So something came to my mind lately, the way the Church throughout history has absorbed new members into it. Frankly when you think about it, the wealthy women of Rome and the servant caste of Indian society have very little in common, yet the Church has managed to spread to all these different peoples and unite them under common doctrine.
The question that came to my mind is, how can the traditionalist movement achieve something similar to this? The trad movement is obviously divided on church matters with Catholic, Orthodox, and high-church Protestants having very different views of the Church at large… Is it even possible for trads to be able to reach out into all levels of society? Or will it always be fragmented tribes acting as small islands of refuge in the sea of progressive ideology?
The purpose of uniting the ‘traditional’ believers in Christ for a common cause, would imo only be for restoring moral disciplinary values (sexual decency, hard work, ban abortions etc) and to perhaps fight in military conflicts against muslims in the upcoming civil wars in Europe.
When it comes to salvation, only one Church can be right, and while we can fight for making Christianity acceptable among the people again, we can’t ever evangelize under the same banner.
Much can be done though, hence why I support legio christi whole-heartedly and urge anyone else to
The doctrine is common, but how people express that doctrine is not. The TLM is the result of the culture of Western Europe, highly influenced by the Roman Empire centered in Rome, and later Milan (and perhaps a few other cities in Italy. Things got crazy late in the Empire). The Orthodox Church is influenced by the culture of Russia, Greece, and the Middle East, depending on which branch of the Orthodox Church you consider. However, nearly all branches of the Orthodox Church use some form of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, or the longer one of St. Basil the Great. The doctrine is the same. It is very similar to the TLM as well, though not perfectly identical. But the Church has adapted, so that each culture may more easily understand the doctrine.
I don’t think that the TLM with Gregorian chant/polyphony should become dominant throughout the world. It should, however, become dominant in the West, because that is where it fits with the culture. In Africa, they should have the same form of liturgy, but the songs they sing should be more from their culture. And I don’t mean current pop culture, no, not at all. I mean the culture of the people as it has been for hundreds of years, fulfilled in Christianity. As the Messiah fulfilled the prophecies of the Jews, and St. Paul showed the Greeks that Christ was the fulfillment of their philosophies, making them more complete and wholesome, making them truly awesome, so too should we present Christianity to the world as the fulfillment of each culture, not the replacement of it. Assimilation and the Traditionalist Movement should move together, and not against each other. Other cultures should be traditionally assimilated.
Before there can be a worldwide push, we must clean up our own relations. I foresee that this will happen once there is a traditionalist pope and rot in the Catholic church is cleaned up. The Orthodox must address its own issues as well, especially with Ukraine as it is now (possibly after Papa Putin annex’s it). The protestants must look to the past to establish authority and to have some form of accountability. How that will happen I do not know. But once this happens, we might begin to unite, and once we unite, perhaps we can march in line together.
A lot of my life’s work is going to be building up the Chinese Protestant churches. Part of that is to develop what liturgical, paraliturgical, and extraliturgical rites already exist for the Chinese, to make them a worthy successor to the rites kept by Confucius and after him by the Chinese state for more than 2000 years.