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.