What is the use of tradition?

September 23, 2025

What is the use of tradition?

Tradition requires constant conversion. It's no picnic! Tradition demands constant effort. And even the most important effort: that of not forgetting. Tradition is of little use for remembering; it serves primarily to not forget. It loses its confidence when it shows itself to be indebted to memory.

Tradition is identified with the condor when memory flutters in the wind like a butterfly. Like the condor, tradition lives with fidelity rooted in the body. Like the condor, tradition can die of love. Like the condor, everything it generates requires time to take flight and assert itself. Like the condor, it requires altitude for thought.

Tradition exists in a pendulum movement that goes from the meaning it transmits since its origin to the understanding of this meaning sifted through the present. It is not lacking in nuggets. Tradition always inaugurates a new intimacy. It gives birth to a revealed secret.

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intimacy , tradition

Posted by:

Emmanuel L. Di Rossetti

A response to “What is the use of tradition?”

Benoît YZERN

September 27, 2025 at 8:00 am

It is appropriate to distinguish between the notion of tradition in general and such or such "regional" or "sectoral" tradition in particular, as well as between a tradition, as a structured and structuring whole, and the traditions present within it, as elements, articulated and hierarchical among themselves, which value and convey this whole.

Within Catholicism itself, a healthy relationship with Tradition is conducive to the acquisition and then strengthening of an optimum of humility, lucidity and holiness; overall, it is a question here of the humility of the respectful heirs of an entire heritage of which they are the servants and transmitters, of the lucidity of those who build themselves up in contact with and by means of that which inspired and guided the edification of those who preceded them, and of the holiness thought and lived in Jesus Christ.

From this, we can easily understand the following: the pillars of any tendency to resentment towards Tradition and of any desire to overthrow Tradition are
– pride, conducive to ingratitude, obliteration and flight forward,
– error, even extravagant and presumptuous lies,
– the replacement or transformation of holiness in Christo by an imprecise, imprudent and indefinite “sympathy” ad extra and in mundo.

Let us add one last aspect of things: in the face of the intensifying effects of the present moment which characterize the atmosphere which serves as or takes the place of culture in our time, at least since 1914, recourse to Tradition is equivalent to recourse to an "anthropological-civilizational" accompanying effect which contributes to keeping alive the Christian sense of duration, depth, primacy of the interior life and solidarity, notably liturgical and spiritual, between the various generations of Catholic faithful.

Reading the above, we can better understand the objective of the successors of those who were or wanted to be the assassins, then the gravediggers of Tradition, as well as their hatred of Tradition. For them, Tradition is enslaving, whereas in fact it is liberating, as long as it is well understood, well thought out and well lived.

In this connection, it is also quite comical that so many reformist Catholics, who disdain or even hate Catholic Tradition, also warmly and positively appreciate almost all non-Christian religions and belief traditions.

There is a relationship to things, or a view of things, which leads one to think that this attitude stems from or is a quasi-swindle.

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Emmanuel L. Di Rossetti was a journalist for twelve years. He was an army officer in the 2nd Foreign Infantry Regiment. He is an entrepreneur. This Travel Journal is the fruit of his reflections on journalism, literature, and the Catholic religion. It is placed under the benevolent and enlightened authority of Georges Bernanos.

We understand absolutely nothing about modern civilization if we do not first admit that it is a universal conspiracy against every kind of inner life. France Against the Robots (1946). Georges Bernanos