Catholic beliefs and doctrines have their roots in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, who founded the Catholic Church nearly 2,000 years ago. These beliefs have been codified in several different sources, namely Scripture and Tradition. Ah, yes, it’s that hot, Catholic buzzword, “Tradition.”
Some people shudder when they read it; others embrace it, holding it up high for all to see like a beacon in the fog. But what exactly is it? I mean, what’s the big deal? Why are some people repulsed by it, and others understand it? Catholic Tradition is not the horrendous “traditions of man” that are referenced in the Bible. In fact, for our purposes, let’s just throw the word Tradition out the window right now.
The Catholic Church (a.k.a. the universal community of believers that received the faith from the apostles) has existed for a long time—about 2,000 years, to be exact. The Church was born on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2) when the Holy Spirit came down upon the apostles, and has been going ever since.
Imagine if you were 2,000 years old. You would have a lot of experience, a lot of wisdom, and a lot of time for your faith to mature and develop. You would still be the original [insert name here], and the basic things about you would remain the same, but your understanding of those things would mature over time into something deep and powerful that only those who took some serious time to understand you might realize.
Looking in at you from the outside, I might be pressed to ask, “How the heck did he/she ever come to that conclusion?” But I am sure that if I asked you, in all your 2,000 years of experience and wisdom, how you came to such a conclusion, you would be able to explain it to me.
It wouldn’t be all that fair if I had only heard from your half-friends and those who appose you and your beliefs, (who, by the way, are all only about 400 years old or even younger) about the things you believed and the conclusions you made; relative to you, they are in their infancy, disagree with you due to a lack of understanding the circumstances, and are unwilling to accept the conclusions you have drawn based on your 2,000-year experience and wisdom.
All Catholic beliefs are in Scripture, but some of them developed over time. It was a maturing process based on much experience and the things handed down from previous generations. This is what the Catholic Church calls Tradition.
The Church never just made up doctrines out of thin air. What is commonly written in anti-Catholic literature about certain Catholic practices not appearing until the Middle Ages is really a big misunderstanding. Often, they cite the years and councils where the Church felt it was necessary to put an official stamp of approval or affirm practice that has been in Christianity since the beginning.
The Catholic Church did not make an “official” announcement on the canon of Scripture until the Council of Trent, because before that time, all Christians had accepted all books of the Bible. It was during the Reformation that the Church felt it was being challenged seriously enough, so it decided it was time to make official what Christendom had believed for all the centuries prior. The same thing is true when looking at the beliefs in transubstantiation, purgatory, the sacraments, prayer to saints, etc.
Some things, such as prayer devotions like the rosary, didn’t develop until later in church history. Devotions like these do not have the same status as the official teachings of the Church. Even so, saying that a devotional, like the rosary, is a man-made tradition of Catholicism and therefore not Christian is like saying that computers are horrible because they haven’t been around since the dawn of time. In order to get to the point where computers came into existence, we had to start somewhere. Through time, steps were taken to get to the point where we had enough knowledge to invent a computer. The same is true with the rosary.
Jesus taught us the basis of prayer in Our Father. Does this mean that all other prayers that follow that mold or that are different are bad because Jesus didn’t teach us those specific words? Of course not; that would be ridiculous. Jesus gave us a formula to pray just as the rest of the Scriptures give us the formula for our faith. The entire foundation for our belief is in Scripture. The rest is history.
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Source: About Catholics: Catholic Beliefs and Catholic Teachings, 2024 About Catholics, Last Accessed 2/2024
Saint Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church 