During three days in late October, 160 people marched the new pilgrim route from Ballarat to Bendigo.
In some ways, this pilgrimage is most emblematic of what the traditionalist movement is about.
On the face of things traditionalism in the Catholic Church is concerned with preserving our heritage of worship and piety. Certainly this is true. But if that were all, then the emergence of traditionalism among modern Catholics might seem no more than a parallel development to the conservation or, more potently, the ethnic identity movements.
While declining to disparage such analogies - because both movements, at their best, represent important countervailing influences against the tendency of western materialism to consume our heritage and to dissolve our identities - traditional Catholics are making a much bolder statement than either of these.
What stirs traditional Catholics to action is the conviction that Catholic faith and practice is the measure of human culture. They reject, consequently, the proposition that how we express the Christian truth today should be determined by forms presented by contemporary secular culture.
This later belief is the ruling idea behind the attempt to modernise the Catholic Church: in the first instance, it was conceived, in hubris, as the strategic doctrine upon which to mount a "final conquest" of the world by the Church; in the second, when the visions of spiritual triumph dissolved, it was transposed into a survival strategy. On the one hand, victory was to be assured by presenting Christianity in the guise of liberal humanism; on the other, our credibility is now justified by proofs of our humanist sympathies.
There are many things we could say about this strange phenomenon, but for the moment we confine ourselves to its strangest feature: to the fact that so much weight has been placed by Catholics upon that thing of human devising, a "pastoral orientation". Formulated by intellectuals, propagandised by bishops - who in their new role as official ideologists attributed authorship to the Holy Spirit - and implemented by an army of bureaucrats, the updating of the Catholic Church has been a classic essay in the (presumed) sufficiency of human means.
As we look back over the ages we can find nothing to compare with this "reform". The fact is that the spread, and the authentic reform, of the Christian faith have been works, not of human deliberation, but of divine inspiration.
If we consider the lives of the saints, what impresses us is their lack of plans. In so far as they were ambitious, it was with an ambition to do the will of God; and where His inspiration on this point was lacking they did the work which their duties of state required, or which custom enjoined, and waited until circumstances should indicate another path. Indeed, waiting for the Divine Providence to unfold, rather than busy striving to anticipate it, has been the mark of the saints.
Another thing the saints understood is that though we are "in the world", we are not "of the world". Our task is to preserve ourselves untainted by the world; and in order that we might hold to God while still in the world, we need our own Christian culture so that, humanly speaking, it becomes easier to use the graces poured out upon us.
Grace works through nature; and nature has decreed that human beings are social animals and that human societies generate rituals, meanings and symbols which identify, and uphold, what they are. Likewise with the Catholic people. They too need culture to sustain their identity, even though it be founded upon Christ and His Revelation. Culture, therefore, is called to reinforce the adhesion by grace to the Person of Christ and to His teaching. Secular culture, clearly, is incapable of assuming this role...which brings us back to the pilgrimage.
Pilgrimage is about building the alternative Catholic culture; it poses a question, and provides and answer, about how this might be done.
One does not plan to build a Christian culture. One simply lives it. If one does not know what to live, or how to live it, one looks to what our forbears did and how they did it. Whether it is relevant to modern man is not a central issue. It is relevant to Catholics - if they have not become like modern secular men - and they need to live it in order to persevere.
Whether Catholic culture should be changed in order to accommodate new developments thrown up by history is a redundant question. It does accommodate. The real question is how; and the answer is en passant: that is, by living the culture as art is lived: by developing such a mastery of, and sense of naturalness with, the great form that new incorporations are made into it, and developments flow out of it, at its own pace, and with comparative ease: these achievements neither being foreseen, nor aimed at, so much as being identified after the event. In this way Christians make themselves instruments of the Divine Providence which orders and unfolds the course of history and of all developments for good which occur among God's people.
Pilgrimage, then, is a case of learning by doing: of learning how to live a Christian culture by living it: of learning how to be a culture-builder by mastering the art of living today the Christian tradition: of preparing the future by making ourselves over, together with our Catholic culture, to the Lord of our destiny.
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