Richard Simon

Next up: Padre Richard Simon. He was a French priest, despite that his works were more popular among the English and Germans. So: "Simón", forthwith.

Simón is that figure we'd been wanting since the whole scriptura cult began: a Catholic who could argue for the Church's rôle in maintaining the Faith, from the standpoint of the Scripture being perhaps imperfect. The irony - as Wiker and Hahn point out - is that the same Church Tradition was thereby indicted as having delivered a poor edition of the text.

Simón performed brilliantly at explaining how the Greek, the Latin, and the Hebrew are all at variance, and at showing how translations have failed. What he forgot, apparently, was to throw any new support to the thus-weakened Tradition. As a result, Simón's legacy ended up with the ultra-Protestants, the laïcists: those who weren't going to support either the Pope nor the Lutherans.

Since then of course many Catholics have stepped up to trace lines of doctrine from the New Testament (Nestle-Aland edition) to the Apostolic Fathers to Justin to Clement Alexandrine to Jerome and finally to our Church. But not Simón. And not, for some time, Simón's Catholic peers. The Jesuits disputed him - having their own agenda. The French king just burned his books (or tried to). By the time Catholic scholars had reapplied Tradition, the damage was done.

This may be moot these days. Since Pius IX, the Tradition has rather gone out of fashion in Catholic literature. Timothy Flanders, who found his way from Protestantism to Orthodoxy to Catholicism exactly along the Tradition's path, has noted that we're being fed Encyclicals these days. Pope Benedict XVI - a theologian - at least tempered this with theological treatises, not to be taken as Papal.

Flanders doesn't like it. He'd rather the Pope was more orthodox (you can take that as you may), supporting the Tradition more than making new pronouncements. I agree. The progress of Western ethics, and the improvement in Western lives owes everything to the Church. The Tradition is where the Church documented it all.