After millennia under the yoke of original sin, humanity longed for renewal. Through a New Eve, Mary Most Holy, Jesus the Redeemer of the first fault was born, the New Adam, to restore the old man.
This culmination did not arise from a springtime for the chosen people. On the contrary, they were living under the thumb of the Pharisees, who, attached to traditions of the ancients, had subverted the Commandments (cf. Mt 15:2-3) to the point of invalidating them (cf. Mk 7:13), as the Divine Master denounces. Above all, Our Lord criticizes the hypocrisy and stiff formalism of the Pharisees, as well as a kind of “fear of the new”. Faced with this, the Apostle to the Gentiles will teach that we must “renew all things in Christ” (Eph 1:10) so that He may be “all in all” (Col 3:11), while upholding the legitimate traditions (cf. 2 Thes 2:15).
In fact, there is no intrinsic contradiction between tradition and the present, between the new and the old. We must always “renew our minds” in order to “prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom 12:2), without ceasing to meditate on days gone by or past generations (cf. Dt 32:7).
Already in the early Church, martyrdom was witnessed as a “new grace”: never before had so many given their lives with such love for an ideal – and for a Person, Christ. Later, on the ruins of the Roman Empire, saints like Columbanus and Benedict of Nursia rebuilt Western Civilization. Inspired by the latter, the Monastery of Cluny flourished in the 10th century, the source of a new medieval renaissance.
In the 13th century, at the height of Scholasticism and the newly-formed Gothic style, saints such as Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure emerged with a new way of doing theology and even preaching – the so-called sermo modernus – addressed not only to religious, but to the entire people of God.
Later, during the Protestant Revolution of the 16th century, Providence did not fail to restore His Church with saints of the highest calibre, such as Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila and Philip Neri, among many others who could be mentioned.
With this in mind, one might ask: does the Church always need to be modernized? We can answer with Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira: “If by ‘modern’ we mean everything that is contemporary, only a fool would condemn modern things en bloc just because they are modern. But if by ‘modern’ we mean the countless and triumphant manifestations of a certain materialistic, levelling and pagan spirit that has reached its paroxysm today, then we are against everything that is modern, en bloc and on principle” (Catolicismo. Campos dos Goytacazes. Year IV. N.39 [Mar., 1954]; p.7).
So how do we proceed, whether in the face of Pharisaic temptation or of the modernist siren song? It scarcely needs to be pointed out that no solution will come from trendy ideologies: When “the law of the Lord is faithfully observed, when respect is shown for sacred things, when the Sacraments are frequented, and the ordinances of Christian life fulfilled, there will be no need for us to labour further to see all things restored in Christ” (ST. PIUS X. E Supremi). Thus, paradoxically, the Church will always be new insofar as she is always old. After all, pastoral experience shows us nothing different: it is this harmony between tradition and the future that draws the sheep of the “little flock” (Lk 12:32) to their one true fold. ◊
