Passing The Torch

I realized just the other day how old I am.  I was born in 1955, which makes me 68 now.  Not that old perhaps in these days of advanced medical technology where they manage to preserve us for longer than they probably should.  But what made me think about the swift passage of time was when I read that in the year of my birth, 1955, there were actually half a dozen veterans of the American Civil War still alive.  These were the men of the Blue and the Gray, who had fought each other to the death in this country, who remembered Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee, for whom places like Bull Run and Gettysburg were not just outdoor museums where something bad once happened.  These men had actual living memories of those dreadful things—the bullets whistling around them, the screams of the wounded, the bloody tents where exhausted doctors performed amputations with no anaesthetics other than the whiskey bottle.  Six of these men whose minds were scarred by such memories as these were still alive when I was born, men with long white beards still waving to the crowds at the Fourth of July parades, living witnesses to history.

Today, it’s starting to happen again, as we watch the gradual demise of the veterans of World War II.  Fewer and fewer remain of the soldiers, sailors and airmen who stormed the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, who flew their Spitfires over the southern shores of England, who liberated the concentration camps of Eastern Europe.  Times goes by, and as we get older, it seems to increase its speed.

What made me think of all this was a brief mention in today’s Epistle from St. Paul to his flock in Corinth.  He speaks of the witnesses to history in his own day.  That the risen Christ was seen of Cephas (St. Peter), then of the twelve apostles, and after that “he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.”  The faithful Corinthians, and indeed the Christians throughout the world at that time, must have been slowly counting down the number of living witnesses who had actually seen our Lord, who had heard him speak, watched him heal and raise the dead, maybe even spoken with him themselves.  How many of those five hundred were still alive, and how many had “fallen asleep”?  The number of the living was getting smaller and soon would be down to a few old men, men who were young when our Lord dwelled amongst us, men like St. John the Divine who was the last of the Apostles to die.  With his death the collective apostolic memory was reduced to mere written recollections of what our Lord had done and said.  Today we must make do with the Four Gospels—we cannot ask for more details of these events any more than we can ask our great-great-grandfathers what it was like to fight on the fields of Gettysburg.

The last book of the Bible is the Apocalypse, also known as the book of Revelation.  It was written by St. John, the last of the Apostles, and is the final chapter of our holy Scriptures, bringing to an end the things that God has revealed to us his children.  God has revealed no other truths, nothing else that we need to know for our salvation.  If there are dogmas of our faith that are not explicitly mentioned in Holy Scripture, they are either implicitly contained in this Deposit of the Faith, or have been passed down verbally in the unwritten testimony of Tradition.  As Catholics we reject the Protestant belief in “Sola Scriptura”—the Bible alone.  The last verse of St. John’s Gospel reminds us of this when he writes that “there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.”  He’s telling us here that it would be impossible to include everything our Lord said and did in a mere book.  Men like him were still alive, they actually remembered events, other words of our Lord, even his facial expressions and tone of voice, things which cannot be described.  And these things they passed down to their children and their children’s children, adding to our knowledge of the God who lived and died at a certain moment of history.

Hundreds of years later we are the recipients not only of Scripture but of these memories that have been passed down to us by countless generations.  Many of these have no doubt been lost in the passage of time and can never be recalled.  But others have been collected in the vast deposit of faith by the Church, infallibly guided by the Holy Ghost and taught to us by this same Church, founded by our Lord Jesus Christ for this very purpose.  Our faith as Catholics is based on this infallible knowledge of revelation that the Church has amassed over the centuries, developed by her theologians with their use of reason.  What the Church teaches as being infallibly true, we must believe.  Why must we believe it?  Not merely because the Church tells us we have to, but because it would be incredibly arrogant of us to disbelieve it.  What kind of perverted pride would it take for us to deny what God has revealed?  To believe that Christ is not physically present in the Holy Eucharist, to reject the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, to deny that we should ask the saints to pray for us, to pray ourselves for the dead?

Today, we are making our final countdown to another end.  This time it’s not Civil War Veterans or anything so relatively insignificant.  Today, our countdown is of the number of people who have kept the faith.  Since Vatican II there has been a huge apostasy from the Church, and the numbers of faithful continue to dwindle at an alarming rate.  Our Lord himself asked if he would find the faith when he comes again to judge the quick and the dead.  He didn’t answer the question, but it’s ominous enough even that he had to ask it.  What will happen to the faith when we die?  Will our children be able to keep it going?  When we who remember, no matter how vaguely, what the Church was like before Vatican II, when we are dead, how can the next generation preserve and restore that Church when there are no longer any living memories of what it was?

The solemn duty of each and every one of us that do remember is to pass on as much of our memories as possible—the processions through town with the Holy Eucharist at Corpus Christi, or the rosary processions in October, weekly Benediction, the daily lives of the parish priests, the nuns who ran the parish school, the simple trust we had in those religious and our bishops, and of course the Holy Father himself who lovingly performed his first and foremost duty of preserving every element of Tradition that had been entrusted to him.  Our faith and the faith of our children and of their children must continue.  God has chosen us in these times to have the burden of this increasingly difficult duty to preserve tradition and pass it down.  Like the Civil War Veterans, we will die, one by one, until there are none of us left.  It’s up to us before that happens to ensure we pass on as much as we can.  Let’s leave here today with the firm resolve to pass on the torch!