To the pessimists who insist on spreading the falsehood that the recent Consistory served only to let the cardinals experience “real” synodality—right there in the synodal hall, at the same tables and in the same format as the Synod on Synodality; to the dour souls who have failed to see how vital it has been for the Church that the cardinals at the round tables could share smiles without tears—it must be said that where smiles and debates have not reached, papers from on high have arrived.
Indeed, the hopes that part of the Church had placed in the Consistory—whose program included the long-awaited liturgical peace—have not been disappointed, even though this topic was ruled out from the very beginning for lack of time. The solution to the problem was entrusted to the cardinal to whom Pope Leo XIV has assigned the guardianship of tradition. A cardinal who is developing grand epistemological principles.
To begin with, Cardinal Roche seems to have discovered that worship has nothing to do with culture; that the decline of worship does not entail the weakening of culture. What a discovery, right? He has also discovered, in the exercise of his office as custodian of tradition (Traditionis custos), that one must discern (oh, holy discernment!) between “healthy” tradition and pathological tradition: the kind that is driven by the itch of a “pathological search for novelties” (he is referring, of course, to “traditionalist novelties” that the sickly lovers of tradition keep discovering in order to feed their pathology). Upon these two imposing pillars, His Eminence has constructed the edifice of the persecution of the obsessive reformers of the reform—an edifice he considers complete with Traditionis custodes, which, as he himself declares in his Consistory papers, issued from his own illustrious pen.
Roche has failed to notice that there is nothing more traditional than worship. That is why the first thing every new master sets about doing in his conquests is the destruction of worship and traditions: because tradition leads us to nostalgia for the past and distances us from the future. If tradition is not destroyed, there is no way to impose new ideas.
The fact is that, since there was no time to put the issue on the table, the Prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship made up for that lack of time with his creative papers. However much one of the major aims of the Consistory was to train their Eminences in the practice of “listening,” Cardinal Roche brilliantly replaced that triviality with his carefully crafted documents.
Cardinal Roche states in his surreptitiously slipped-in text to the Consistory that “the reform of the liturgy ‘desired by the Second Vatican Council’ (not promulgated by the Council) is not only fully in tune with ‘the truest sense of tradition’ (so there exists a ‘less true’ sense of tradition: that of the traditionalists), but also constitutes an elevated form (the traditionalists’ is coarse and base) of placing oneself at the service of tradition.” He then goes on to explain this notion of pathological tradition opposed to “healthy tradition,” and that of “legitimate progress.” Indeed, the defenders of crusty, reactionary tradition do not know how to discern between “legitimate” and illegitimate progress—something the Consistory supposedly should have clarified. But that is no longer necessary, since the cardinal defender of “healthy tradition” has discerned it all by himself. The only thing this “healthy tradition” lacks, Roche says, is the appropriate formation in seminaries.
Pope Leo XIV is no stranger to these approaches; on the contrary, he is aligned with the document slipped in by the Prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship. Indeed, in his address on January 8, he stated that “the Second Vatican Council rediscovered (if it ‘rediscovered’ it, that must be because something was lacking in its initial ‘discovery’) the face of God as Father, looked upon the Church in the light of Christ (it must have been looking at it with some other light before), and initiated an important liturgical reform by placing at the center the mystery of salvation and the active and conscious participation of the People of God.” It is clear that a wheel cannot function with two axles: the old one (that of the mystery of salvation) and the new one, that of the active and conscious participation of the People of God. Evidently, the new center of the liturgy (the participation of the People) has displaced the former center: that of the “mystery of salvation.”
It seems evident that Cardinal Roche’s report must be interpreted in the light of Leo XIV’s words spoken on January 8 (in the midst of the Consistory). The pope’s words on the matter have every appearance of attempting to shore up not only the aforementioned report, but also its author. In any case, it is an explicit papal stance very much in line with the document that seeks to make up for the removal of the liturgical topic from the Consistory’s program.
It is obvious that the underlying issue is the Second Vatican Council, which the Church has still not been able to bring to a close. The current liturgy was forged outside the Council and, in not a few respects, in direct opposition to it. But it is not only the liturgy that was so falsely “closed,” since after sixty years we are still grappling with the problem. We continue dragging along the only dogma proclaimed urbi et orbi by the Second Vatican Council: aggiornamento—a deceptive principle, impossible to close. Because the days keep passing, there is no way to finish the Church’s “updating.” And since in sixty years the world has turned upside down, we have found ourselves compelled to “open ourselves to the world and to welcome the changes and challenges of the modern age” (again, the pope’s words).
Yes, of course, the great dogma of aggiornamento has brought us to the centrality of the great issues that trouble the Church today—especially in the West. Evidently, Christ is no longer the center of interest of episcopal conferences, the Vatican, or the various synodal maneuvers. The bishops’ obsession is to attune themselves to the world, which is no longer the world of the Second Vatican Council. Today the obsession is to establish in the Church a synodality that grants full legitimacy to different inculturations—not only Amazonian and indigenist ones, but also those of the very latest Western culture, so firmly propped up by Fiducia supplicans. “For the moment.” There you have the new postmodern theological discovery: provisionality as the supreme norm. Since the world never stops turning, what seems perfect today is useless tomorrow. And the Church, so ready to open herself to the world and to welcome changes (yes, of course, changes and more changes) and the challenges of the modern age, has no choice but to dance to the rhythm set by the world. Thus aggiornamenti neither are nor can be forever. From the “updatings” (to the world) of the Second Vatican Council onward, there are no longer things that are definitive and for all time in the Church. From that point on, everything is “for the moment.” And if moments change, why shouldn’t principles change as well?
Source (Spanish): https://germinansgerminabit.blogspot.com
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