“The origins of many Catholic traditions are often somewhat obscure.”
Of course they are obscure. They arose among simple people how either couldn’t or simply didn’t write down when they started or why. I can’t see why having an historical record for traditions, especially religious traditions, is an issue. I have to say that such a pov is both very Western, very “modern” and very scholastic. I should think that the last thing the Latin church would want to be required to do would be to establish clearly, with “record citations” its many otherwise obscure traditions.
The English Reformation was primarily a top-down revolution which aimed to abolish the popular Christianity of the times and replace it with the imagined Christianity of the Reformers.
Exactly!