"What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful."
I was reminded of that statement when I read this categorically opposite statement by Herder, a pioneer of cultural relativism:
"Could it be that what a nation at one time considers good, fair, useful, pleasant, true, it considers at another time bad, ugly, useless, unpleasant, false? -- And yet this happens!...one observes...that ruling customs, that favorite concepts of honor, of merit, of what is useful can blind an age with a magical light, that a taste in these and those sciences can constitute the tone of a century, and yet all this dies with the century."
Johann Gottfried Herder, Philosophical Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 256 (Referenced in Maria Baghramian, Relativism, New York: Routledge, 2004, 69).
What may be true of nations and centuries (albeit, of course, only in a limited sense, because there are a great many obvious and permanent truths regarding the world, man and God, e.g. all men are born and die within a relatively short span) it is certainly false regarding the Church and her Tradition. "The gates of Hell will not prevail against Her!" Matthew 16:18
The continuation of the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite is a exercise of that Divine permanence, at least as important as the preservation of the other ancient Rites of the Church, for us of the Greco-Roman Western heritage. The Catholic faith is not relative, it is universal and trans-historical. It's heritage is from Saint Peter, Christ, King David, Moses, Abraham, Adam, God!
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