As a young adult who was raised in a family that had little reverence for tradition, nonetheless Catholic tradition, I experience the truths you’ve conveyed here everyday.
Luckily, articles and books on the topic help me and many other young Catholics form our minds and hearts to love tradition, preserve it, and pass it on to our own children.
Yes, this is the background from which almost all of us hail. I grew up in a practicing Catholic family but it was thin gruel, with roots only millimeters beneath the topsoil. It took me decades to rediscover my heritage, and having done so, I both see why we must fight to recover it, and why those who discarded it could not have been motivated by godly intentions.
Thank you, Leila. I agree: the continuity people have cherished since time immemorial is obviously the way men were meant to behave. It is our modern times that are the bizarre aberration.
Seems like a lot of people enjoy the voiceover, so I'll keep it up.
Maybe you'll address it in subsequent parts of this series, but I'd be curious to know how you'd square the development of unique practices in the Latin church that go against the weight of centuries of universal practice as complete anomalies, like withholding the chalice from the laity, or withholding the precious gifts from baptized infants and children (when, e.g., Augustine explicitly says that the whole reason infants are baptized is *precisely so that* they may receive the Body and Blood). What was it that managed to outweigh such weighty and universal matters to the effect of legitimizing these anomalies in only one ritual Church?
These are more complex questions than you are giving them credit for being ("complete anomalies"). Remember, development in doctrine and practice is possible, and occurs in both the East and the West. That is why, e.g., the East once *condemned* not giving communion in the hand, but then later reversed that and gave communion with a spoon into the mouth. Similarly, in the East sacral languages developed as they did in the West (e.g. the use of ancient Greek or of Church Slavonic), but then in more recent times have been abandoned, which doesn't sound like retaining "the weight of centuries." As for "withholding the chalice," that phraseology is already loaded, since what the Church gives to the laity is nothing more and nothing less than the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ, present in each particle and in each drop of the two species. This of course is orthodox teaching. I could continue...
Thanks for your note. Of course practices can develop, but that sidesteps these specific questions. Developments themselves can be positive, neutral, or negative. Just because something changed, doesn't mean it was either for the better, or legitimate considering the weight of precedent. The de facto excommunication of infants and small children was ignored altogether (despite the explicit doctrinal component I alluded to in Augustine). And defending the development of banning the chalice (a factual, not a loaded term, since it ended up being literally banned, except for occasional, limited, explicit indults) with the doctrine of concomitance runs into the problem of what you yourself often correctly criticize - sacramental minimalism. "Hey they're already receiving the whole of Jesus in one species so why complain/what's the big deal" is not unlike "why complain about guitars or felt banners, Jesus is there and that's what matters." The fact remains that in both cases that I brought up (infant communion and two species), the precedent is unequivocally, inarguably, universally against the current Latin practice in the first millennium. What right the Latin church had from departing from this universal consensus, if liturgical tradition is as normative and weighty as you posit it to be, remains unclear.
Of course I don't think changes are always positive. I just do not see that these changes have to be given the worst possible interpretation (e.g., by using the term "excommunication").
St. Thomas Aquinas explained with luminous clarity that anyone who is baptized into Christ is already a member of His Body and is ordered thereby to Eucharistic communion; this means someone who is baptized but dies before receiving Communion does not lose the spiritual reality of communion (as if they would run afoul of John 6: "He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood..."). That is, the eating and drinking are ordered to the perfect union, which a child before the age of committing sin cannot lose anyhow.
So if one wanted to emphasize the personal side of the Eucharistic communing, that is, that it should be eating and drinking with discernment, with faith, with knowledge of what one is doing - esp. because it is not a sacrament of necessity the way baptism is - it might very well develop into a desire to give communion only to those who are conscientious about what they are doing. And thus was born the delay in communion.
You don't have to think it's the best practice, but for you to condemn it outright is simply to reject a huge number of Western saints who defended the custom. And it is to slide into an antiquarianism that assumes the contrary of what you said in your post, namely, that older is ALWAYS better. This is the reverse of saying newer is always better. There's a good reason the Church, East & West, stopped giving communion in the hand, for instance; and I don't see you arguing for that as superior.
I wasn't arguing for any sort of antiquarianism at all - I was talking specifically about two customs that were 1) apostolic, 2) absolutely and unquestionably universal in the first millennium (unlike any of the other areas or issues you brought up above), and 3) that to this day are alive and well, taken for granted and unbroken in every apostolic church but the Latin (whether Chalcedonian, in or out of communion with Rome, Miaphysite, Assyrian or whatever). It is a matter of historical fact that the Latin church introduced new reasoning to underscore a new practice that arose in the early 2nd millennium, and that is unique to the Latin church. "How could you dare to imply that St Thomas Aquinas was wrong" is not really a good argument to address the heart of the matter, which is -- again -- the normativity of a universal apostolic tradition and what would legitimize its unilateral abandonment in one particular tradition. Anyway, I appreciate your engagement nonetheless.
If the Church has custody over sacramental practice, such as the requirements for receiving any given sacrament, then surely she would have the authority to make changes like that. And no, I don't think that *necessarily* plays into sacramental reductionism because it does not follow that those who give communion under one kind or only to older children *must also* despise their liturgical heritage. In point of fact, we see the opposite: everyone in the West adheres to the traditional Latin rites and uses until the 20th century. Aquinas, by the way, is only teaching on this point something that can be found in Eastern theologians too, even if they don't draw the same conclusion about praxis.
As a young adult who was raised in a family that had little reverence for tradition, nonetheless Catholic tradition, I experience the truths you’ve conveyed here everyday.
Luckily, articles and books on the topic help me and many other young Catholics form our minds and hearts to love tradition, preserve it, and pass it on to our own children.
Thanks Dr. K. !!
You're welcome!
Yes, this is the background from which almost all of us hail. I grew up in a practicing Catholic family but it was thin gruel, with roots only millimeters beneath the topsoil. It took me decades to rediscover my heritage, and having done so, I both see why we must fight to recover it, and why those who discarded it could not have been motivated by godly intentions.
So well done.
Once you put it this way, it's all so reasonable and natural. It's the innovators who strain and fight against what seems right, what draws us.
Looking forward to the rest!
(I also appreciate that you read it -- I listened while making Sunday dinner!)
Thank you, Leila. I agree: the continuity people have cherished since time immemorial is obviously the way men were meant to behave. It is our modern times that are the bizarre aberration.
Seems like a lot of people enjoy the voiceover, so I'll keep it up.
This looks to be a great series! Thanks Peter.
It certainly does!
Sadly, such things are hidden from our "nondenominational" loved-ones.
Maybe you'll address it in subsequent parts of this series, but I'd be curious to know how you'd square the development of unique practices in the Latin church that go against the weight of centuries of universal practice as complete anomalies, like withholding the chalice from the laity, or withholding the precious gifts from baptized infants and children (when, e.g., Augustine explicitly says that the whole reason infants are baptized is *precisely so that* they may receive the Body and Blood). What was it that managed to outweigh such weighty and universal matters to the effect of legitimizing these anomalies in only one ritual Church?
These are more complex questions than you are giving them credit for being ("complete anomalies"). Remember, development in doctrine and practice is possible, and occurs in both the East and the West. That is why, e.g., the East once *condemned* not giving communion in the hand, but then later reversed that and gave communion with a spoon into the mouth. Similarly, in the East sacral languages developed as they did in the West (e.g. the use of ancient Greek or of Church Slavonic), but then in more recent times have been abandoned, which doesn't sound like retaining "the weight of centuries." As for "withholding the chalice," that phraseology is already loaded, since what the Church gives to the laity is nothing more and nothing less than the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ, present in each particle and in each drop of the two species. This of course is orthodox teaching. I could continue...
See this piece on the first topic mentioned:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/what-modern-catholics-can-learn-from-eastern-christians-and-protestants-about-reverent-communion/
Thanks for your note. Of course practices can develop, but that sidesteps these specific questions. Developments themselves can be positive, neutral, or negative. Just because something changed, doesn't mean it was either for the better, or legitimate considering the weight of precedent. The de facto excommunication of infants and small children was ignored altogether (despite the explicit doctrinal component I alluded to in Augustine). And defending the development of banning the chalice (a factual, not a loaded term, since it ended up being literally banned, except for occasional, limited, explicit indults) with the doctrine of concomitance runs into the problem of what you yourself often correctly criticize - sacramental minimalism. "Hey they're already receiving the whole of Jesus in one species so why complain/what's the big deal" is not unlike "why complain about guitars or felt banners, Jesus is there and that's what matters." The fact remains that in both cases that I brought up (infant communion and two species), the precedent is unequivocally, inarguably, universally against the current Latin practice in the first millennium. What right the Latin church had from departing from this universal consensus, if liturgical tradition is as normative and weighty as you posit it to be, remains unclear.
Of course I don't think changes are always positive. I just do not see that these changes have to be given the worst possible interpretation (e.g., by using the term "excommunication").
St. Thomas Aquinas explained with luminous clarity that anyone who is baptized into Christ is already a member of His Body and is ordered thereby to Eucharistic communion; this means someone who is baptized but dies before receiving Communion does not lose the spiritual reality of communion (as if they would run afoul of John 6: "He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood..."). That is, the eating and drinking are ordered to the perfect union, which a child before the age of committing sin cannot lose anyhow.
So if one wanted to emphasize the personal side of the Eucharistic communing, that is, that it should be eating and drinking with discernment, with faith, with knowledge of what one is doing - esp. because it is not a sacrament of necessity the way baptism is - it might very well develop into a desire to give communion only to those who are conscientious about what they are doing. And thus was born the delay in communion.
You don't have to think it's the best practice, but for you to condemn it outright is simply to reject a huge number of Western saints who defended the custom. And it is to slide into an antiquarianism that assumes the contrary of what you said in your post, namely, that older is ALWAYS better. This is the reverse of saying newer is always better. There's a good reason the Church, East & West, stopped giving communion in the hand, for instance; and I don't see you arguing for that as superior.
I wasn't arguing for any sort of antiquarianism at all - I was talking specifically about two customs that were 1) apostolic, 2) absolutely and unquestionably universal in the first millennium (unlike any of the other areas or issues you brought up above), and 3) that to this day are alive and well, taken for granted and unbroken in every apostolic church but the Latin (whether Chalcedonian, in or out of communion with Rome, Miaphysite, Assyrian or whatever). It is a matter of historical fact that the Latin church introduced new reasoning to underscore a new practice that arose in the early 2nd millennium, and that is unique to the Latin church. "How could you dare to imply that St Thomas Aquinas was wrong" is not really a good argument to address the heart of the matter, which is -- again -- the normativity of a universal apostolic tradition and what would legitimize its unilateral abandonment in one particular tradition. Anyway, I appreciate your engagement nonetheless.
If the Church has custody over sacramental practice, such as the requirements for receiving any given sacrament, then surely she would have the authority to make changes like that. And no, I don't think that *necessarily* plays into sacramental reductionism because it does not follow that those who give communion under one kind or only to older children *must also* despise their liturgical heritage. In point of fact, we see the opposite: everyone in the West adheres to the traditional Latin rites and uses until the 20th century. Aquinas, by the way, is only teaching on this point something that can be found in Eastern theologians too, even if they don't draw the same conclusion about praxis.
Brilliant article. The Heresy of Formlessness book by Martin Mosebach also confirms these thoughts.
Also I think Confucius, in a dim pagan way also had a similar view.
Wow! Thank you, Dr. K.
I'm going to forward this to my own problematic, 'prodigal' son. Thanks to you, sir.