This article by Andrew Greeley has been on several Catholic blogs already but I finally got a chance to read it in its entirety.
Some forty years ago, as the dramatic events of the Second Vatican Council unfolded, a spotlight was trained on the Catholic Church. It was, commentators said, a revolutionary time.
From what I understand reading about the council, it wasn’t supposed to be revolutionary but pastoral. The implementation and interpretation of the council was abused and THAT was what was revolutionary. Personally, I don’t think we will ever see anything like it again because the many in the laity and priests and religious on the lower levels are much more informed and in touch, thanks in large part to the internet, good Catholic publishers, and EWTN.
For more than three decades now, as a sociologist and a priest, I have been tracking the evolution of the beliefs and practices of the Catholic clergy and laity in the United States. My most recent analysis, based on survey data that I and others have gathered periodically since Vatican II, reveals a striking trend: a generation of conservative young priests is on the rise in the U.S. Church. These are newly ordained men who seem in many ways intent on restoring the pre-Vatican II Church, and who, reversing the classic generational roles, define themselves in direct opposition to the liberal priests who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s.
I don’t think it is so much that they want to reverse the council as it is implementing the council correctly. I feel that much was lost with the bad implementation of the council. Popular devotions and Catholic culture in general took heavy casualties as the implementation in this country really made Catholic life more secular and in some ways much more Protestant. It certainly made us dumber. The crap that passed for religious education while I was growing up certainly didn’t pass on the fullness of the Catholic Faith to my generation.
The divisions created by Vatican II are not new, of course. Caught up in the reform euphoria that followed the council, the lower clergy and the laity almost immediately developed a new ideology based on respect for women and for the freedom (including the sexual freedom) of the laity. On these matters, quietly or loudly, the laity and the lower clergy did resist the teachings of the Church.
The correct word is dissent. I would also say “Some” in the laity and “Some lower clergy” dissented from the teachings of the Church. Not everyone felt Humanae Vitae for example, was wrong.
The backlash was swift.
It was? Well I suppose in church terms it was, but it’s taken most of my life to see any attempt to put the reigns on this nonsense.
Newly appointed bishops would restore the rules; theologians who disagreed would be silenced; and, as much as possible, the old order would be re-established.
Thus proving my point… none of that happened immediately after the council. It has happened during JPII’s reign and it has been a long time in coming.
Even some of the progressives of the council, frightened by the laity’s exuberant interest in change and by the declining influence of the Church in the United States, lost their nerve and joined in the call for a Restoration. Today’s young conservative priests are rallying to this call.
I think Father Greeley fails to give credit where credit is due!! Catholics like myself, embarrassed by our lack of catechesis, tired of being challenged by our Protestant brethren with “Are you saved?” and hungry for the devotions and practices of our early childhood have studied, prayed and worked voraciously to restore this part of our Catholic lifestyle and Culture that was taken from us. That in turn has been passed on to our children who are now coming of age and into the priesthood and convents.
But only about 40 percent of the younger generation believe that birth control is always wrong;a revealing failure of the Restoration efforts of the past thirty years, which have been fundamentally opposed to birth control.
Since when was birth control ever accepted by the church teaching and then had to be restored? This is liberal gobbledy gook for dissent, or as they use to say before Vatican II, heresy.
Priests as a group are simply not in touch with the laity. In the 2002 Los Angeles Times study only thirty-six of 1,854 priests identified clericalism as one of the major problems facing the Church’s laity. Astonishingly, only forty-seven priests thought the sex-abuse scandals worth mentioning. For some reason, priests of all generations are unable or unwilling to see the clergy as responsible for the departure of disaffected laypersons;a problem that today plagues the U.S. Church.
To explain the laity’s dissatisfaction with the Church, priests from all generations tend to trot out the usual litany: individualism, materialism, secularism, lack of faith, lack of prayer, lack of commitment, media bias, hedonism, sexual freedom, feminism, family breakdown, lack of education, and apathy. The advantage of such explanations is that they free priests from any personal responsibility and put the blame on factors over which the clergy cannot be expected to exercise much control. The rectory thus becomes an isolated citadel battered by cultural forces, which encourages precisely the sort of closed, band-of-brothers mentality that the Vatican II reforms were designed to break down.
Well there’s someone out of touch here Father Greeley and it’s you!! The band-of-brother mentaly by clergy who dissented from Catholic Moral teaching is what caused the sex scandal and sickened the laity. The “young Fogey’s” weren’t part of that problem, they’re the new solution – orthodoxy, orthodoxy, orthodoxy!!
Interestingly the liberal group at the Birth Control and Catholic Church site never got this either, but the liberal, dissenting group from the 60s and 70s are aging, graying and dying and because they “protected” themselves from offspring, they will now suffer the natural consequence – extinction.
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