Every age convinces itself it has understood tradition, yet very few can truly claim to have lived it. Ours is no exception: it has fallen into the paradox of splitting between the nostalgic guardians of what used to be and the self-styled prophets of what is yet to come, without noticing that both positions are built on the same distortion. Those who look backward want to preserve what they no longer use, as one protects fragile objects locked in a display case; those who look forward see tradition only as an obstacle to creativity, something to overcome in order to breathe freely. Neither side sees that the real issue is not the past or the future, but the present. Because tradition, when it is truly tradition, does not belong to yesterday and does not anticipate tomorrow: it happens. It happens now, in the encounter between a word received and a freedom that responds.
The confusion comes from treating tradition as a thing. We discuss it as though it were a doctrine, a custom, a set of rules: something to defend, adjust, repair, relocate, historicize. But tradition is not an antique piece of furniture to be restored or discarded. It is a gesture. It is an event that is handed on. It is the living continuity of an experience that has crossed the centuries not because it was protected, but because it was lived. Whenever we freeze it in the past, we empty it; whenever we turn it into a pretext for innovation, we lose it. In both cases we miss the essential point: tradition is not an object, but a relationship.
In the life of the Church, this misunderstanding has deep consequences. When tradition is reduced to a series of forms to be preserved, it hardens. It becomes formalism, a bodyless ritual, a nostalgia that refuses to call itself nostalgia. The obsession with what once was prevents us from seeing what is happening now, from judging the present, from being wounded by the questions we carry and that demand answers. Preserving for the sake of preserving is not fidelity; it is fear. And fear leads to paralysis. It does not generate discernment, only repetition. Traditionalism is born here: when fidelity is mistaken for mechanical reproduction, when the past is idolized because the present is no longer intelligible.
But the opposite temptation springs from the same mistake. When tradition is seen as a burden, responsible for delays or rigidity, when it is blamed as the source of today’s difficulties, one has already abandoned any attempt to understand what it truly is. Those who believe they must free themselves from tradition in order to be free fail to notice that in doing so they dismantle the very criterion that makes freedom possible. Without tradition, freedom becomes impulse rather than judgment, reaction rather than choice, volatility rather than a path. The true erasure of tradition does not produce modernity, but disorientation—and in ecclesial life, disorientation results in a community that can no longer recognize what is taking place.
Tradition, instead, is the working hypothesis by which reality is faced. Not to repeat the past, but to verify whether what has been handed down still generates life. It is a “deposit” only in the way a seed is a deposit: not made to be looked at, but to be planted. It bears fruit only when used—and using it requires risk, judgment, and freedom. Tradition is the way a word coming from afar continues to resound now. It is the encounter between memory and present, an encounter that cannot be neutralized either by nostalgia or by the frenzy for the new.
This is why the real distinction is not between those who defend and those who innovate. The real distinction is between what is alive and what is dead; between what is relation and what is ideology; between what accompanies and what hardens. Traditionalism is the shadow of tradition: it resembles it, imitates it, mimics it, invokes it, yet renders it sterile. Tradition lives only when it continues to generate life; traditionalism survives only by defending forms it no longer knows how to judge. And while tradition opens, traditionalism closes. While tradition frees, traditionalism chains. While tradition judges the times, traditionalism limits itself to judging others.
We are living through radical transformations, and tradition cannot be either the refuge of the fearful or the trench of the conservative. It is the horizon within which the present can be recognized. Without tradition we lose continuity; without freedom we lose truth. Tradition is the one place where these two needs do not cancel each other out but sustain each other. It is a path, not a fence. A promise that continues to unfold, not a relic to be venerated. The challenge today is not to save tradition from the modern world, nor to save the modern world from tradition. The challenge is to recognize what is happening—and allow it to generate life once again. For what is true does not fear time: it crosses it. And what is alivedoes not ask to be protected: it asks to be followed.
d.R.P.
Silere non possum