The Traditions of God

From today’s Mass (Wednesday of the third week in Lent), the gloss for the Gospel reading - Matthew 15:1-20 - says that “the Pharisees added to the Commandments human tradition, which consisted of wholly exterior formalities and to which they attached more importance than they did to the law of Moses. The Church therefore seeks to put us on our guard against the observance of merely exterior practices of worship or fasts, which are not united to acts of charity.”

In a conversation with a friend about my conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism, I said that when I was a Protestants I thought Catholics were Christians who just created a lot of unnecessary work for themselves. Protestants, you see, hold that Catholic rituals and ceremonies and customs and accretions are a continuation of the empty traditions that Christ condemned the Pharisees for. The solution, then, was to jettison all traditions and retain the Scriptures only.

Only that practice of the Protestants is contradicted by the Scriptures themselves. Here’s an explanation, with links to relevant Scripture verses.

Sacred Scripture: The Old and New Testaments. Scripture is one of the two pillars of the Christian Faith for Catholics; the other pillar is Divine Tradition (2 Thessalonians 2:14-15).

Divine Tradition: The divinely-inspired customs and the oral accounts of the early Christians that captured the history and teachings of Christ not written down in the Scriptures (John 21:25). Tradition is one of the two pillars of the Christian Faith for Catholics; the other pillar is Sacred Scripture.

Protestantism: A 16th century revolt against Catholic belief, practice, and governance. Divine Tradition was rejected; a modified form of Sacred Scripture was retained.

God uses words and traditions to convey His Gospel.

Winterpeg or Bust

Two professional hockey teams have migrated from my old home of Atlanta to the land of the Canucks.
* The Flames, now in Calgary, were the home team when I was a youngster.
* A few years ago the Thrashers flew north and become the Jets when they landed in Winnipeg.

A recent conversation with an awesome Ottawa pilgrim friend brought to mind the one substantial trip I’ve ever made across the Canadian border (plane changes in Toronto count as visits, to be sure, but they don’t really give you a flavor for the locale).
 
My multi-day trip was to Winnipeg for a friend’s wedding, which was a Sung Mass in the Latin. It was a delightful time, and the big day for my friends was a joyful one for all of us.
 
I also did a little site-seeing while I was in Winnipeg, driving my Rubicon jeep around the city. Flowing through Winnipeg are two rivers, the Assiniboine and the Red. I traversed the Red River a couple of times in my Rubicon, and perhaps because the wedding Mass had been a Latin experience, my mind turned to things Roman during one of the crossings. “When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River, the fields of Rome ran red with the blood of civil war,” I thought. “And now here I am crossing the Red River in my Rubicon Jeep.”
 
My geek credentials thus firmly established, I hummed a Gloria Patri and continued on my way.