Tradition—"Whatever Remains, However Improbable"

There is a well-known quote from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, to which I have always been partial. It goes, "When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Doyle's quote speaks to the mechanics of problem solving—those sincerely interested in getting to the heart of a matter must be willing to put all options on the table. This is especially true when the difficulty is seemingly insoluble and defies easy explanation. In such cases, when all obvious options have been exhausted, reason dictates that we proceed down the line to those less obvious. We already know what doesn't work; our task is to discover what does, however counterintuitive it might seem. 

This attitude is, in my experience, what characterizes people and organizations who are truly interested in problem solving versus those who wish only to pay lip service to it whilst refusing to seriously try to fix anything. For many years I worked for a service company that was trying to find the best way to pay its employees. The employees worked appointments booked by the office, but each service call had the opportunity to turn into a larger job depending on the employee's ability to assess the client's needs and propose remedies. So the company wanted to find a way to compensate the employees in a way that provided a guaranteed liveable baseline while also incentivizing ingenuity, discipline, and salesmanship. In my eleven years with the company I saw them cycle through all kinds of pay structures involving salaries, hourly, commissions, bonuses, and all manner of combinations of the four. They were constantly assessing the strengths and weaknesses of their pay system in search of the happy medium. In the end, their diligence paid off and they found a pay structure that worked well for everybody—but only because every option was on the table. The company was sincere about actually solving the matter.

I was thinking about this today in relation to the Church. Sometimes I see parishes that are in an obvious state of decline: even the best-attended Sunday Masses have entire pews that are empty, a prevalence of congregants are gray-hairs, and you can tell from his homilies that the pastor is just phoning it in. Demographics are destiny, and if nothing changes, the parish will cease to exist in ten years. In some places, this describes the entire diocese.

Bishops pay lip-service to addressing the problem; their action plans are legion. For some, it is going to be snazzy new evangelization programs with names like "Put Out Into the Deep" and "Go and Make Disciples"—or alternately, depressing parish consolidation programs with names like "Faith Forward" or "Walking Together in Hope." For others, it will be attempts to shoe-horn the charismatic renewal into parishes in the naive hopes that it will manufacture excitement. There might be attempts at "man pandering" to draw Catholic men out of their lethargy while other parishes will lean heavily into social activism. There might be attempts to integrate parish catechesis with some fancy app, like parish prayer and discussion groups using Formed or Hallow. And there will certainly be little vocations prayer cards in the pews to read at the end of Mass asking God to "send workers into the harvest." 

Seems like parishes and dioceses are willing to try anything in an effort to strengthen their dying congregations...or I should rather say, almost anything, because there is one course of action that is noticeably absent—implementing a return to traditional liturgical practices. I'm not even talking about just the Traditional Latin Mass; imagine the rejuvenation of faith that would happen if a bishop were to simply mandate (a) ad orientem, (b) communion at the rails kneeling on the tongue, and (c) Gregorian chant and sacred polyphony. Time and again it has been demonstrated that a reorientation towards tradition is capable of regenerating the faith of Catholics through reintroducing them to the truly transcendent nature of traditional Catholic worship. Even if we set aside all the history and politics and bad blood that has surrounded this issue, it cannot be denied that, purely from a standpoint of raw efficacy, traditional Catholicism has a track record of success far better than any of the remedies the Church usually has recourse to.  

Sadly, such turns to tradition have only occurred on a micro level, here and there in tiny little pockets of the Catholic world. A general turn to tradition as a blueprint for diocesan renewal is never suggested. Not by the bishop. Not by the pope. If suggested by the priest, in a niggling, circumspect way with a cover of plausible deniability. 

But why neglect a remedy so obvious? Simply because the Church is not yet serious about fixing the problem. Above I mentioned the openness to ingenuity characteristic of organizations that are sincere about problem solving. When an entity is not sincere about problem solving, we see remedies shelved in the service of ideology. Have you ever worked for a company where a certain project or initiative was clearly an abject failure but it simply couldn't be allowed to fail because it was so-and-so's baby and so-and-so had too much clout in the corporate hierarchy to look bad. So excuses have to be found, manufactured if need be—anything rather than admitting that so-and-so's pet project has failed. When this happens, an institution is more interested in protecting reputations than finding solutions.

From an instituional perspective, this is where the Catholic Church remains in 2026. We have literally tried everything except a sincere turn towards tradition. If we were serious about solving our problems, we would at least be willing to try. I mean, what do we have to lose? If nine out of ten doors have been dead ends, what do you have to lose by opening the tenth? Nothing at all...unless you have staked your entire credentials upon insisting that the tenth door cannot be the way out. Unless you have spent years insisting there was nothing behind the tenth door worth seeing and have vested your entire institutional reputation upon that claim. Then of course you will do anything rather than open the tenth door. But a person who does such a thing isn't interested in actually finding a way out. 

The entire post-conciliar intellectual edifice is built upon the belief that Catholic tradition needed to be dismantled for the Church to move forward. From the bishops' perspective, therefore, the notion that tradition could actually be the answer to Catholic decline seems extremely improbable. But when you've ruled out everything else, "whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."