What It Means to be a Traditional Catholic
 
                                                                                          by Bro. Alexis Bugnolo

Sacred Scripture infallibly teaches every Catholic the essence of what it means to be a Traditionalist. We read in St. Paul's Second Letter to the Thessalonians: Therefore, brethren, stand fast: and hold to the traditions which you have learned, whether by word, or by our letter. And again, further on, he admonishes us: And we charge you, brethren, in the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ, that you withdraw yourselves from every brother walking disorderly, and not according to the tradition which they have received from us. [cf. John 20:30; 21:35; 1 Cor. 11:2; 2 Tim 1:13-14, 2:2, 3:14; 1 John 2:24; Jude 1:17]

There is a fundamental logic for the necessity of Sacred Tradition in Catholicism: History. For as St. Peter, the first Pope testified to us long ago: For we have not by following artificial fables, made known to you the power, and presence of Our Lord Jesus Christ; but we were eyewitnesses of His greatness. (2 Peter 1:16) And so, just as life is more than words, so is that unique, altogether marvelous supernatural intervention into time, that was the Incarnation, Passion, Death, Resurrection and Ascension of the Only Begotten Son of God, incapable of being understood correctly except by a living human testimony, handed down [traditum] through human history.

Now this Tradition is Sacred, because it is the Christian testimony of the faithful to the intervention of the Holy One of Israel in time. Just as He is and claimed to be The Way, The Truth, and The Life so His advent in history brought forth a harvest of faith in the Church. This Holy Faith is the confession of Eternal, Perennial, Unchanging Divine Truth. Hence, its transmission is Sacred; and its essential characteristic of passage through time, unchanging. The faithful Catholic is therefore gravely bound not only by his Baptism but also by the nature of his very religion to protect and preserve the sacral character of Tradition.

Thus if Sacred Tradition were to be robbed of its sacredness, the Catholic-----he only one worthy of the name "Christian"-----would be robbed of both religion and his proper name. For what is Sacred is due the grave moral obligation of protection from secularization, deformation, mutation, and profanation. And with change, the transmission of the only authentic eye-witness understanding of the Deposit of Faith would be lost; rendering the Catholic someone who no longer believed the same identical things the Apostles received from Christ. Hence it is that the true nature of what it means to be a traditional Catholic is made manifest.

In truth, then, there is no Catholic, except the Traditional Catholic; no Christian, but the Traditionalist. The Protestants rant, "Scripture, Scripture, Scripture!" But they have lost its only true meaning, reducing the Sacred Text to the record of a unverifiable, hence mythic event. The Modernists rant, "Inspirational, Inspirational, Inspirational!" But they deny the historicity of what actually took place. But it is the Traditional Catholic, who holds his silence, in that temerity of humility which desires only to repeat to his children the exact same truths which he himself learned from the lap of his parents; conscious that the heritage of his Holy Faith, passed on in Sacred Tradition, is an irreplaceable treasure, a supernatural heirloom, the only hope of a shipwrecked world.

To be a Traditional Catholic then, it is not sufficient to prefer the past; to enjoy the celebration of Traditional Rites of the Church, to amuse oneself with the incunabula of our Catholic forefathers, to have a love and nostalgia for all things Catholic which have gone before. That kind of traditionalism is the hallmark of the Anglican Church, cut off from the living vine of Christ.

To be a Traditional Catholic, moreover, is not to enjoy the past, but to seek to remain bound fast to Him Who alone is Our Joy, in the present, by means of preserving and propagating the self-same identical heritage, which testifies to His coming into time.

To be a Traditional Catholic, hence, is not a matter of preferences, but of necessities; not a side chapel option in a pluralistic Church. It is a necessity of character; the essential form of the faithful. To depart from Sacred Tradition is to cease to be Catholic; to depart from immemorial ecclesiastic customs, theology, liturgy, to cease to be the Christian whose faith comes from the past, unadulterated.

The Modernist and Protestant are untied in this, that they will always claim a priori, that Tradition has been corrupted; that Tradition needs to be purified and cleansed. Since theirs is not the Church founded by Christ, but rather the Church of the Antichrist, they seek to destroy-----the former from within, the latter from without-----the Mystical Body of the Real Christ by means of attacking Her perennial character as the Handmaid of Sacred Tradition.

Today, more than ever, it is necessary for the Traditional Catholic to denounce that Gullet of Iniquity which has spewed every vile and wicked argument forth against the Bride of Christ in Its attempt to subvert, pervert, and seduce the faithful. This Beast of our age is the notion that it is the essential work of the Church to renew Herself by means of purifying Tradition of accretions. How false this lie is, is manifest from its novelty. Where in all the history of the Church has any Father, Doctor or Saint claimed that it is the duty of the Church to purify Her past? Nay, rather, they all declare it is the duty of the Church to purify the present age!

Likewise it is the duty of the Catholic, not to reform the Church by renewal, but to reform himself by submitting to the perennial norm of faith: Sacred Tradition. This madness that has gripped the Church from the reign of Pope John XXIII must be seen for what it is, entirely foreign to the authentic nature of the True and Historic Church: a pernicious, festering, infection, which like AIDS, reduces its host to a defenseless, beplagued cadaver, by destroying all its defenses. The defenses of the Church are the traditions, customs, discipline, theology, doctrine, piety, art, spirituality which She has receive from Christ through the Apostles, decorated and applied by our forefathers. These are the vessels and handiwork of Sacred Tradition, and to attack them in the name of a modernistic/Protestant iconoclasm, is to destroy the remembrance and propagation of the only True Faith, outside of which and apart from which there is no salvation [cf. Pope Nicholas IV, Supra Montem, Aug. 17, 1289 A. D., preface]

The only authentic norm of renewal then, is not Aggiornomentoism, but rather penance and faith. And this should have been clear enough to the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, admonished as we all are by the Apostle Paul: Do not conform yourselves to this present age, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.

From this consideration of the nature and essence of what it means to be a traditional Catholic, that is a real Catholic, one can see that those who accept innovations such as the New Theology, Evolution, Phenomenology, Historicism, etc. have either never grasped what it meant to be a Catholic vis-à-vis history, or have abandoned their true nature in the face of the temptations of the present age, out of a wick lust for the world, the flesh, and the devil.

It behooves every Traditional Catholic then, not to compromise. As Our Lady declared at Akita: There will come a day when the Church will be filled with those who accept compromise. At this She wept. And it has come to pass: in the Sacred Hierarchy, in the Institutes of Religious and Priestly life, in the parishes, in lay organizations, etc. On account of the nature of Catholicism, as seen above, all those who compromise have already lost essential character of what it means to be Catholic and live as a Catholic.

Therefore, the Traditional Catholic should and must steel his soul to the terrible truth that when the restorer Pope comes, there will be only a tiny flock remaining, that is, unless God grants the extraordinary grace of world wide conversion. Without doubt, He promised this, if only the Pope heed what Our Lady of Fatima asked for, and act as a faithful son, and with him all the Bishops of the Church. For this, it behooves, every traditionalist to pray and make sacrifice, for it touches the very essence of who is he and who he should be.