To me, this is a real question:

Is the tradition (a) the lived experience of liturgy as it is actually carried out, or (b) a certain body of work, no matter how far removed from anything resembling common experience, defined as such by ecclesiastical law?

I tend not (personally) to balk at the use of "tradition" as meaning "what has been handed down to me." I do, however, think that there are good and bad traditions. There are also traditions that, in many places, while they certainly remain part of a common patrimony / heritage, have become lost.

For fun: the "Kyrie" from the St. Cecilia Mass of Fr. J.E. Turner, O.S.B. Is it traditional? These Korean Catholics have kept it up for well over 100 years now, along with many of the Ordinaries of Korman et al. that would commonly have been heard in American Catholic Churches of the first half of the past century. If it hasn't made the jump from novelty to custom / tradition already, when will it? Can it ever?

I've had some numinous experiences with these old Ordinaries. Some merry men (and women) and I used to journey every year to a country church about an hour away from home, in the days after Christmas (usually St. Stephen's or Holy Innocents) where the pastor employed our services for a noontime High Mass with Carols. The organ was installed in 1912, the church was about large enough for 200, with beautiful painting and a lovely high altar. Middle of nowhere. No traffic noise, nothing of the kind. Usually the lights were off, too. You could easily forget what year, decade, or even century it was out there. We usually sang an Ordinary from their [century-] old choir files. Something of this kind, very Romantic and spirited.

It was special to experience. Not just to sing music from this broad Catholic tradition, but the specific music that was used for divine worship in that very space, a century ago, on the instrument on which it had been first heard. I've never had a stronger sense of the communion of saints than those moments.

And yet, unlike them (in all likelihood), we sang the full Proper in Gregorian Chant. And in this, there was a tremendous sense too of the beauty of these "recovered" traditions.

Or should we react to these things in the same way that the Taliban reacted to the Bamiyan Buddhas -- an idol is an idol, no matter how old, and subject to legitimate smashing? ;-)

My wife devised a Good Friday evening para-liturgy for our parish, which caught on immediately. She made minor changes to it most years, but one change in the fifth, or was it the fourth? year brought forth complaints, from people who knew that she organised it but did not know she devised it, "Oh, but we've always done ..."

Yeah, I would like to put a bullet through that damned eagle and end all our misery from having to perform it. It is popular for funerals to a degree I do not pretend to understand. How Great Thou Art and Amazing Grace are also traditional in the parish. Parts of my choir will show up and sing tomorrow but they take Christmas Day off, too. Their reasoning is they came at midnight and shouldn't have to come back. Since they have been doing that for better than 50 years, I will not even try to change it.

What many call tradition is actually a travesty

tradition is actually a travesty

or, in Austrian, Schlamperei.

BHCordova,

"New Tradition" is an oxymoron, but new practices can, indeed, come into existence. Those practices grow organically from tradition. The challenge in our day is that something non-Catholic was grafted onto the tree, and now "organic" growth must come again from the original tree instead of the grafted one.