ROME. Pope Francis has once again criticized Catholic traditionalists for despairing of the past and dangerously resisting change.
In an interview with his Jesuit brother in Canada, published Thursday in the magazine La Civilta CattolicaThe Pope declared that those who wanted to defend the teachings of the Church as “monolithic” and “unnuanced” were mistaken.
According to him, it is important to respect “true” tradition, not tradition. “Someone once said that tradition is the living memory of believers,” he said. “Traditionism, on the contrary, is the dead life of our believers.”
Tradition is the life of those who came before us and continue,” he continued. “Tradition is their dead memory.”
The Pope said, “We must start as a foundation, not from concrete historical experience taken as an eternal model, as if we were going to stop there,” and we should avoid using phrases such as “it is always done, there are thoughts of paganism.”
“Thirty years ago there was a tremendous liturgical deformation in Latin America,” he said. “Then they moved on to the drunkenness of the old turn. There is division in the church.”
This “intoxication” continues today, the Pope said, as evidenced by his opposition to the Church’s apology for its treatment of indigenous Canadians in the boarding school system.
Pope Francis addresses a general audience in the Hall of Paul VI. Vatican City (Vatican), 3 August 2022 (Portfolio Grzegorz Galazka/Mondadori via Getty Images)
“Of course there is no point in hiding, there are those who work against healing and reconciliation, both in society and in the church,” he said. “Even last night I saw a small group of traditionalists protesting saying the church was different.”
“All I know is that one of the biggest enemies of the unity of the Church and the bishops is ideology. So let’s continue this process on the road,” he said.
In his speech with the Jesuit community, the Pope also affirmed his belief in the “synodal” church.
“When they say ‘the synodal church,’ the phrase is superfluous: the church is either synodal or not,” he argued. “So we went to synod on synodality to reiterate. It can be said with certainty that the church in the West has lost its synodal tradition.”
The most authoritative text on the nature of the Catholic Church published in the last 100 years is the 1964 Dogmatic Church Constitution, published under a Latin title by the Second Vatican Council. Lumen Gentium.
Surprisingly, the term “synodalism” is not mentioned at all, although the 25,000-word Synodal Text mentions in detail many of the special features and characteristics of the Church.
A similar strange absence can be noticed in 1992. Catechism of the Catholic ChurchThe official compendium of the Catholic faith, whose publications were overseen by Saint John Paul II. The comprehensive definition of the Church, covering the numbers 748 to 945, also makes no mention of the word “synodality”.
Source: Breitbart
