Adherence to Apostolic Tradition is What Makes One Catholic

David Martin | The Daily Knight

Conservative Catholics often speak of “traditional Catholics” to distinguish them from those Catholics that are lukewarm, heretical, or taken up with the new school of Modernism. But in actuality, the term traditional Catholic is redundant because a true Catholic is automatically traditional in his doctrine and religious practice. For Catholicism defined is adherence to Apostolic Tradition. There is no such thing as non-traditional Catholicism.

Concerned Catholics who identify as traditional are not trying to form their own groupings but are simply determined to be loyal Roman Catholics as they were called to be. These true Catholics have a special calling to let the light of tradition shine before men (Mt. 5:16) to reilluminate the Church and bring souls to Christ.

This witness for tradition is sorely needed today because so many Catholics are holding to detrimental ideologies and practices that are not of the Faith, only because the wide body of today’s Catholic bishops refuse to correct these errors and to nourish their flock with the pure waters of Tradition.  Instead, they go out of their way to feed the flock with the errors of humanism, ecumenism, and modernism, which are not Catholic.

These modernistic errors and ideas include:

• The Mass is a memorial by definition

• The Mass is a community meal

• The Mass is an assembly or community gathering

• The Eucharist is blessed bread

• The Catholic faithful are part of a “common priesthood”

• Communion in the hand is blessed by God

• The Holy Spirit guided the changes since Vatican II

• Unity with the world is the work of God

• Mass in the vernacular is the work of God

• God wants to empower women to help lead the Church

• God wills that we include all in the Church

• God accepts us as we are

• God blesses our way of life forever

• God wills diversity of religions

• Christ did not exclusively found the Roman Catholic Church

• Luther was a “witness to the Gospel” who corrected abuses in the Church

• Other religions can provide a means to salvation

• Ecumenism is the work of the Holy Spirit to unite the Church

• The Church should not correct homosexuals but should welcome them

The foregoing errors have fostered practices and behavior that are ruining the souls of men. These include:

• The reception of Communion in the hand

• Holding hands during the Our Father

• The handshake of peace

• The use of lay Eucharistic ministers

• The use of women lectors

• Women wearing sinful dress (low-cuts, shorts, mid-drifts) in the Church

• Men wearing LGBT earrings in the Church

• Allowing contemporary “guitar Mass” and youth ministry

• Attending “interfaith worship”

• Attending “Charismatic Renewal” meetings

• Attending indigenous smudging rituals

Though the above ideologies and practices are not Catholic they nonetheless are central to the thinking of a great many Catholics today. That is to say, the Church at large is adhering to heresy, not to Catholicism. Only a few have kept the Faith while the rest are flowing downstream to their own destruction like ducks following the leader.

Some argue that if the vast majority of Catholic bishops, cardinals, and priests hold to the above ideas, they are not errors, but this in itself is an error. Just because an ideology is universally accepted by the Catholic hierarchy doesn’t make it true or acceptable.

Since Vatican II, there has prevailed the error that an episcopal consensus to a given position or doctrine renders it part of the Church’s Ordinary Magisterium, but this is not true. A common consensus in itself is of no significance. Even if the pope and the entire body of bishops avidly hold to a given ideology for fifty or a hundred years it is not magisterial unless Christ Himself has established and guided this for His Church.

The words of St. Augustine apply:

“Wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it, right is right even if no one is doing it”

Some argue that if the Church is holding to error the fruits will most certainly be evident. Indeed, they are! The Church for the past sixty years has held to the errors of Modernism, because of which the Church today has been reduced to a doctrinal garbage dump.

To be truly Catholic, the bishops, cardinals, and priests must scrap modernist innovation and return the Church to tradition. This would include a universal return of the Traditional Latin Mass and all the reverence that goes with it. The Church needs to stop the strumming and return to chanting. It needs to stop the socializing and return to praying. The bishops need to trash innovation and return the Church to its former position of honor as it stood before Vatican II.

The good bishops and priests who aspire for this are not trying to start a “traditionalist” movement but are simply determined to be loyal Roman Catholics as Christ called them to be. Their standing apart from the new church of man does not schismatize them but rather exposes the schism of the modernist movement.

Since the sixties, the wide body of bishops, cardinals, and priests have sought to update the Church to keep up with the times, but this has no approval from God. Playing follow the leader to change doctrine and liturgy is the whole point of Modernism, which is condemned by God. The Lord sent us prophetic teachers like Popes Leo XIII and St. Pius X to warn us against the oncoming errors of Modernism, but the majority of today’s clergy have closed their ears to them and have opened their itching ears to modernists instead.

Is it any wonder why the Church is where it is today?