The Tradition of Christendom and the Second Vatican Council

Abstract

'Tradition’ is one of the most problematic words in the vocabulary of theology. At one end of the theological spectrum it serves as the name for a norm whereby to judge any practice or belief, a standard endowed with authority related – in a way which it is not my concern to define more closely here – to that of the scriptural revelation. At the other end of the spectrum it can approximate to customs, practices, beliefs which are carried by the Church through her history as the debris of the past, a dead weight which may have lost meaning and relevance but is built into the Church's sociological structure. Thus a pope of the eleventh century, Gregory VII, who always liked to stress that his own reforming ideals were only to bring the Church back to the precepts of the holy fathers and the ancient canons, could nevertheless reply to his opponents, who invoked time-hallowed customs to justify their opposition, by remarking in words themselves borrowed from a long tradition – that Christ had said he was the truth, not that he was tradition. In general our talk of ‘tradition’ moves on a level a little lower than the angels of authoritative norm and above the beasts of outworn custom. It is this peculiarity that gives such evocative power to the language, to take a recent example, of Mrs Rosemary Haughton. in one of the more thoughtful contributions to the symposium Objections to Roman Catholicism.