What to get from receiving Guardians of tradition ? The announcement of an upcoming apostolic visit of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter by the Vatican gives us the opportunity to ask the question. Perhaps above all the impression, if not of a contradiction – in the double sense of the term – at least of a double paradox. Francis’ motu proprio aimed to suspend the provisions of that of Benedict XVI due to the deficit of communion, generated by a rite celebrated from an ecclesiological prism out of step (Tridentine) in relation to the development of the life of the Church.
What we must see here is that Guardians of tradition does not oppose The supreme pontiff. He extends his gesture, namely correct a lack of communionno longer by encouraging “mutual fertility” of the two Missals (Pius V and Paul VI) but by discouraging monoritualism, which resulted from an antiquated reading of the document of Benedict XVI. Francis’ loyalty to his predecessor is marked in this inversion. Both gestures are based on an ecclesiological motive. We therefore understand nothing, or almost nothing, about Guardians of tradition if we do not perceive the ecclesial issue from which the ritual question cannot be separated.
Life and traditions
Because before the “ritual codification” (formalizations), and based on this, there is the life of the community, which must nourish from within the intelligence of the rites and their implementation, while holding together fidelity to “received practice” (tradition) and the situation of the community. We must bear in mind this tension between the life of the community and the expression of this life in order to understand the double gesture characterizing Vatican II and its differentiated extension in The supreme pontiff et Guardians of tradition : resourcing and updating.
Because its expression in formulas or rites is inseparable from a situation determining this gesture of formalization, it can happen – the history of the Church attests to this – that it is no longer done rightly, or not enough, to the life the community lives. Rather than transmission vectors, formalizations become traditional objects. Between these two understandings of the function of formalizations, there is the difference resulting from the taking into account, or not, of life (law of living) and its primacy in the constitution of formalized prayer (law of prayer) and the doctrine defined (the law of belief).
Reconstructing the past with the Tridentine rite
The singularity of the traditionalist crisis consists in playing a moment of the story of the Church against the development of the life of the Church. Behind the “passivity” that François denounces, there is more than a nostalgia for the figure that the community gave itself at a moment in its history. There we find the fear of life – what John Henry Newman calls the “phenomenon of development”which attests that the Church is alive. Hence the search for refuge via a (re)appropriation of the traces left by past generations: monuments (Chartres) or ideals (Christianity).
Traces rather than life: between the differentiated legacy of past generations and the ecclesial community of which it is contemporary, traditionalism establishes a (critical) distance which transforms the traces of a passage (cf. Emmanuel Levinas) in traces of the past. Where the Church reduces the gap between these traces and the life that generated them (resourcing movement), traditionalist groups widen it via the reconstruction of a past that is required of its artifacts, here the Tridentine rite , to make present. Theological gesture here. This is a museum gesture, which reduces the historicity of the revelation to documentary history (missal) and of which Nietzsche clearly saw the link with the ” resentment “ that nihilism generates.
The ambiguity of traditionalism
It is there, in the ambiguity of its relationship with the life in which the ecclesial community lives, that the source of traditionalism is found. To exist, it must generate distance. Because its essence consists in a function of distancing: with the Church, with the world. Now, because life has no outside – because life constantly adheres to itself – it follows that the traditionalist gesture pushes less “outside” of ecclesial life and the face-to-face. screw that it implies that he protects himself from it from the inside, thanks to the canonical device which still legitimizes his monoritualism. While the liturgy must push with the announcement of the Gospel, the celebration of the Tridentine rite then becomes a pusher : of the Church (too worldly), of the world (without Church).
How to qualify this ambiguity? Newman was surprised at the vitality of Arianism after the condemnation of the Council of Nicaea. What should we think of the attraction of the Tridentine rite after the correction of Francis’ motu proprio? What does the rapprochement of the two situations teach us phenomenologically? Perhaps the nature of what is at stake in the question of the Tridentine rite is being revealed in its true light. Said differently, and undoubtedly a little brutally, the backward-looking approach targeted by Pope Francis, with the ambiguity it generates, is akin to a form of heresy. No longer dogmatic, but ethological.
What the traditionalist posture mainly affects is less the the law of prayernor the the law of beliefbut the the law of living which is the principle of all celebratory action, before formalizations. More precisely: the the law of prayer and the the law of belief are played against the the law of livingby virtue of the dynamic characteristic of traditionalism, which cannot grasp life otherwise (and illusorily) than from external forms. Hence this impression of artificiality given off by what Benedict XVI called the “extraordinary form” of the unique Roman rite. The mutual fertility evoked in the letter accompanying The supreme pontiff aimed less at liturgical tinkering than it implicitly called for re-appropriating the letter of a rite (Pius V) from the Spirit of which it constitutes the ever-living trace but In the Church.
A systemic problem
The attraction exerted by the Tridentine rite after Guardians of tradition therefore constitutes an ambiguous phenomenon. How ambiguous is the posture of the Fraternity of Saint Peter, to limit ourselves to the group which will be the subject of the next apostolic visit to the Vatican. ” Ambiguous “ in the etymological sense of the term, namely as pushing in two directions at the same time: outwards within the Church.
This thing is not new. Already at the beginning of the 2000s, 16 priests of the FSSP had warned the Vatican. It would be good for their lesson not to be forgotten by Rome as it approaches a new critical examination of the Tridentine rite and its effects on the life of communion that the liturgy must attest to, as well as generate. Because ambiguity is systemic. To resolve it, it is necessary to abolish the canonical system behind which traditionalism takes refuge in order to be able to celebrate mass without vis-à-vis.