The Temptation to Tidiness

A friend of mine forwarded this to me yesterday.  I found it to be very insightful.

Oriens: The Journal of the Ecclesia Dei Society of Australia

Winter 1999

The temptation to tidiness

 

"THERE ARE many mansions in my Father’s house," so says Our Lord. "If there were not I should have told you."

 

The metaphor of the Church as God’s household is an attractive one. We live in a rambling old house that has rooms both in time and in eternity. It has rooms full of apparently useless junk, kitchens, dining rooms, rooms to sleep in, rooms just to sit around in, rooms for fun, rooms for quiet, solemn rooms of State and rooms to drink wine and sing songs in. The important point is that the rooms in God’s household are for His family, and that there is a place for everyone. It has been a sign of authentic Catholic faith throughout the ages to allow God’s family to dwell in His house undisturbed by unnecessary demands for moral or doctrinal conformity.

 

The heretics have generally been the puritans, fanatics and purists. The Catholics generally had the softer approach to life. The heretics were always wanting to clean up the house like Martha, the Catholics content to put up their feet and chat with the head of the household like Mary. The Catholic attitude to life should be just a little bit irresponsible and perhaps even scandalous, rather like the Church’s founder.

 

The Traditional Movement because of its unfortunate marginalisation is always in danger of this temptation to tidiness which historically has not been the characteristic of a Catholic outlook but of a heterodox one. The Church of Christ has never been tidy, efficient or well organised. Catholics, with some notable exceptions, have never been very good, for example, at running wars or bureaucracies. This is as it should be since the Church’s job is to get people into heaven, not to wash or scrub them or to make them into model citizens of whatever sort.

 

This should also be the aim of the Traditional Movement which should be content to live in the vast and rambling mansions of God and to encourage others to do so. More frequently than we would like to admit, however, we traditionalists can see ourselves as bouncers at the front door keeping out the riff raff who might make the place untidy. The rules for admission, however, were laid down by Our Divine Founder in embarrassingly minimal terms: "Come to me all you who labour and are heavy burdened and I will give you rest." There are four gospels, seven sacraments and ten commandments. All the rest is optional.

 

Integrist temptation

 

There is a tendency among traditional Catholics to see Tradition as one big package of religious, social and political conservatism. Those who do not accept this whole package can then be portrayed as inconsistent and not really Traditional at all, just eclectic cafeteria Catholics who happen to like incense and chant, as mere aesthetes who just like dressing up or even in more alarming terms as agents or infiltrators of unseen sinister forces trying to subvert the Church.

 

Neither...nor...

 

The fact is, however, that the traditional movement cannot impose any other agenda than that of the Church itself. It can be neither republican nor monarchist. It cannot take a line on which is the best way to advance the pro-life cause. It does not have a view on gun control. It neither condemns nor approves home schooling. It does not have a line on the privatisation of public utilities. It is neither capitalist nor socialist. It does not and cannot endorse or condemn any political party. It can only encourage individuals to follow the Church’s teaching on Faith and Morals and to promote them in the public forum. To require more of people than the Church requires is to make ourselves more Catholic than the Pope and more Christian than Christ.

 

If traditional Catholics, moreover, are to accept the whole of the Church’s teaching then we must also recognise the Church’s traditional teaching on social and political matters. For over a hundred years the Popes have spoken in encyclical after encyclical about the rights of workers, about the injustices associated with debt and the centralisation of economic power. We cannot ignore the consistent teaching of the Popes from Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum to Pope John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus. To do so would be to embrace the very same "cafeteria mentality" of the progressives that is so often condemned in traditional circles.

 

The Church’s social teaching should not be seen as a regrettable family secret that we try to keep anyone else from finding out about. There is no contradiction between a desire to see a restoration of liturgical and doctrinal Tradition and a lively interest in the issues of social justice so consistently urged upon us by the Magisterium of the Church. One might indeed hope, that the alienation felt by many traditional Catholics as a result of the manifest injustices that many of us have suffered would lend us a certain sense of solidarity with the poor and dispossessed.

 

Interior coherence

 

There is furthermore an interior coherence between the Truth of Christ expressed so purely and so eloquently in the traditional Mass and our refusal to accept the deceptions of the dictators and despots of this world. The traditional Mass is much more difficult for the world to subvert. It cannot easily become propaganda for any party. In its easy and expansive silences Truth is easily nurtured in the soul and the whispered lies of tyrants die. In that hospitable silence the peasant may kneel next to the king, and the only measure between them is that of personal holiness, and God keeps that secret in the recesses of His own mystery.

 

The traditional Mass is indeed the Mass of God’s rambling and welcoming mansions into which it is our happy duty to invite all of His scattered sons and daughters.

 

Comments

[Owen Sweeney]

Well said. I have a temptation to tidiness, and this was good advice.

Regarding recognizing the Church’s traditional teaching on social and political matters, it is interesting to me (if not regrettable) that two of the better known Austrians (Woods and Tucker) are traditional Catholics. In the November issue of Chronicles, R. Cort Kirkwood favorably reviewed Christopher Ferrara's (another traditional Catholic) "The Church and the Libertarian." In the February issue, Kirkwood responds to a letter to the editor regarding his review. Good reading.