By SHAUN KENNEY
To be Irish is to know that in the end, the world will break your heart. This is a paraphrasing of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s commentary after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in the book One Thousand Days, and as we are coming up on the fifty-fifth anniversary of that untimely event, perhaps it is worth reflecting on how the world has changed.
Of course, for Catholics in America the world was much different. The Novus Ordo was still replacing the old Tridentine Rite Mass, our priests were revered and honored in American culture, our nuns taught our Catholic children and tended to our sick in Catholic hospitals. It was still a time when a Catholic could be born in a Catholic hospital, be taught in Catholic schools, participate in Catholic civic organizations all his life, die in a Catholic hospital, and be buried in a Catholic graveyard.
Such are the virtues of parallel institutions. Then came Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Great Society; Richard Milhous Nixon and the nationalization of education; a series of sexual abuse scandals — and exhausted, we find ourselves in a condition where Catholics have changed our own culture to fit what could be called a more Elizabethan standard.
During the sixteenth century, Jesuits practically invaded England, both in an effort to restore the jewel of Christendom to the Mother Church and in an effort to persuade Queen Elizabeth that a program of religious toleration was both beneficial and benevolent (and in the event she died without an heir, the likelihood of a Catholic succession welcomed by a Catholic populace).
The journal of Fr. John Gerard, SJ, entitled Autobiography of a Hunted Priest, is full of tales that read like Robin Hood but for the soul — evading the English while hiding in cupboards, offering Catholic recusants some modicum of normalcy during a time where being Catholic was a death sentence.
It is no small wonder why — in the 55 years since Camelot — the Catholic Church’s presence in the United States has changed so radically.
Instead of a system of Catholic parochial schools, we have a network of Catholic home-schooling cooperatives, made necessary because our government-backed public schools see fit to impose their secular values with the fanaticism of a religion while excoriating those who even attempt to introduce sacred ones.
Much of the old Catholic superstructure has been co-opted by the state in the wake of the Great Society. Catholic charities are either in thrall to government grants or staffed by those who see themselves as extensions of the Democratic Party. USCCB staffers openly share rainbow ribbons and flaunt their support for Planned Parenthood on social media. Our charitable works — feeding the homeless, for example — take on the flavor of a proletarian uprising at times.
JPII’s High Expectations
One really cannot help but reflect upon the trickle of information coming out of the so-called “Youth Synod” as if the under-40 set needed to be appeased. Catholicism has been in a bunker mentality since Napoleon, and the secular revolutions have been chipping away at the zeal once reserved for the sacred with small hammers here, bayonets there, gas chambers here, and finally social programs. After all, most people do not want to be helped; just fed.
Thus the Youth Synod takes on a very different character than what Catholics under 40 were used to during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II. During the 1980s and 1990s, John Paul II did not lower his expectations of us, but rather set them on high.
Rather than dissimulate, he encouraged. Rather than tell us to compromise, John Paul II asked us to never compromise — and it is through the challenge for us to faithfully live the Gospel that we discover the charity, joy, and humility to look at our fellow persons and see Christ — to encourage them rather than cut cards with the Devil.
But this was not the language of the synod.
Instead, we are treated to words such as “accompaniment” in cf. 150 when asked how to respond to those who view themselves as an extension of their sexuality. We are treated to words such as “synodality” when asked what our standards should be. We are told that lay Catholics are no longer asked to come to the table if they express an opinion different from that of the Lavender Mafia, that publications faithful to the Magisterium should be registered somehow in an odd reversal of the Index of Forbidden Books — but rather, an Index of Approved Blogs. (See an October 30 posting at https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com.)
Pope Francis’ remarks about a Church under attack only confirm the “bunker mentality” hypothesis. “No one attacks our Mother,” thundered Francis. The sexual abuse crisis — rather than deserving the attention and reaction of the full Body of Christ — was compartmentalized as a leftover of Irish-based Jansenism infecting the English-speaking Church: the United States, Ireland, and Australia.
But what about our children?
This is where the inwardness of the Youth Synod seems so off-putting to those of us who still identify as young (though I am at the very precipice of middle age, to be sure). The generation that mucked it up intends to instruct to the generation responsible for restoring Catholicism how this restoration should proceed — along a path of synodality and accompaniment, one supposes.
Certainly, one can concede that “rigidity” or the enforcement of rules for their own sake is not the charism of the Church by any stretch. Most Catholics know this, even if those on the political left continue to throw the accusation as so many Ping-Pong balls against a brick wall. And in America, we are the sons and daughters of an Irish Catholicism that pounded the Baltimore Catechism into our heads as an insulation against a hostile American Protestantism that today has either exhausted itself of descended into a lukewarm socialism.
Yet the process of “reform” followed up by a “reform of the reform” just 50 years after the first reform has demonstrably failed us as Catholics should be of great concern to those of us who count on tradition and fidelity to the Magisterium as the sure and reliable means (though not the substance of) holiness.
Most of all, when the Eucharist and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist are treated as something ordinary? This instructs the faithful that what is holy and reverent can somehow be treated as something mundane and unnecessary. When the reverence of a Mass is exchanged for liturgical dancers, when Oremus hymnals are traded for Gather hymnals, when organs and choirs are replaced with drums and guitars, when homilies are replaced with PowerPoint?
Keep The Flame Alive
Pope Francis has promised to follow up the magisterial parliament with an apostolic constitution of his own, and despite the heroic efforts by the African bishops and others to preserve the integrity of the Magisterium, the clear and overt efforts by the reformers to debase the Magisterium in order to provide wider currency (a carefully chosen word — as this has just as much to do with making Catholicism more palatable to the secular world as it does with appeasing secular governments who issue the grants that enable the Church’s charitable work overseas) were in plain view, and their disappointment and anger was visible indeed.
For those of us still keeping the flame alive, we should remember that the Holy Spirit is guiding this process with an intent and reasoning far beyond our own. I don’t pretend to understand it, nor is it my place to judge. But we can all still discern a spirit that is of God versus a more worldly spirit designed to turn the Vatican into just another non-governmental organization.
One hopes and prays that Pope Francis — having seen the ill-intent of these reformers — will do just as Pope Paul VI did with Humanae Vitae 50 years ago and plant his flag for an authentic Catholicism in the public square. Then again, I am an Irishman . . . the world might eventually break my heart anyway.
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Questions? Comments? Brilliant thoughts? Please feel free to send any correspondence for First Teachers to Shaun Kenney, c/o First Teachers, 5289 Venable Road, Kents Store, VA 23084 — or if it is easier, simply send me an e-mail with First Teachers in the subject line to: svk2cr@virginia.edu.
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