CATHOLIC UNITY CANNOT BE BUILT Upon the Dismissal of Tradition

Professor Jacob Phillips, Regina Unscripted, and the dangerous confusion between doctrinal development and ecclesiastical accommodation

Can Pope Leo XIV unite a divided Catholic Church? In a recent Regina Unscripted interview, Professor Jacob Phillips joins Kathryn Bennett and Mark Lambert to discuss the future of Catholicism, the legacy of Benedict XVI and the challenge of modernity. Yet their conversation reveals a profound contradiction: while advocating openness, charity and historical understanding, the participants repeatedly characterise traditional Catholic resistance in terms of rigidity, bitterness and defective ecclesiastical faith. Behind these judgments lies a more serious theological problem—the tendency to confuse fidelity to the living Church with acceptance of contemporary ecclesiastical decisions, and authentic doctrinal development with whatever subsequent generations have chosen to introduce.

There is something particularly revealing about a conversation devoted to overcoming division within the Catholic Church which repeatedly characterises one of the principal parties to that division as intellectually rigid, spiritually insecure or insufficiently appreciative of the Holy Ghost’s continuing activity. Such is the difficulty with the recent Regina Unscripted – In Conversation programme, Can Pope Leo XIV Unite a Divided Church?, featuring Professor Jacob Phillips of St Mary’s University, Twickenham, alongside presenters Kathryn Bennett and Mark Lambert.¹ The discussion is ambitious, often engaging and occasionally genuinely illuminating. Yet beneath its expressions of concern for Catholic unity lies a theological assumption which, if left unchallenged, threatens to make unity dependent upon acquiescence in precisely those ecclesiastical developments whose legitimacy remains contested.

Phillips is plainly an intelligent and articulate theologian. His familiarity with Joseph Ratzinger, his interest in the relationship between Christianity and modern intellectual culture, and his insistence that Catholicism must engage the contemporary world without surrendering its essential truths are commendable. His arguments concerning the sanctity of human life are particularly valuable. The difficulty is not an absence of theological learning, but its inconsistent application. Modern philosophical developments are to be sympathetically understood, critically purified and incorporated wherever they disclose genuine truth. Yet the objections of Catholics defending their inherited worship and doctrine are too readily interpreted through the categories of polarisation, nostalgia and resistance to legitimate development.

This inconsistency becomes evident in Phillips’s account of St John Henry Newman’s theology of doctrinal development. He correctly observes that Catholic Tradition develops through history as the Church encounters different intellectual and cultural circumstances. But he goes further. Discussing those who believe that the Church has departed from an earlier state of fidelity, he invokes Luther’s repudiation of subsequent ecclesiastical history and declares, at approximately 6:07, “I just see Luther in that.”

The comparison is astonishingly careless. Luther’s revolt involved fundamental disputes concerning justification, sacramental theology, ecclesiastical authority and the relationship between Scripture and Tradition. A Catholic who accepts the defined dogmas of the Church, recognises the Roman Pontiff and questions whether particular twentieth-century reforms faithfully express the inherited Roman Rite is not thereby advancing Protestant principles. Indeed, the traditionalist may be doing precisely the opposite: appealing to the accumulated authority of Catholic Tradition against the proposition that its received expressions may be substantially reconstructed according to contemporary pastoral theories.

More fundamentally, Phillips’s appeal to Newman is incomplete. In An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Newman did not merely establish that authentic development occurs. His principal concern was to distinguish genuine development from corruption. Among his seven notes of authentic development are preservation of type, continuity of principles and the conservative action of subsequent developments upon what preceded them.² The distinction is indispensable. Without it, development becomes little more than a description of historical succession, and the fact that something occurred later begins to serve as its own theological justification.

Newman’s argument imposes an obligation upon those advocating innovation as much as upon those resisting it. If a reform is claimed to represent authentic development, its continuity with the preceding tradition must be demonstrated. It is not enough to establish that development has occurred in the past. The central question is whether the particular development under consideration preserves the identity, principles and inherited substance of that which is supposedly developing.

This is precisely the examination missing from the programme’s discussion of liturgical reform. Lambert acknowledges the radical character of the postconciliar changes, describing the development of the new Missal as considerably more extensive than previous alterations. Yet the conversation proceeds towards the suggestion that resistance to the reforms risks treating Tradition as though it had ceased developing, or the Holy Ghost as though He had ceased working within the Church.

But this is a theological non sequitur. The continued activity of the Holy Ghost does not establish the prudence of every liturgical decision made by ecclesiastical authorities. The indefectibility of the Church is not equivalent to the impeccability of her administration. Divine providence may preserve the Church through the consequences of mistaken human decisions without thereby establishing that those decisions were divinely inspired or intrinsically beneficial.

An inherited liturgy which has developed through centuries of organic growth is not necessarily equivalent to a comprehensive reconstruction undertaken by a modern commission. Differences in method, scale, theological emphasis and historical circumstances matter. A reform which substantially alters inherited prayers, ceremonies, calendars and devotional expressions requires more substantial justification than the observation that liturgies have always changed. The distinction between organic development and deliberate reconstruction cannot be dismissed as antiquarian sentiment.

Indeed, Pope Pius XII supplied an important corrective in Mediator Dei. He recognised the legitimate authority of the Holy See over sacred worship, acknowledged the possibility of liturgical development and warned against excessive antiquarianism—the assumption that earlier forms were necessarily superior to subsequent developments.³ His principles challenge both an indiscriminate preference for antiquity and the supposition that novelty constitutes progress merely because it is new. They also raise an uncomfortable question about reforms which appealed to reconstructions of earlier Christian practice as justification for altering the received liturgical inheritance. If traditionalists are to be accused of antiquarianism for defending an established rite, why should the antiquarian assumptions influencing aspects of twentieth-century liturgical reform escape comparable scrutiny?

Phillips’s invocation of Benedict XVI’s hermeneutic of continuity presents a related difficulty. At approximately 4:01, he recalls Benedict’s criticism of those who interpret ecclesiastical history through competing narratives of discontinuity. But Benedict’s address to the Roman Curia in December 2005 was substantially more sophisticated than the reassuring slogan into which his argument is often reduced. Benedict recognised that authentic reform can involve continuity and discontinuity at different levels, while insisting that permanent principles remain intact.⁴ His argument was not that every identifiable discontinuity must be denied, but that the Church’s enduring identity must be preserved amid legitimate historical change.

This distinction is decisive. It is entirely possible to affirm that the Catholic Church remains indefectibly the same Church while maintaining that particular disciplinary decisions, pastoral policies or liturgical reforms have been imprudent, defective or insufficiently faithful to her inherited principles. The Church’s divine constitution does not depend upon the wisdom of every administrative decision. Nor does criticism of those decisions amount automatically to rejection of her authority.

The interview nevertheless repeatedly approaches ecclesiastical criticism as though it might disclose an underlying failure of faith. At approximately 8:21, Phillips characterises a tendency among traditionalists as believing that “tradition has stalled”, thereby suggesting that their resistance reflects a conception of the Church in which authentic development has ceased. Yet the traditional Catholic objection is not necessarily that development has ceased, but that particular alleged developments fail the tests by which authenticity can be established. Confusing these propositions does not answer the objection. It evades it.

Even more objectionable is the programme’s tendency to psychologise traditional Catholic disagreement. Lambert acknowledges that he has developed a habit of deliberately provoking traditionalists online by posting examples of reverent contemporary worship. He then complains of the hostility which such provocation sometimes attracts. Subsequently, discussing traditionalist rigidity, he employs the description “a kind of autism”.

The remark is inappropriate and intellectually worthless. Autism is a neurodevelopmental condition, not a theological category or legitimate shorthand for defective ecclesiastical reasoning. More importantly, such descriptions contribute nothing towards establishing whether the doctrinal and liturgical objections being raised are justified. The admission of deliberate provocation makes the ensuing complaint about bitterness particularly unconvincing.

There is a wider intellectual defect at work. Traditional Catholics are frequently described as nostalgic, fearful of change, emotionally dependent upon familiar ceremonies or incapable of accepting historical complexity. Their actual arguments are thereby displaced by speculation concerning their motives. Yet the same method might readily be applied to defenders of the postconciliar settlement. Institutional conformity, professional convenience, academic fashion and reluctance to reconsider deeply established assumptions could influence their positions. None of these possibilities would establish that their arguments were false. That is precisely why theological controversy must be conducted through evidence and reasoning rather than through psychological insinuation.

A professor of systematic theology should insist upon this distinction. That Phillips does not more forcefully challenge the interviewers’ rhetoric is regrettable, particularly because his own arguments repeatedly commend charity, intellectual openness and the capacity to recognise genuine truth beyond one’s established assumptions.

The difficulty becomes more serious when Phillips discusses the spiritual demands of ecclesiastical fidelity. At approximately 10:30, he observes that “faith in the church is faith”, explaining that Catholics must trust the Church as God’s instrument on earth. Properly understood, this is entirely orthodox. Yet its application becomes problematic if the different objects and degrees of ecclesiastical assent are not carefully distinguished. Catholics owe supernatural faith to what God has revealed and the Church infallibly proposes. They owe other forms of religious assent and obedience according to the nature of the teaching or authority exercised. They are not obliged to regard every episcopal policy, curial judgment or disciplinary arrangement as though it enjoyed the same divine guarantee as revealed dogma.

The distinction is not a concession to Protestant private judgment. It belongs to Catholic ecclesiology itself. Even the 1983 Code of Canon Law recognises that the faithful possess the right, and sometimes the duty, to communicate concerns regarding the welfare of the Church, while preserving fidelity and appropriate reverence towards their pastors.⁵ The legitimacy of such criticism depends upon its substance, manner and circumstances, not upon whether it makes ecclesiastical authorities uncomfortable.

Phillips’s suggestion that those who distance themselves from particular institutional circumstances may be seeking a more comfortable religious environment is equally questionable. For many traditional Catholics, the preservation of inherited worship has demanded considerable sacrifice: lengthy journeys to attend Mass, loss of established parish communities, financial burdens, strained relationships with diocesan authorities and persistent suspicion concerning their ecclesiastical loyalties. Whatever the merits or deficiencies of particular traditionalist responses, the notion that such fidelity is principally motivated by the desire for comfort is a remarkable generalisation.

The distinction between the divine constitution of the Church and the fallible conduct of her ministers must therefore remain fundamental. The Catholic who repudiates the divinely instituted authority of the Roman Pontiff occupies a different theological position from the Catholic who acknowledges that authority but questions whether particular exercises of it are consistent with the Church’s received discipline or theological inheritance. To collapse these positions into a general category of resistance to the Holy Ghost is not a defence of ecclesiastical faith. It is a failure to explain its proper object.

This imprecision becomes particularly serious when Lambert refers to the “SSPX schism”. The expression is introduced as though the canonical and ecclesiastical circumstances of the Society of Saint Pius X, its clergy and the faithful attending its chapels could be comprehensively settled by a convenient label. Yet Catholic canon law gives schism a particular definition, distinguishing it from other forms of irregularity. Canon 751 identifies schism in terms of refusal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff or communion with those subject to him.⁶ Questions concerning particular episcopal consecrations, canonical penalties, subjective culpability, claimed necessity and the position of individual persons consequently require careful analysis.

The events surrounding the Society’s episcopal consecrations in July 2026 make such precision especially important. The Society’s recognition of the Roman Pontiff does not automatically settle the canonical character of its actions, any more than its irregular situation automatically establishes the personal culpability of every Catholic associated with it. Its appeal to necessity, its claim to provide auxiliary episcopal ministry without ordinary territorial jurisdiction, and the Holy See’s objections all require examination according to the relevant law and theological principles. It is possible to reject the Society’s justification without treating every question surrounding its situation as already resolved.

This is not an appeal for special treatment. It is an appeal for the intellectual precision which the programme otherwise professes to value. If Phillips and his interlocutors wish to oppose polarisation, they ought to avoid precisely the casual use of contested terminology which makes responsible theological discussion more difficult.

The treatment of Marian doctrine reveals a comparable inconsistency. Phillips personally professes belief in Our Lady as Co-Redemptrix while indicating his willingness to accept contemporary ecclesiastical reluctance to give the title official prominence. The distinction between the theological legitimacy of a title and the prudence of formally defining it is reasonable. Yet the historical pedigree of Marian doctrine must remain relevant to any contemporary judgment. Properly understood, the title does not posit a second or competing source of redemption, but describes Our Lady’s entirely subordinate cooperation in the saving work accomplished uniquely and sufficiently by her divine Son.

The question of terminology, doctrinal precision and dogmatic definition is legitimate. What is not legitimate is to treat contemporary institutional hesitation as though it could negate the theological significance of established Marian teaching. Phillips commendably recognises that ecumenical sensitivities cannot determine Catholic doctrine. His insistence upon this principle makes its insufficient application elsewhere more conspicuous. If the Church must resist accommodation to Protestant objections where revealed truth is concerned, why should resistance to accommodation in liturgical theology and practice be interpreted so readily as rigidity?

The programme is appreciably stronger when Phillips turns to the sanctity of human life. His arguments against euthanasia and assisted suicide recognise that human dignity does not depend upon independence, efficiency, physical strength or the absence of suffering. His reflections upon reconciliation and spiritual understanding near the end of life are pastorally valuable. Yet the strongest Catholic argument goes beyond the possibility of discovering meaning in suffering. The inherent dignity of human life remains even when no reconciliation occurs, no consolation is experienced and no visible spiritual benefit can be identified. The prohibition against deliberately killing innocent human beings does not depend upon establishing that continued suffering will produce a beneficial outcome.

Here Phillips demonstrates the value of communicating Catholic moral principles in language intelligible to those outside the faith. He recognises that the Church must engage the secular world through reason as well as revealed doctrine. His contributions concerning the irrationality of certain contemporary cultural assumptions are likewise substantial. But the contrast with his treatment of ecclesiastical controversy is striking. When confronting secular modernity, he recognises the necessity of distinguishing enduring moral truth from contingent cultural assumptions. When examining the postconciliar ecclesiastical settlement, comparable distinctions receive considerably less emphasis.

The discussion of immigration is especially revealing. Phillips correctly recognises that Catholic social teaching embraces both the duty to protect vulnerable foreigners and the legitimate responsibility of political communities to regulate immigration for the common good. The Catechism expressly acknowledges both principles.⁷ Here he rejects the reduction of Catholic teaching to a single politically convenient proposition. Moral principles must be applied according to circumstances, competing obligations and practical consequences.

But why should this recognition of prudential complexity become less evident when examining liturgical reform or ecclesiastical government? If Catholic teaching concerning immigration requires distinctions between permanent principles and contingent applications, the same distinction must apply to ecclesiastical discipline and the practical exercise of authority. Neither the Pope nor the episcopate possesses a divine guarantee that every policy will prove wise. Acknowledging that reality does not diminish their authority; it recognises its nature and limits.

The immigration discussion itself is not without problems. Statistical assertions concerning asylum claims and allegations about the systematic conduct of charitable organisations are introduced without adequate substantiation in the conversation. Such matters require careful verification and should not be accepted merely because they support a conclusion with which the speakers sympathise. Intellectual consistency demands that evidential standards remain the same regardless of the subject or the attractiveness of the argument.

The final discussion of Joseph Ratzinger raises another important methodological question. Phillips contrasts Ratzinger’s engagement with modern subjectivity and the more objective theological architecture of St Thomas Aquinas. There is substance in recognising differences of theological method, but the contrast risks becoming excessively schematic. Aquinas did not disregard human reason or experience, while Ratzinger’s theological approach cannot adequately be reduced to modern subjectivity. Both insisted, within different intellectual circumstances, upon the objective character of truth and the priority of divine revelation.

The assertion that contemporary people inevitably inhabit modernity is sociologically uncontroversial. It does not follow that modern philosophical assumptions must determine the fundamental categories of Catholic theology. The Church has always employed philosophical insights from the cultures she encountered, but she has also judged, corrected and subordinated them to revealed truth. Modern intellectual developments may disclose genuine knowledge; scientific discoveries may correct inherited assumptions concerning the physical universe; cultural changes may require new methods of explanation. None of these propositions establishes that the content of supernatural revelation can be reconstructed according to contemporary intellectual preferences.

Indeed, Phillips himself acknowledges that engagement with modernity involves purification rather than indiscriminate acceptance. This principle should be applied equally to modern ecclesiastical developments. The reforms of the twentieth century are not exempt from theological scrutiny simply because they form part of the Church’s recent history. Their legitimacy must be assessed according to their relationship with the received faith, the theological expression of the inherited Roman Rite and the conditions governing authentic development.

That brings the discussion back to Pope Leo XIV. The participants are understandably encouraged by the Pope’s public devotion to Our Lady, his participation in solemn religious observances and his defence of human dignity during his recent visit to France. Such acts deserve proper recognition. But a Pope singing the Salve Regina before an image of the Blessed Virgin does not thereby establish the theological legitimacy of every other aspect of his pontificate, any more than an imprudent papal decision would invalidate the office itself.

The distinction between the objective dignity of the papacy and the contingent actions of its occupant is indispensable. The Roman Pontiff is honoured because of the office instituted by Christ, not because his every statement, policy or administrative decision must be interpreted as a vindication of the contemporary ecclesiastical settlement. Catholic loyalty to the Pope is neither Protestant congregationalism nor papal absolutism. It requires the recognition of divinely instituted authority within the doctrinal conditions and limitations established by the Church herself.

The First Vatican Council’s constitution Pastor Aeternus defined papal infallibility under precise conditions concerning definitive teaching on faith and morals. It did not render every liturgical decision, prudential judgment or administrative action of the Roman Pontiff incapable of criticism.⁸ Nor did it suggest that Catholics must abandon the historical and theological principles by which the proper exercise of papal authority has traditionally been understood.

This is particularly relevant to Old Romans, whose ecclesiastical circumstances have long demanded careful distinctions between Catholic identity, sacramental validity, canonical regularity and ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Recognition of the Roman Pontiff is entirely compatible with the rejection of papal maximalism. Fidelity to the Church’s inherited doctrine and worship does not require Catholics to establish a competing ecclesial identity, nor does it oblige them to treat every contemporary administrative arrangement as though it belonged to the deposit of faith. The apostolic inheritance remains the inheritance of Catholics themselves, irrespective of the institutional difficulties encountered in its preservation.

The task of ecclesiastical authority is to safeguard and transmit what has been received. It is not to manufacture a new Catholic identity according to each generation’s pastoral preferences, nor to make the faithful’s attachment to established doctrine and worship dependent upon the ideological sympathies of contemporary administrators. Tradition is not an optional cultural accessory to the Catholic faith. It is the means by which the Church remains recognisably the same Church throughout history.

This is the fundamental contradiction which the Regina Unscripted conversation fails adequately to confront. Its contributors repeatedly advocate intellectual generosity, spiritual maturity and the patient discernment of historical development. Yet traditional Catholic objections are too often interpreted through categories of fear, bitterness or defective ecclesiastical faith. Theological distinctions which are rightly employed when discussing secular culture and political policy are insufficiently maintained when the subject becomes ecclesiastical reform.

The result is an account of unity which risks making acceptance of the postconciliar settlement the practical measure of Catholic fidelity. Those questioning that settlement must continually demonstrate that they are not Protestants, schismatics, nostalgists or spiritually insecure. Those defending it are not subjected to an equivalent obligation to demonstrate that particular reforms satisfy the criteria of authentic development.

Such an imbalance cannot produce genuine unity. It may produce institutional conformity, but conformity and communion are not identical. Catholic unity is grounded in a common profession of revealed truth, legitimate sacramental life and ecclesiastical communion properly understood. It cannot be manufactured by marginalising the historical inheritance against which contemporary innovations ought to be judged.

Newman offers criteria for distinguishing development from corruption. Benedict XVI insists upon the enduring identity of the Church amid historical reform. Pius XII recognises both the proper authority governing the sacred liturgy and the dangers of innovation founded upon questionable historical assumptions. These authorities cannot simply be invoked as ornaments of an argument already decided in favour of the contemporary ecclesiastical establishment. Their principles must be applied, including where their application yields uncomfortable conclusions.

The essential question remains unanswered: by what objective criteria are the reforms, theological assumptions and pastoral policies of recent decades to be judged, and what happens when those reforms appear to depart from the principles which formerly governed Catholic belief and worship? Until that question receives a serious answer, appeals to continuity will remain insufficient. Continuity must be demonstrated, not merely asserted.

Professor Phillips is right that the Church must engage the modern world. She must do so because her mission is universal and her message concerns every age. But engagement is not accommodation, and development is not reinvention. The modern world must be judged according to the truth entrusted to the Church, just as contemporary ecclesiastical reforms must be judged according to the Tradition they profess to develop.

The greatest danger in the present discussion is therefore not that traditional Catholics are excessively attached to the past. It is that fidelity to the past has become so readily confused with opposition to the Church’s future. Catholic Tradition is neither an archaeological curiosity nor an ecclesiastical embarrassment to be overcome. It is the living transmission of what the Church has received from Christ and His Apostles.

The Holy Ghost does not preserve the Church by rendering every ecclesiastical innovation prudent, every disciplinary decision irreversible or every contemporary theological judgment superior to the accumulated wisdom of previous generations. He preserves her in the faith delivered to the saints, notwithstanding the weaknesses and failures of those entrusted with its transmission.

The question is not simply whether Pope Leo XIV can unite a divided Catholic Church. It is whether those advocating unity are prepared to acknowledge that Catholic unity cannot be established by treating fidelity to Tradition as the very problem which needs to be overcome.

Tradition is not the obstacle to Catholic unity. Fidelity to Tradition is the condition by which authentic Catholic unity remains possible.