they usually attend the Latin Mass or an Eastern Rite—this is the case for virtually all the anti-traditionalist podcasters and mainstream apologists. Even those who get paid to defend the New Springtime take a weekly sojourn in the Old Christendom because they know where Catholicism is to be found.

A return to Tradition is really quite simple, and it is the easiest solution. We don’t have to make up anything new, and we don’t have to come up with some grand plan that takes a decade more of synodal stupidity. All we have to do is go into the archives and dust off some old books and take out some old vestments and dust those off as well. We simply have to read old stuff and teach that stuff to our kids; and professors have to teach that same stuff to the seminarians, who will then teach it to the faithful. The ironic thing is that the radical change we need is not really a change at all but an undoing of changes.

It wouldn’t be as hard to accomplish as people think. No one expects priests to all say the Old Rite in a week or two, and maybe they need a year or two to become acclimated. Also, I seem to recall reading about a time in the 1960s and ’70s when they radically changed everything and ransacked the churches like iconoclasts. Can’t we just do the opposite of that, or do we not have the same resolve as the modernists and iconoclasts?

And, we should expect that some lukewarm cafeteria Catholics will leave if we “go back,” but aren’t they leaving anyway? Also, isn’t it the case that many more will stay or be reinvigorated? Remember, we are dealing with a 700 percent deficit, so we are in no place to say that doing something that worked for centuries is too “risky” when we are facing annihilation.

It really is a choice between Tradition and annihilation at this point, and I don’t have it in me to listen to any more talk about types of “continuity” or “mutual enrichment” or “revival.” I live in reality, and in reality, those things don’t work—just like how, in reality, Communism doesn’t work. You can tell me until you are blue in the face that we just need to Vatican II harder or Novus Ordo harder, or that the true Vatican II was never implemented, or the true Novus Ordo was never celebrated, but I am not going to take you seriously. In my mind, you may as well be the sociology professor telling me why the true Marx has never been understood, blah blah blah. 

What we are doing and have been doing doesn’t work, and it will never work, and what we used to do did work, and it will work again. Sure, going back to the old ways isn’t a panacea, but it also isn’t a continual ingestion of strychnine either. Let’s stop the bleeding, fix the wounds, and do what we know how to do best, and we can discuss reforms and how to tinker with this or that when we stop committing ecclesial suicide.