- Feb 5, 2002
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The Church, having identified too intimately with the culture, has been wallowing in more “liberal” talk of forgiveness, mercy, compassion, and love, but without a corresponding and primary emphasis on truth.
Tim Sullivan’s recent piece for the Associated Press on the state of the Church in America has made the rounds in Catholic circles, and it feels like a generally accurate snapshot of where things are and where they’re heading. Sullivan looks at recent developments at St. Maria Goretti parish in Madison, Wisconsin, and Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, arguing that they’re emblematic of a broader shift across the U.S. toward a “new, old” Church: Latin and Gregorian chant in the liturgy, cassocks, and habits on priests and religious, and dogma and doctrine back in the conversation.
My home parish and current parish—both in the more liberal Northeast—have seen the same shift: Latin, ad orientem, and kneelers for Communion have become standard again, while guitars, Eucharistic ministers, and altar girls have become rare. In discussing the AP piece with colleagues, they reported similar trends in the South and Midwest. It’s all anecdotal, but also undeniable: love it or hate it, change is afoot all over the country—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes in fits and starts, but all in a similar direction.
And, as Sullivan notes, the change is especially palpable among young people. The young priests and young families who are still showing up in churches are not doing it because it’s expected of them—if anything’s expected of them now, it’s that they will drift away—but because they know they’re lost without it. The Church’s ancient traditions and doctrines are not a suffocating burden but a breath of fresh air—an exciting new discovery of hidden treasure in the muddy and barren fields of relativism.
And as these Gen-Xers and millennials more and more rise up to take the helm of the Church’s institutions, that excitement in our shifting moment will define the Catholicism of the future in this country. In fact, whereas many doomsday voices online have warned of an invasion of indifferentist modernism in the Church, the real internal threat facing the Church in the decades to come may well end up being a radical traditionalist counter-reaction to the Second Vatican Council and all the popes in its wake.
Continued below.
www.catholicworldreport.com
Tim Sullivan’s recent piece for the Associated Press on the state of the Church in America has made the rounds in Catholic circles, and it feels like a generally accurate snapshot of where things are and where they’re heading. Sullivan looks at recent developments at St. Maria Goretti parish in Madison, Wisconsin, and Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, arguing that they’re emblematic of a broader shift across the U.S. toward a “new, old” Church: Latin and Gregorian chant in the liturgy, cassocks, and habits on priests and religious, and dogma and doctrine back in the conversation.
My home parish and current parish—both in the more liberal Northeast—have seen the same shift: Latin, ad orientem, and kneelers for Communion have become standard again, while guitars, Eucharistic ministers, and altar girls have become rare. In discussing the AP piece with colleagues, they reported similar trends in the South and Midwest. It’s all anecdotal, but also undeniable: love it or hate it, change is afoot all over the country—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes in fits and starts, but all in a similar direction.
And, as Sullivan notes, the change is especially palpable among young people. The young priests and young families who are still showing up in churches are not doing it because it’s expected of them—if anything’s expected of them now, it’s that they will drift away—but because they know they’re lost without it. The Church’s ancient traditions and doctrines are not a suffocating burden but a breath of fresh air—an exciting new discovery of hidden treasure in the muddy and barren fields of relativism.
And as these Gen-Xers and millennials more and more rise up to take the helm of the Church’s institutions, that excitement in our shifting moment will define the Catholicism of the future in this country. In fact, whereas many doomsday voices online have warned of an invasion of indifferentist modernism in the Church, the real internal threat facing the Church in the decades to come may well end up being a radical traditionalist counter-reaction to the Second Vatican Council and all the popes in its wake.
Continued below.
On that Associated Press piece and the future of the Church in America
www.catholicworldreport.com
