The Bible and Tradition

 Does Tradition, that is how the Church has interpreted scripture and developed its practices and doctrines accordingly from the time of the Apostles have any relevancy today..   Protestants claim that Scripture is supreme and confine the past to the middle ages when everything in the Catholic church was then invented, indeed not only Protestants but at the failed revolt after Vatican II, people who were described as 'experts' came into our Churches to tell us that all this adoration of the Eucharist was wrong and was invented indeed in the middle ages. 

It was all so wrong.   Yet I found myself the only one who could contradict them and became Public Enemy No. 1 in the Diocese.   Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament was well established in the Church long before the Middle Ages.    Indeed when the Eastern Orthodox Church separated from Rome in the 7th Century it retained a great love for the Blessed Sacrament and carried on with the Mass.  If you enter many Orthodox Churches you will find all the sacramentals of the Catholic Church.   In practice this means that in the Early Church under the Pope and the Bishops although the liturgy may have differed the central point that the consecrated host was the flesh of Jesus was widely believed.    Indeed the historian HND Kelly a protestant states that from earliest times the Church took the words of Christ and believed them.   St Ignatius of Antioch condemned a 1st century heresy of the Docetists that the consecrated bread was not the the flesh of Christ.    They did not sit around arguing from scripture.   They further turned to the text of Malalchi 1.10   and were satisfied that the pure victim that was to be offered in the future was the Flesh of Jesus.

Why do we not now all this.   It is because the Church taught scripture and although mentioning tradition left the ordinary Catholic in the dark about what it meant by tradition.   So the Bible became among the Catholics the only reference point.   I know that Bishop Egan tried to rectify this by inviting an Evangelical convert over who had been a convert through tradition but perhaps he did not understand the history of the Diocese and where the problems lay.   I travelled with six others from the parish but was disappointed.     May I recommend a book called 'The Fathers Know Best' by another convert Evangelical Minister called Jimmy Akin.   It is like a catechism of Tradition.   It lines up the teachings of the Church then reveals the writings of the Early Church on each topic.   It is a quick reference source of which every honest priest in the diocese should avail themselves.