The generation before.

Jul 11, 2006

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Rod Dreher asks a good question at the Crunchy Con blog.

I’m 39 years old, and the sort of person to resort quickly to anger at the previous generation for so thoroughly trashing our heritage, especially within the Catholic Church. But as is often remarked, things wouldn’t have collapsed so suddenly within 1960s Catholicism in the US and Europe if everything had been okay in the 1950s. I guess I’m not really interested in wasting any more energy deploring the revolutionaries, and instead want to understand what made them revolutionaries so that those of us whose task it is to rebuild from the ruins they left us don’t make mistakes that could lead our children and grandchildren to such a suicidal backlash.

Any ideas? Was the 1960s-1970s upheaval in the U. S. Church just part of the general, whole-culture zeitgeist, or was there something sinister lurking in 1940s and 1950s style Catholicism specifically? Something that the 60s-70s people were trying to correct, and wound up overcorrecting?

Comments

4 responses to “The generation before.”

John

July 11, 2006

Zeitgeist schmeitgeist.
It doesn’t have to be so complicated.
All this looking for hidden rot is part and parcel of the error that got us here in the first place: too much faith in people.
Things collapse all the time without being rotten. The thing is, most people most of the time are kind of dumb. They’ll follow a clever talker anywhere.
There’s been no great coming-of-age. People, except maybe Jesuits and manish nuns, didn’t get all ‘mature in their faith’.
Take this foolhardy faith in weak humanity, mix in a mass fit of dumping all correction and rules, toss in an orgy of novelty; what the heck did we expect to happen?

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james

July 12, 2006

oh honestly. That’s a typical response from John. A lot of hot air and nothing in the way of an answer. Even John, with his twenty-something years is unable to look back pre-60s in what can only ever be rose-tinted spectacles. He wasn’t there. The ‘revolutionries’ of the 60s were. For some reason, they werent satisfied. Their needs were not being met, they weren’t being evangelised. the Church, for all its good, failed to reach them. And they had a great Liturgy (no New Mass there!) So something was amiss. Its a question the Trads never really want to look at, and seem unable to without getting all hot under the collar and miserable about bearded nuns and the like. Its a shame becuase all the nuns I know are in their twenties and thirties, very holy, and wear habits to the ground and wimpoles. And they’re too young to remember the Traditional Mass.

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bearing

July 12, 2006

Well, I’m just asking. I wasn’t there.
Since what happened in the 60s/70s was unprecedented, and it couldn’t have come out of nowhere, I figure there are three hypotheses for the cause. (1) Something was going on within the church in the 40s and 50s, perhaps dormant, that exploded in the 60s. (2) The wider culture changed abruptly(that’s where I was going with the zeitgeist thing, JC) and it in turn changed the church. Though we might well ask why the church was so willing to engage with the culture in that particular way at that particular time. Which brings us to (3) some peculiar combination of the two.
Progressive CW seems to be that the whole church successfully repressed progressivism for 1900+ years until it finally wiggled free in the sixties. That sounds illogical to me, rather, that it’s more likely that something built up in the church over only the generation or two prior to the Boomers.
OTOH there’s always the theory that Vatican II and the sexual revolution collided with spectacularly bad timing to produce all this. It’s certainly the easy assumption to make. And maybe it’s right. I don’t know.

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mandamum

July 12, 2006

One thing to consider is that none of us has ever lived in the century following any other council. One of my professors commented that it tends to take about 100 yrs for the wisdom of the council to really be taken in by the Church, and in between there can be a lot of upheaval. I’m sadly lacking in my knowledge of Church history, but I think I remember this prof mentioning something about their being more…Arians? perhaps… in the years after the council dealing with whichever particular heresy it was than there were before the council, because it takes a while for change to sink in. No matter what , there will always be the richness of the writings of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church and other saints, along with the Bible, to help us individually to live Holy, Catholic lives.

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