A Revolution of Tradition

The Catholic Thing

By Robert Royal "Take care. It is easy to break eggs without making omelets." Thus, the great and wise C. S. Lewis sixty years ago as his Anglican communion was making jarring changes to the liturgy. It's a principle that goes far beyond forms of worship and prayer, though, to most of what constitutes a good life for beings like us who straddle eternity and time. Especially in a radically unstable time like ours, the stability rooted in what never changes is often the only immediate recourse amidst much that, in the short run, cannot be fixed. That can be a hard saying to follow, even for Christians. Students of the classics will recall the famous passage in the ancient Roman historian Livy who, writing while Jesus still walked the earth, lamented "these days, in which we can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies." God ultimately had a bright path prepared for Rome, but it took centuries - and the suffering and death of many believers - before it fully showed itself. There are moments, to be sure, when radical change is necessary - especially the kind of radical change that the Scriptures call metanoia, a whole-hearted "turning back" to God Himself. But for the most part, it's better for most of us, at most times, in most places - if we are already on a steady way - to change slowly, with caution, deeply aware of how little we know about ourselves or the world, unseduced by the secular and ecclesial politicians of every age who campaign on "change." Ironically, it was Karl Marx who may have first recognized what was coming about in the modern age. As he wrote in the Communist Manifesto: "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." Marx thought a sober materialist revolution would lead to human liberation. We know how that turned out. My late friend Michael Novak, who was both 100 percent American and 100 percent old-school Slovak, used to say that the great benefit of having ethnic parents and grandparents is that when you start to think things can't get any worse, they remind you, "Oh yes they can." It's been said that the Christian tradition is an accumulation of experiments that worked - hence their survival despite revolutions in politics, economics, culture, civilizations, technologies - to say nothing of human sin, folly, and error. Steadiness has no political party these days, but a deep Christian steadiness in the face of all unsteadiness may just be what the Church and world need most of all now. There's s wisdom to be gained from seeing ourselves within the long history of the Catholic Church, particularly when we feel that its great legacy, as in the papacies of St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI, is being recklessly cast aside. Witness the life of Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand of Sovana), the great saint and reformer. Catholic school children of my generation were taught how he made Henry IV do penance in 1077 by kneeling for three days in the snow at Canossa before the pope would lift his excommunication. It was a lesson about how even the most powerful earthly authorities had to bow before the authority of Heaven. What we didn't learn - I didn't anyway - was that the story didn't end there. Before long, Henry was back at his old ways, which meant that like England's Henry VIII and the modern Chinese Communists, he re-asserted his claim of authority to "invest" bishops. He invaded Rome, had an anti-pope named, and himself crowned Roman Emperor. In 1085, Gregory VII died in exile at Salerno thinking his efforts at reform had come to nought. But they hadn't. The story becomes too complicated to recount in detail here. Suffice to say that before long Urban II, the great pope who inaugurated the crusade that succeeded in retaking the Holy Land, was back at spreading the reforms Hildebrand had begun, which his successors were also able to continue. What emerged is much of wha...