Jose Leitao - Precious Apothecary: A Catholic Grimoire

The claim of universality by the Catholic Church at times obfuscates the specificities of its particular expressions. While such has been long admitted and known regarding folk aspects of religious practice, such observations often seem to border on implicit paternalism and a certain intellectual disregard of such peoples and their practices as inferior or ignorant in light of true and pure religious observance (this being the actual meaning of the word syncretism). However, this same variability of Catholic practice needs to be equally realized of the upper echelons of the Catholic intellectual establishment.

The Council of Vatican II has, in part, contributed to this general ignorance of Church specificity by offering a new and renovated self-constructed vision of this institution as an ecumenical trans-cultural body. This is not a criticism in itself, and a great deal of praise can be made regarding the new humanistic ideals of the contemporary Church, but the enforcement of this novel vision has led the theologically observant faithful to become oblivious of the Catholic traditions of their forefathers. Again, this is beyond the folk aspects of Catholicism; the forefathers we speak of are the men of the cloth who sustained the Church in all corners of the world as it assumed various particular and unique expressions of a single ideal and cosmological vision. The capacity for centralization and the mechanisms for quick communication which the past century has offered is leading many to gradually forget the local Church as an expression of personal and unique religious sensitivity and experience.

The results of this are numerous and nuanced, but among them is the noted lack of focus on the local Saint as a living participant in religious practice and observance. Saints were often the focal point of local Catholicism; their bones were quite literally what the Altar was built upon. Saints were the centre and protector of the community, the example to be followed, and the theological weapon for church, convent, monastery and sanctuary power struggles which allowed for the establishment of local authority, constellations of pilgrimage sites, miracle narratives or the flow of devotion. By the control of relics, publication of hagiographies, miracle and cure propaganda, the specificity of the local grew from the fall of the classical world onwards, across medieval, modern and contemporary times, creating the only human way any church could hope to be Universal: by becoming infinitely local.

Still, specificity within the Church hasnt been lost, and novel groups, lay associations and orders do in fact exist, and increasingly so, each with its own rites and patrons. But such, given birth from within the current Church, seem to borrow more from Reformation ideals than ancestry and locality acknowledgement. Once again, this is likely to be an unfair criticism (if it is indeed criticism), since the Church as a living body existent in the present, and led by one single Shepherd (the Pope) as an actuation and representative of Peter, is meant for change. Consequently, such flavourless and colourless changes still need to be acknowledged as legitimate and spiritually valid even if boring.

Importantly, traditionalists seem to miss the point that the Pope has authority to go against tradition, and if you dont accept the legitimacy of papal innovation then you are not really Catholic, but rather a heretic whose heresy has not been made manifest for lack of opportunity. The search for ideal traditionalism is equally destructive since traditionalism is not constructed on a base of living organic creation, but rather erosion. Traditionalism encysts practice on a strict adherence to a particular circumstantial orthodoxy, and personal and particular expression become a danger to be combated. Speaking Latin does not make you more interesting, just a different shade of bore.

Between progressives and conservatives, modernists and traditionalists, rightfully or not the Church that once was is indeed being forgotten, because that Church of bones and dirt is problematic to both sides of the trench. If we start turning back the clock on that which is today called the Catholic Church, even if we are not wanting to fall outside its orthodoxy, we will thus be able to find shades of unusual colour. By focusing on any one environment, and tracking its visible literary outputs, lines of unique tradition thus become visible. Based on cornerstones of long-standing local practices, often put in place by the necessities of Christianization or missionary work, unique lines of ideas, expositions and religious work and conceptualization take body and form. Such is valid for any environment, creating numerous forms of Catholic expression organized along regional, national and cultural lines, each distinct and somehow, mysteriously, part of the same cosmological universe.