WINE
On the shores of Lake Garda… Sebastian Morello on Traditional Catholics, and the wines of Lugana
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eaders of this wonderful quarterly will be aware that in July of last year the Holy Father issued an edict, Traditiones Custodes, aimed at frustrating the religious practice of Catholics who worship as did their forefathers in the Faith. In his accompanying letter, Pope Francis explained that such Catholics tend to identify the Church’s received tradition with what he called the ‘true Church’, and suggested that these Catholics saw the novel experiments and innovations of the past half-century as something of a departure from that ‘true Church’. Perhaps Pope Francis imagines that traditional Catholics think the Mystical Body no longer subsists in the hierarchical Church – a position comparable to the one Martin Luther adopted, with the ‘true Church’ being seen to be a spiritual entity visible only to God. But that is not what we think. Rather, traditional Catholics tend to think that some, perhaps most, of the Church’s hierarchs have gone offpiste with their theology, to the extent that believing the truths of the Faith can get a Catholic into trouble with ecclesial institutions. In this way, there seem to be two religions, or religious world views, competing within the visible institution of the Church. For this reason, traditional Catholics have repeatedly compared our own times to those of the Arian crisis of the 4th century, except our crisis is more or less world-wide. Eight years ago, the Latin Mass Society sponsored me to attend the Roman Forum Summer Symposium on Lake Garda, a twoweek scholarly conference during which attendees listen to lectures delivered by erudite academics from around the world and engage in fascinating discussions that continue late into the night over fabulous dinners. I knew little of the Old Rite at that time, but I had read many works by the Roman Forum’s legendary founder Prof. Dietrich von Hildebrand, philosopher, anti-Nazi activist, and champion of Catholic tradition. So, when I heard that the LMS was offering sponsorship for people to attend the Symposium, I approached them.
SPRING 2022
DOC Lugana is a small viticultural area just south of Lake Garda
Those involved in the Symposium share one thing in common: all are committed to defending the tradition of the Catholic Church. At this event I learned – and not because anyone said this to me, but rather by what I observed – that there are indeed two religions subsisting within the visible institution of the Catholic Church. There is the religion I encountered at the Symposium, and there is the religion I have encountered in many places elsewhere. There is the religion whose origin is wholly supernatural and whose purpose is the transformation of fallen human nature by divine grace, and there is a religion which differs not in kind from a sort of optimistic humanism, whose ‘values’ are indistinguishable from the acceptable middle-class sentiments of the modern West. One of these religions was practiced by Paul the Apostle, Francis of Assisi, Thomas More, Benedict Joseph Labre, and Maria Goretti, and one of these religions was not. It was at this Symposium that I discovered Catholicism as an integrated whole, within which Christian fellowship, liturgy, devotion, creed, the moral life, and the intellectual life are interwoven and inseparable. As one Roman Forum faculty member put it to me, “the Incarnation happened, and now everything is different.” I had known for some time that the religion which I so frequently encountered in the Catholic Church differed from that which I encountered in old Catholic books and lives of saints, but it was on the shore of Lake Garda that I discovered that the latter religion still lives. At the end of the Symposium, on account of my engagement in
the discussions and debates, von Hildebrand’s brilliant successor, the historian Prof. John Rao, invited me to join the faculty. My experience there had been comparable to a second conversion. I came home a ‘traditional Catholic’ – what less than a century ago was called a ‘Catholic’. I have returned each year since to deliver papers on various topics – that is, until pandemic-related regulations made it impossible. Fortunately, over the past two years I have had occasion to visit Lake Garda through the bottle. DOC Lugana is a small viticultural area just south of the Lake, and produces some of the most remarkably subtle, peachy, vanilla-ry, refreshing whites of the whole region. The terroir is extremely difficult to work with, being up to 50% clay in some areas, but that mineral-rich clay is the magic ingredient for bringing forth such perfect Trebbiano di Lugana grapes (now called Turbiana grapes since the recent DNA discovery that the vines do not belong to the Trebbiano family). This wine, when young, is perfect for white pasta dishes or shellfish, but it bottle-ages beautifully into a robust, complex and nutty wine which is still zesty and invigorating after ten years of waiting for its turn. My experience is that this is a wine that can be drunk late into the evening on its own, and especially lends itself to roaring debates over whether Anselm’s ontological argument contains a fallacy or – a little later into the night – the merits and demerits of the Jacobite uprisings. With the world put to rights, this wine ought to be used to toast our ancestors in the Faith, who kept alive the received tradition and liturgy in times of terrible pressure and persecution.
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