“A Constant, Quiet, Peaceful Revolution”

Newsletter for September 26, 2025

Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak with some colleagues who are preparing to travel to the Jubilee of Synodal Teams and Participatory Bodies in Rome next month. Our conversation turned to the differences in tenor between Francis’s pontificate and Leo’s. Francis, we observed, was about creating a culture of synodality, where all are welcome to voice their concerns in a spirit of parrhesia, or openness. Leo’s approach, so far, seems to be one of consolidating this culture—and with it, the reforms of Vatican II that are still contested in some corners of the church.

This brought us to a discussion of the nature and place of tradition. When someone mentioned aggiornamento—that need for a continual review and recasting of church teaching in light of the signs of the times—I thought of Thomas Merton’s very helpful distinction between tradition and traditionalism in New Seeds of Contemplation. “The living Tradition of Catholicism is like the breath of a physical body,” he writes. “It renews life by repelling stagnation. It is a constant, quiet, peaceful revolution against death.”

Traditionalism, on the contrary, “tend[s] toward stagnation and decay” by “try[ing] to perpetuate things that cannot be perpetuated” and “cling[ing] to objects and values which times destroys without mercy.” Merton points out that while the “whole truth of Christianity has been revealed,” it has yet to be “fully understood or fully lived.” It is in this ongoing process of seeking understanding, then trying to fold the fruits of that search back into our lives and the life of the church, where we experience the open-ended “breath” of tradition rooted in the “body” of revelation.

The 19th-century Russian theologian Alexei Khomiakov employed a similar biological metaphor when he wrote, “The Church is a living organism, the organism of truth and love, or, more exactly, truth and love as organism.” The image comes from his landmark essay “The Church Is One,” which is known to have influenced the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council.

The aim of “church reform,” broadly speaking, is to be a voice, a reminder, of this organic nature of the church’s development. A common criticism of the reform community throughout the Synod was that groups were driven by particular issues—women’s ordination, for instance—rather than attending to the synodal process as such. But this, I think, was to misread the situation: these groups were merely identifying places where the “truth and love” at the core of our tradition were modulating in new ways, as the light of the sun emanates from one unchanging position yet falls on objects in varying gradients depending on the time of day. This does not mean living in a world of flickers and shadows, but rather preparing to recover, in Merton’s radiant phrase, “the limpid obscurity of a single intuition that unites all dogmas in one simple Light.”

Michael Centore
Editor, Today’s American Catholic