The Beauty of Tradition, by Anthony Esolen

The divide in our Church between people who believe in the richness and the rightness of her theological tradition and those who do not is, in many ways, not an equal divide. The inequality should be a comfort to those who hold, as I do, that the casual dismissal of past customs and hard-won and well-defined truths is foolish, even if all you want is what a canny politician would want—that is, success.

Set aside the issue of what is true. One distinguishing feature—I see this divide going back into my youth, when young priests and sisters preached “values clarification” with an air of those too sophisticated for definition—is that the traditional believers hold that there is such a thing as moral truth, while the others do their best to skirt the matter. That, I think, is not mere bad faith. It is a failure to see virtue as a life-giving dynamism and vice as immediately and inevitably deadening. ….

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