Kudos to Abp Aymond

Archbishop Gregory Michael Aymond of New Orleans has announced that the Archdiocese is publishing the sacramental records of slaves and free blacks online in commemoration of Black History Month. This is a good thing in itself, making these important historical records more easily available to researchers. But, it is also a "distinctly Catholic" thing to do. Our tradition is not merely a set of documents. Our tradition attests to the spiritual lives of real people, our forebears, who carried on the tradition they received and handed it on to their children. Unlike the "sola Scripture" crowd, we are not Catholics because we happened to have been born in a place where there are Bibles lying about. We are Catholic Christians because we have been baptized into a community of faith, rooted in Revelation because we are rooted in the tradition that carried that Revelation forth to our own time.