Rituals and Progress

The child is instinctively ritualistic. It is wrong to think that rituals are ornaments added to life; they are the acts by which life is transmitted. Informality is an embellishment to natural form; it has to be learned, when formality is simply given. The child in his primitive rituals may bow down before false gods, but he will not think it odd to bow down. He has to be stopped from it by an adult. He may think the dark in the closet is evil and the reflection on the wall is an intelligent spirit; but he will not think that there is no evil, or that angels are impossible. He has to be given that misinformation by an adult. Ritual gives the young an automatic posture; they do not feel a need to invent experience, for they are too busy beholding it. The loss of ritual consciousness is an adult complex, by that I do not mean it is mature, only that it is not youthful. One sign of the loss of the ritual sense is the increased need to manipulate the rites of life to make them "more meaningful." Youth is happily free of that, and rightly feels patronized when liturgies and protocols are toned down to an adult's idea of youthful taste. Ancient rituals are the youngest things in the world, for they are as elastic as tradition itself. Human though can imagine progress, but can only attain it through a sacred tradition. Without this pious intuition, progress becomes progressivism, a motion never quite in motion, a movement anywhere except somewhere. Having reject the life of tradition, the progressivist loses the vitality of his goal and ends up nowhere.

At the moment, progressivism has become entrenched in the universities which have become the establishment for the anti-establismentarians of the 1960s. The progressivism assumes a variety of names in this time capsule:"structuralism", "deconstructionism", "radical feminism". And it still operates against the purpose of the university by making it home to a totalitarian defensiveness and a fortress of reaction at war with the working world.

From "Piety and Learning" in Beyond Modernity: Reflections of a Post-Modern Catholic by Fr. George Rutler (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987)