There’s a strange discomfort that comes with the word tradition these days. It can feel like an anchor, a shackle or a heavy weight at times., depending on who’s holding it. In secular discourse, tradition is often seen as the antithesis of progress – something dusty, rigid, inherited without interrogation. Sometimes, in my Church, it’s weaponised as a shield against uncertainty or as a reason to refuse evolution. I suggest that tradition, rightly understood, is neither nostalgia nor control. It is a living memory. A sacred inheritance. A tether to meaning in a time that so often seems dislocated and disoriented.
Fidelity does not mean stasis. We are called to deepen, to unfold the truth that has been handed down, not merely to parrot it back. If tradition is to mean anything in a Church that still dares to call itself Catholic (universal) then it must remain both rooted and responsive. Aquinas reminds us that veritas (truth) is the conformity of the intellect to reality. But reality shifts. Cultures evolve. Voices once silenced – women, the poor, the marginalised – now rise with a clarity and urgency that simply can no longer be ignored. To pretend that divine truth can only be understood in a single register is not orthodoxy. It is idolatry of the familiar. We are not called to abandon tradition, far from it, but we are called to ask: What do we honour? And what have we enshrined that was never holy to begin with?
Let’s be honest. Some traditions have protected the sacred. Others have protected power. The two are not the same and to name this is not betrayal, it is fidelity to the Gospel. Jesus himself was not a curator of comfort. He was deeply formed in the Jewish tradition, yet radically open to the Spirit’s work beyond it. He healed on the Sabbath. He touched the unclean. He restored dignity before he enforced rules.
In today’s secularised world where individualism is exalted and truth is often reduced to personal opinion, tradition offers something essential: a way of anchoring identity in a reality more enduring than algorithms or passing trends. Yet tradition cannot speak to the modern heart unless it learns to breathe anew. Karl Rahner once warned that “the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not be at all”, a line that feels less like prophecy and more like necessity in our disenchanted age. The task of tradition now is not to retreat into self-preservation, but to open itself to wonder, to mysticism, to silence, to the slow, unfolding work of the Spirit who, as John’s Gospel promises, “will lead you into all truth.” But that kind of openness requires courage. Especially from women. Especially from those on the margins. When we speak of evolving tradition, we are often accused of threatening the foundations. If the foundations are divine, they will not crumble. And if they do crumble perhaps they were not divine to begin with.
We must learn to distinguish between what is sacred and what is merely familiar. The Incarnation itself (God made flesh) was a scandalous act of tradition’s evolution. The infinite clothed itself in time. The eternal entered history. Tradition is not about preserving the exact form of the jar. It’s about protecting the water within.
So let us honour tradition. Let us light the candles, sing the psalms, receive the sacraments with awe. But let us also make room. Let us not confuse faithfulness with fear. Let us risk reimagining, not because we want to leave the Church behind, but because we believe in her enough to want her whole.
We need tradition. But we also need fire.
We need memory. But we also need prophecy.
And we need the Church – not just as it was, but as it could be.
Because tradition, at its best, is not the silence of the past.
It is the echo of God still speaking.
The Female Theologian 