In an interview which the historian Frank Linderman recounted, Plenty Coups, traditional chief of the Crow Nation, refused to speak of his life after the destruction of the buffalo. The chief’s story did not include the years between the passing of the buffalo until his death in 1932. 

“When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this, nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere,” Plenty Coups said. 

For the Crow people, the buffalo provided not only means of physical sustenance but the core of their religion and culture. Stealing horses from their enemy, the Sioux, was how young Crow warriors established their status and contributed to the success of the buffalo hunt. So too were the inter-tribal wars in which they fought, writes philosopher Jonathan Lear in Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. 

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But the white man criminalized horse stealing and ended warfare among various Indigenous nations. These actions, along with the settlers’ eradication of the buffalo, devastated traditional Crow culture. 

Plenty Coups developed a form of hope over his remaining years, but it was hope focused on revival of the old ways. However, those ways are gone forever. The Crow will not become great again, if greatness consists in revival of traditions of war and theft.

In my reading, Lear is describing something similar to what took place in the Catholic Church in the Western world following the Second Vatican Council. Church attendance collapsed over the next several years. 

There has been an irresolvable controversy over the cause of that mass exodus from the pews, the priesthood and religious life. Progressives say the exodus was due to changes in society, and that numbers began to dwindle more than 10 years before Vatican II. Conservatives maintain the Church’s reforms themselves undermined the faith of the people. My view is that both factors contributed to the decline in church attendance, and there is no way to discern the extent to which either factor contributed to the decline.

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The conservative argument is not easily dismissed. On one hand, many devout, traditional Catholics were deeply unsettled, perhaps even traumatized, by the changes to the liturgy, especially by the move to use vernacular languages in the Mass. To them, a desacralization of the central act of the worshiping community occurred.

On the other hand, the vast majority of Catholics welcomed those changes. It was about time that lay people heard the prayers in a language they understood, and that the grim regime of obligation, fasting, abstinence and mortification was no longer compulsory. 

Yet, for the most part, the traditionalists remained devout. It was the majority whose numbers were decimated. One might conclude that they were never committed to the faith, and they simply drifted away from church practice. Perhaps for some that was the case. But I am of the opinion – and it can only be an opinion – that the reforms unsettled cultural Catholics at least as much as it had conservative churchgoers. 

Their hearts fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. Without their knowing it, the erasure of traditions had led their hearts to stop singing.

I am not one who believes the liturgical reforms should have never occurred. If anything, they were centuries overdue. Even less do I support a return to Latin and the old form of the liturgy. Catholicism does not need to be made great again; it remains ever great. 

Further, a Latin revival would not lead people to stream toward the Church. It would drive away more of the faithful who remain firm in their religious practice.

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The hope we now need is something like what Lear called radical hope. That hope is rooted, not in changeable aspects in our traditions, but in the Great Tradition of the kingdom of God. Joseph Ratzinger once wrote, “The Church knows only one saving tradition: the tradition of Jesus, who lives his life from the Father, who receives himself from his Father and continually gives himself back to his Father.” 

The saints understood this. Their love was for Jesus and the Trinity. Particular forms of ritual can bolster that love, but they can also substitute for true devotion. This Great Tradition looks back but also forward. Our hope lies in the Lord, and we long for a world in which the Beatitudes are the foundation for our living. No tradition short of that will suffice.