Which is greater to a Catholic, Scripture or Tradition?

The short answer is that both are essential! A document from the Church titled Dei Verbum gives us some wonderful insight into the relationship between Scripture and Tradition:

“Hence there exists a close connection and communication between sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture. For both of them, flowing from the same divine wellspring, in a certain way merge into a unity and tend toward the same end. For Sacred Scripture is the word of God inasmuch as it is consigned to writing under the inspiration of the divine Spirit, while sacred tradition takes the word of God entrusted by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit to the Apostles, and hands it on to their successors in its full purity, so that led by the light of the Spirit of truth, they may in proclaiming it preserve this word of God faithfully, explain it, and make it more widely known. Consequently it is not from Sacred Scripture alone that the Church draws her certainty about everything which has been revealed. Therefore both sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of loyalty and reverence” (9).

Scripture and Tradition together form what is called the “deposit of faith,” which is everything that God has revealed to us for our salvation. Both are needed for our salvation. Scripture is God’s Word and is the means by which God continues to speak to us day by day; however, Tradition is what enables us to understand and practice the Word of God properly.

Let’s also consider this from a historical point of view. Take, for instance, the four Gospels. All of them were written several decades after Jesus’ Resurrection and Ascension. The early Christian communities realized that the original witnesses (and even the disciples of the original witnesses) were getting old or being put to death in persecution. Therefore, the authors from within these communities (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) put the testimonies of the disciples, the words of Jesus, and the living memory of his ministry into writing. That means that in the case of the Gospels, Scripture came out of Tradition. Then later on, even after those original Christian communities had long since died, their descendants (even down to our own day) were able to continue interpreting and living out the divinely revealed truths of the Scriptures because of the Tradition that had been passed down to them. Without that Tradition, those communities would have misinterpreted the Word and gone astray (and many did). There would be no Scripture without Tradition, and there would be no Tradition without Scripture.

The same document mentions that “the Church has always venerated the divine Scriptures just as she venerates the body of the Lord” (21). Without a doubt, the Scriptures hold a supreme honor in the life of the Church. The reason it holds that honor, though, is because Tradition preserved it as it was handed on from one generation to the next. Both are sacred because both are inspired by the Holy Spirit. And both serve the same purpose: to reveal to souls the divine truths of our faith, to lead souls to encounter the Living God, and to guide us to salvation.