Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

After a couple of weeks dedicated to Holy Week and Easter, B16 has picked up again his new catechetical series on the Church. This series, if you recall, is aimed at correcting the all too common but mistaken Christian individualism which desires a relationship with Christ without His Church. Benedict shows that this is an impossibility. Scripture, the early Church and the entire Christian Tradition demonstrate that the Church is the extension and prolongation of the Incarnation. In other words, if you want Jesus you have to accept the whole Christ–which is His Mystical Body.

His audience this week continues the theme of communion with Christ in His Church through the Holy Spirit. However, B16 moves on to the topic of Tradition. Tradition, coming from the Latin traditio which in the biblical sense means that which is handed on, has negative connotations for many Western Christians who have been raised in the polemics of the Reformation communities. I will leave aside showing that Sola Scriptura is unbiblical, unhistorical, and illogical as there are a plethora of resources for this and more importantly B16 does not directly address it in this audience. Instead, I will focus on his positive affirmations.

Benedict XVI begins his discussion by emphasizing that there is an authentic communion that unites the universal Church throughout the world today (synchronic) but this communion also transcends time, past, present and future, and unites Christians throughout all time (diachronic) as well. This is effected by Jesus’ work of salvation and is made effective in time through the Spirit making use of the Tradition left by Christ. He says:

The Spirit appears as the guarantor of the active presence of mystery in history, who assures its realization through the centuries. Thanks to the Paraclete, the experience of the Risen One, made by the apostolic community in the origins of the Church, will always be able to be lived by successive generations, in the measure that it is transmitted and actualized in faith, in worship and in the communion of the People of God, pilgrim in time. And, in this way, we, now, in Eastertide, live the encounter with the Risen One not only as something of the past, but in the present communion of the faith, of the liturgy, of the life of the Church.

Benedict has shown that Jesus left Another Paraclete and also a Church, the latter of which is now led by successors to the apostles with sacramental means of conveying saving grace. All of these things are the Church’s Tradition. All of this was handed on by Christ and continues to be handed on to believers through the successors of the apostles vivified by the Holy Spirit. B16 shows, especially using the Acts of the Apostles, that there is a certain fusion of the action of the Holy Spirit with St. Paul in administering to the Church the salvation won by Christ. He indicates that God has chosen to work through His visible Church to apply the grace of the Cross to believers in time. This is authentic Tradition; it is the patrimony handed on by Jesus Christ by which salvation is applied throughout time. Tradition is not some dead letter:

Concluding and summarizing, we can therefore say that Tradition is not the transmission of things or words, a collection of dead things. Tradition is the living river that unites us to the origins, the living river in which the origins are always present, the great river that leads us to the port of eternity. In this living river, the word of the Lord that we heard at the beginning from the lips of the reader: “And behold, I am with you always, until the eng of the age” is fulfilled again (Matthew 28:20).

Understanding Tradition in this way, one recognizes it as a living breathing reality that, because it is a gift from our Savior, ought to be loved and cherished as we do Sacred Scripture. It is the means of effecting Our Lord’s presence in a salvific manner. Tradition is nothing less than the means to eternal life in Christ through the Spirit.