The heart of Catholicism is the conservative instinct: gratitude, trust, reverence, reception, celebration of and loyalty to the PAST. The past, which is to say memory and history, is brimming over, even exploding with the Good and the True and the Beautiful. For Christians, the salvific Event of Jesus Christ permeates and animates the drama of human history: it was preceded by the Divine Romance with Israel over milenia and followed by the Spousal Drama, still in play, of Jesus with his Bride, which is also his Body, an ecclesial person, centered in Mary and the saints, and continuous-alive-fruitful-effervesent through history. And so, we turn daily, gratefully and expectantly, to the past: pondering in Scripture and Tradition the wondrous works of God as they continue daily in seamless continuity.
The past is not something separated from the present, but fully alive and present in concrete, specific ways: Scripture, the sacraments, Church authority and the ever-new movements of the Holy Spirit. As such it is ever new, fresh and creative: moving us with passionate expectancy into a rich future, a future which ever startles us by its continuity with and fidelity to the past and its genuine novelty, freshness and youth.
The polar opposite of this filial gratitude: ingratitude, resentment, disparagement and an arrogant sense of superiority towards the past.This attitude is the heart of anti-Catholicism and is the inner form of the great disruptions of history: the Reformation as rejection of authority and the past and the Enlightenment as elevation of reason and rejection of faith and tradition. The very word "modernity" implies a rupture with the past: the "modern" is of course enlightened, scientific, inevitably progressive and evolutionary, technologically in control, evolving always to peace and health. By this logic the past is obviously ignorant, superstitous, reactionary, trapped in tribal violence and bigotry. The "post-modern" is of course even worse: it unmasks the delusions and pretensions of modernity as control, reason and peace to reveal that all is will-to-power, domination, and the war of all against all. It falls into the dark nihilism of Nietzche, Satre and Foucault...into despair, unending battle, resentment and jealousy.
This spirit of ingratitude, resentment and arrogance erupted feverishly in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. The Civil Rights Movement was an exception: that was a revival of traditional Christian love and justice which energized the amazing Evangelical Black Community and elicited a gracious response from the white mainstream, still enjoying its own post-war revival under the likes of Billy Graham and Fulton Sheen. But the Sexual Revolution even more than a liberation of sexuality from fidelity and fecundity was a renouncing of tradition and its presence in the present as authority. The Boomer generation (I know since I am a member) fundamentally rejected the past as authoritative in favor of the present as a self-choice project, including obviously the slaughter of the innocents. The amorphous "Spirit of Vatican II", unrooted in the actual documents, is the license to reject the Past in a "hermeneutic of discontinuity. The "great awokement" with its racist and transgressive fascinations is the most current, intense and rabid eruption of this hatred of the past. To be "woke" is to be viscerally anti-Catholic.
By contrast, the great moments in Catholic history are always returns to the past that explode in fresh, creative fruitfulness: the Renaissance as return to the ancients; the Counter-Reformation as solidification of centuries of development; the 4th century monastics; the 13th century mendicants; the explosive missionary waves from 1500 onward. In my lifetime I would identify the Resourcement or Communio theology (DeLubac, etc) that guided the Council and its interpretation by John Paul and Benedict as well as the renewal movements (often lay) that complemented and enfleshed that theology.Both ae retrievals even as they are eruptions of creativity and fecundity.
So, the stereoptype of Catholics having tons of children is accurate. Standing upon a glorious past ("we stand on the sholders of giants") we anticipate a magnificant future and want to share it generously. By contrast, the modern, standing on the fragile delusions of technological control and progress, is contraceptive and sterile; while the post-modern, drowning in the swamp of resentment, suspicion and despair, goes preverse and suicidal.
Currently, we see the vacuous, empty Modern and Post-Modern universes disintegrating and self-destructing in front of us. But we live in a present that is not constituted by this chaos and lunacy, but by the efficacious, infallible, ineffable and invincible yet concrete presence of a Past that contains the Eternal, the Infinite, the Divine. We can never be adequately grateful, trusting, hopeful!
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