It Was the Worst of Times: American Church 1947-2023 (Letter 38 to Grands)

 We now consider the dark side: the distortions, dysfunctions and degradations of the Church of my time.

1. The Church Becomes Bourgeois.  The dark side of the Great Catholic Restoration of 1945-65 was that Catholicism became comfortable, accepted, privileged, respected, secure, and arrogant. Prior to 1945,  American Catholicism was immigrant, ethnic, poor-and-working class, afflicted by the Depression, despised by WASP and Fundamentalist, uneducated, ghettoized, and heroically militant in a world war. That changed drastically within the two decades of my childhood and adolescence. Catholics rose the capitalist ladder of affluence, status and privilege. Flight from ethnic, urban neighborhoods to monotonous middle class suburbs. Access to higher education, the ivy leagues, political influence, firms and country clubs. In the process Catholicism became soft, accommodationist, compliant with mainstream mediocrity. It became a "thin" rather than a "thick" faith, compliant with rather than resistant to the broader culture. It blended into the bourgeois mainstream and was soon indistinguishable in things that matter: marriage, family, sexuality, gender, acceptance of abortion.

2. Catholic Progressivism as Accommodation. Catholicism blended into mainstream American culture, including at elite levels, as that was embracing the Sexual Revolution. So a critical mass of the more intelligent, ambitious and successful surrendered to the new "Culture of Death": abortion, sexual sterility, deconstruction of masculinity/femininity, technocracy, meritocracy, bureaucracy, dissolution of the intermediate communities that have always supported the family in deference to an expansive state and malignant global capitalism.

3. Political Polarization. A Catholicism now comfortable, complaisant, consumerist, slothful and  inebriated by the unbalanced optimism of the Council found itself impotent in the face of the Sexual Revolution. Catholic labor leaders supinely surrendered the Democrat Party to the sexual liberationists and have electorally supported legal abortion with unconditional loyalty for the last half century. Their class hostility to the wealthy Republicans blinded them to the transformation that happened.

Conservative Catholics encountered more moral ambiguity in the new Republican Party. This championed the core religious-moral traditions around life and family, but retained allegiance to the financial interests of the rich. It retained a libertarianism as an individualism that compromised Catholic allegiance to solidarity, the poor and the common good. A  Catholic Reaganite Republicanism emerged for the best and worst of reasons: in respect for vulnerable human life and the sacredness of marriage and in order to protect their newfound wealth.

A Catholic grounded in the Church's social doctrine found himself without a political home. More recently, however, in the wake of Donald Trump, there is emerging a "New Right" that advocates a cultural-and-economic populism that is closer to the Catholic sensibility. However, the Church can never marry herself to any party or politics.

The political polarization of the society deepened and intensified the ecclesial divide between conservative and progressive.

4. Mega-Church-Institutions. The expansive, robust, affluent Catholic Camelot of 1945-65 left the Church with an enormous physical infrastructure of buildings, parishes, schools, hospitals, universities and social agencies. She found herself to be a Giga-Bureaucracy. This was not entirely deliberate, but the result of a million initiatives at all levels of the Church and society. Suddenly, the bishops found themselves as chief executives of multi-billion dollar enterprises involving fund raising, legal liability, public image, institutional survival and expansion. The mission of the bishop, already dense and demanding...shepherd, theologian, mentor, exemplar of prayer and holiness, governor of the diocese...became immensely expanded to entail stewardship of a mega-organization of a universe of lower bodies. Already in the 1960s the iconoclastic Ivan Illich was calling for the Church to de-institutionalize and become small, poor, humble. Half a century later, after endless sex and financial scandals, he is proved to be prescient. The institutional, sacramental, hierarchical Church will do well to surrender the corporal works of mercy (medicine, education, etc.) to the laity and purify itself in its actual priestly works.

5. Priest Sex Scandal. The abuse by trusted clergy of our youth has done more damage to our Church than anything else. The harm to victims, families, the broader Church and the priesthood is incalculable; it boundlessly exceeds the billions in settlements and bankruptcies of our dioceses.  It was a "perfect storm" of confluent, demonic forces. It surged in the decades immediately after the Sexual Revolution: prior to 1960 and after 1990 the recorded cases are very few. It is partly but not entirely a result of the sexual liberalism that surged in the Church: some of the worst offenders (Maciel, McCarrick) were staunch conservatives. For our purposes here we may understand it as a catastrophic convergence of the "flesh" (sexual addiction), the "world" (of sexual license) and the "devil" (Lucifer himself as principal conspirator.)

6. Flight from Philosophy. Fashionable progressive Catholic philosophy in the wake of the Council renounced reliance on Thomism, but it largely moved away from metaphysis entirely, thus throwing out the baby with the bathwater. With few but notable exceptions (John Paul, Benedict, Communio), there was a pronounced move into the pragmatics of therapy and politics and avoidance of the hard work of metaphysics. To not do metaphysics is to do a bad metaphysics. Catholicism classically is a wedding of the Hellenic philosophy with Hebraic spirituality. Progressivism renounced the first and degraded into lazy, sloppy relativism, agnosticism, subjectivism, and emotionalism. 

This unfortunate trend is exemplified in the magisterium of Pope Francis whose lack of theological vigor and clarity has discouraged many who are loyal to the Church, has fueled the forces of confusion as in Germany, and has further divided an already polarized Church.

Conclusion

These six are hardly exhaustive of the sin, decadence and decline of the Church of this time. The Church is human and as such always sinful, disordered and dying. We are living now in a particularly dark time for the Church. Like all organic, natural, living life, She waxes and wanes; has good days and bad days. Looking back, I see that the postwar period was a good one. The last decade, the time of Pope Francis, is a particularly bad one. The Church is in decline. She is divided. Discouraged. We are in bondage, like the Hebrews in Egypt. We are in exile, like the Israelites in Babylon. We are in disbelief, like the apostles on Good Friday and Holy Saturday. We are in a "dark night" with all the great mystics. We do not lose heart because we await the sunrise of Easter with joyous expectation.

These last few letters have considered the changes, good and bad, within the Church over the last 75 years. To conclude we might reflect on the continuity and the dramatic relationality of the Church.

In her over 2,000 year history, the organic fluidity and creativity as well as the fragility and vulnerability, of the Church is in tension with an even greater stability, continuity, reliability and even invulnerability. This is the Divine nature of the Church. She has continued, as the same divine-human, corporate person, unflinchingly through time and incredible misfortunes. She is the same in every part of the globe; she is the same now as in the early Roman persecutions, as in the Egyptian hermitages, as in the feudal monasteries, as in the medieval mendicants, the Tridentine Jesuits, the missionaries to the continents, the Great American Catholic Restoration, and the convoluted transformations of the 1960s. 

The Holy Spirit abides in her, perpetually. The priesthood celebrates Eucharist and all the sacraments, efficaciously, always and everywhere, regardless of the worthiness of the celebrant. The Truth of God is proclaimed infallibly, by the Magisterium. The soul, the inner form of the Church exists eternally, in our Blessed Mother in union with the saints of heaven, in purgatory, and with us who struggle and fight here on earth. The flesh of our Savior abides...in perhaps half a million tabernacles globally...quietly, humbly, patiently, begging for our love.

That ecclesial, Catholic, Marian soul abides eternally. But it is not static, inert or monotonous. Rather, it is dramatic, eventful and relational. The Church is in never-ending interchange, with Christ the Bridegroom, with our heavenly-Merciful Father, indwelt by the Sanctifying Holy Spirit, with each other in Truth-Beauty-Love, in battle with the world-flesh-devil, looking upwards always to our heavenly destiny.

Thank you, Triune God, for the Church of our time: flawed, sinful, disordered and distracted; but organic, alive, resilient, dramatic, eventful. Thank you for staying with us, abiding with us, encouraging us, guiding us. We surrender ourselves to You! We rest in You! We trust in You, delight in You! We love You and we adore You! Amen!

Memoir of the Catholic Church, USA, 1947-2023: It Was the Best of Times (Letter 37 to Grands)

The previous letter considered three visitations by the heavenly Bridegroom to his bridal Church in my 75 years: the Mercy of the Father (St. Faustina and John Paul II), the ongoing revelation of the Divine-Human person of Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, and the myriad workings of the Holy Spirit. The  letter to follow will look at the distortions, dysfunctions and decadence of the Church in our time ( "The Worst of Times"). Here we will identify, in broad strokes, the secondary workings of divine grace. These lack the heavenly purity of the primary three already considered, but are movements of the Holy Spirit infused in human agency. In some cases, they carry within themselves a dark side. That will be considered in the following, third letter.

The Great Catholic Restoration 1945-65

In the wake of the War and Great Depression, the American Church experienced a surge of blessings, energy, optimism, fruitfulness, affluence, power, religious revival, and hope: robust economy, global dominance, large families, thriving religious orders, seminaries, expansive parishes and dioceses, enhanced status and recognition in the broader culture, widespread Church attendance, boundless and exuberant confidence. Catholics were united with the entirety of the West in opposition to a totalitarian, predatory, communist Soviet Union. The threat of nuclear war was there, for example in the Cuban missile crisis, but my defining memory was of a virile, youthful, bright, Irish-Catholic John F. Kennedy, surrounded by elegant-wife-thriving-family-and-brain-trust, radiant with vigor, strength and promise. Lean, erect, athletic JFK was to fat, bald, aging Nikita Kruschiev what Gary Cooper as Marshall Will Kane (in High Noon) was to Frank Miller and his boys; what Marlon Brandon, as Terry Malloy, (in On the Waterfront), was to Johnny Friendly; what John Wayne, as Tom Doniphon, was to Lee Marvin (in  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.) (Sidebar: if you haven't seen these movies put them on your "must do" list for this summer!) Catholic presence was powerful, assertive and highly esteemed in the labor movement, Civil Rights, Democratic Party, and  the war on poverty. There was a strong awareness of the poverty and suffering of the undeveloped, "third world" and a flow of energy and resources to assist them.

 (This last was a complex reality: at once a countermove against communism, a humanitarian act of kindness, an ecclesial-charitable work of evangelization, and sometimes a gesture of American arrogance and imperialism. My uncle Bill Gallagher is exemplary: a decorated war hero, he worked as a small businessman in Latin America and also for a time for Agency for American Development (AID). AID was intended to assist development in the Southern Hemisphere but identified by the New Left of the 1960s as a cover for our intelligence operations. Bill remained a believing Catholic and befriended Maryknoll Missioners. We later learned that all those years he was working for military intelligence. He was a character straight out of Graham Green: war hero, fisherman, golfer, heavy drinker, loving if eccentric father and husband, spy, less-than-successful small businessman, believing but flawed Catholic!)

It was a 20-year Catholic Camelot. It was the best of times. It was not to last.

Vatican Council II 1962-5

This was the defining historic event of the Catholic Church of the past century. It was, by wide consensus, a remarkable work of the Holy Spirit. It did not come out of nowhere. It was  the confluence of a range of movements that had been gaining strength in the post-war era and even earlier.  It was not a rupture, but a defining, culminating climax of a remarkable symphony of organic, dramatic developments. These include:

Ecumenical Movement. Within and beyond the Catholic Church there was an urgency to realize the prayer of Christ that all his followers would "be one." The antagonism between Catholic and Protestant that structured the post-Tridentine Church was overcome, in this event, by a focus on our unity in faith.

Liturgical Movement. The intention here was to enhance lay participation, to overcome a perceived passivity and monotony, and clarify the underlying, ancient form of the Liturgy.

Scripture. Advances in academic study of scripture joined with a yearning for the Word of God in an emulation of Evangelical zeal for deeper, broader engagement with the Bible.

Laity. A new "age of the laity" was declared which did not diminish the mission of the priesthood (worship, preaching, governance of the Church) but overcame a sense of inferiority and recognized the authority of the lay person in marriage, family, culture and the broader society as well as a leadership role within the Church.

Jews. A new appreciation for the Jewish people emerged out of our horror at the Holocaust but also from our gratitude for the Judaic roots of our own faith and how much we share with our ancient "cousins." The Catholic Church was never anti-Semitic in its core belief and practice as it has always cherished the Jewishness of the Scriptures, patriarchs, prophets, Jesus, Mary and the apostles. It has, indeed, longed to share with the Chosen people the riches of Christ. But it has at times tolerated anti-Semitism in society. And its theology of Judaism, since the primitive split of Church from Synagogue, has dwelt upon the rejection, by Rabbinic-Pharisaic Judaism of Jesus as Messiah. Without denying that immense difference, a new positivity about Judaism and the Jews surged out of our sorrow at the Shaol and newfound delight in our shared roots. One might say that in the Jew-Christian relationship a hermeneutic of continuity displaced one of rupture.

Freedom.  Freedom of conscience and the broader human freedoms were elevated in the mind of the Church in this council. Previously, the medieval model in which the Church exercised a more direct authority over government and society had widely prevailed in Europe and beyond. At this time, the American experiment in liberty and pluralism gained wide esteem, especially in the light of the recent and current totalitarianisms of the Right and the Left. The Church fathers were all well aware of Communism and Fascism. Clear recognition was given to primacy of conscience, not as directionless autonomy, but as oriented to Truth and Goodness.

World Religions. The mysterious workings of God's grace were recognized outside of the institutional boundaries of the Catholic Church, even beyond Christianity and the monotheisms (including Islam), in the world religions. Previously, Church understanding of "salvation in Christ alone" was understood to cast an absolutely dark judgment against "pagan" belief and practice. Without diminishing the specific salvific role of Christ or the power of evil and sin in the world, a more generous, expansive view prevailed to see that Christ himself, anonymously-covertly-mysteriously, is at work in every soul and every community to draw us all together in God's love.

Philosophical Openness. From the time of the French Revolution to the Vatican Council, the Church was under attack from and defensive before a hostile post-Enlightenment modernity of  ideologies including Marxism, Fascism, atheism, libertarian capitalism untethered from tradition and community, secular psychology, sexual liberalism and more. Especially in the early 20th Century the Church condemned "modernism" as accommodation to godless secularism and erected a philosophical fortress, largely an elaboration of the magisterial thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, around a now-ghettoized and defensive Catholicism. This theological edifice fit the immigrant experience of poor, ethnic Catholics despised by WASP elites of the northeast and Southern fundamentalists/evangelicals. Priests, who provided most faith instruction to largely unschooled ethnics, were formed in a closed system of thought removed from developments in scholarship. The Catholic community was largely a ghetto in America, even as it exercised muscle in labor unions, city politics, police/fire departments, and such arenas.  But in the euphoria of the post-war Camelot, there emerged a new openness to the broader, now-Catholic-friendly society. And so, in the Catholic academy, there was an explosion of interest in modern philosophy, social and natural sciences, and the humanities. The restrictive straightjacket of a narrow Thomism was cast off. This new embrace of the larger culture was affirmed by the Vatican Council and the Church surrendered to a euphoria of dialogue and engagement. The study of personalism, phenomenology, psychology, political science, literature and a range of subjects dilated the Catholic intelligence. We will see that we were not quite ready for such an intense engagement.

"Ressourcement" Theology.  Along with this study of contemporary thought, there occurred in the years leading to and flowing from the Council a turn to the "sources":  Scripture itself, the Church fathers, doctors, saints and mystics. This is, of course, our Deposit of Faith, our abiding legacy, our perennial philosophy. But new historical, literary studies opened up a richness of thought that had been obscured by a narrow, defensive Thomism. For example, two who participated in the Council, one as a theological adviser (Joseph Ratzinger) and the other as a young, rising bishop (Karol Wojtyla), did doctoral dissertations in Augustine/Bonaventure and St. John of the Cross and phenomenology respectively. 

This list of nine is not exhaustive. They share characteristics. First, in each there is a clear, legible paradigm shift. Elements of our faith are shifted in relation to each other so that some take on a new emphasis and others change in that light. Second, none contradict the past but flow from it fluidly and organically. They involve growth, continuity, improvement, not rupture. Thirdly, each radiates a positivity, an openness, an eagerness to dialogue and communicate. An expansiveness and generosity. 

All of the above represent the collaboration or "conspiracy" (in the etymological sense of "breathing together") of the bishops/theologians with the Holy Spirit. The council documents are inspired. But they are also human statements, finite and less than perfect. They are free of substantial error. But they are less than complete revelations of Truth. There is more to be said. They need to be interpreted, elaborated, clarified and even complimented as there are inevitable omissions and inadequacies. 

The overwhelming flaw is precisely the unbalanced optimism and positivity in its embrace of the world. The Council happened 20 years after the decisive defeat of the Axis powers and at the very end of the post-war Camelot.  It largely ignored the menace of Communism. Someone reading these documents alone would receive an inaccurate picture of the Church and world of that time. There prevailed an aura of euphoria, wellbeing, and trust. The Council ended as the West was about to explode into the Cultural Revolution. The Church emerged at this time eager to credulously embrace a world that was at that very moment turning to the dark side. The Council left the Church singularly unprepared to confront the attack that was set to be launched from the depths of hell.

Post Vatican Council 1965-2023

1. Humanae Vitae, and John Paul's Catechesis on the Human Body as Response to the Cultural Revolution.   The sexual liberalism that exploded in the West just as the Council concluded was a demonic attack upon the human person in its most profound, vulnerable, sacred and intimate dimensions: bodily sexuality and gender. First of all, with contraception it tore sexuality away from the spousal mystery as unitive and fertile, leaving it isolated as subjective, self-enclosed, lonely, sterile, futile and despairing. Secondly, it denied the interior reality or form of masculinity/femininity in their distinctive-yet-complimentary natures as iconic, generous, heroic, fruitful.  St. Pope Paul VI in his prophetic encyclical Humanae Vitae defied the already-hegemonic contraceptive "culture of death" and the progressive compulsions of the post-Council Church. He predicted accurately that the sterilization of sexuality would lead inexorably to the degradation of women, pornography, divorce, abortion, and the destruction of the family. A few years later, John Paul in his talks on the "theology of the body" articulated a definitive anthropology of the spousal-sexual-gendered human person that will endure as the definitive answer to the sexual liberalism.

2. Culture War.  Even beyond the spousal reality, Cultural Progressivism was a direct, powerful assault upon Christian life in all its integrity and complexity: incompetent human life, authority, tradition, the role of science, the nature of moral norms, freedom of conscience, and the reverence and gratitude due to God. A vicious war erupted and has been raging since. It has inflamed and polarized politics, religion and all aspects of culture. After more than half a century, it is increasing in ferocity. At the start the Church, intoxicated with the Conciliar openness to modernity, was feeble and delayed in response. All the Churches became polarized between those that accommodate and those that resist cultural liberalism. Observant Catholics found themselves in a new ecumenical alliance with Evangelicals in defense of their shared way of life. Slowly courage and energy was summoned to protect innocent human life, the family, religious freedoms, and principles of solidarity, subsidiarity and the common good. This Culture War is the defining event of our time.

3. Lay Renewal Movements.  These, mentioned in the prior letter as visitations of the Holy Spirit, include: Cursillo, Charismatic Renewal, Marriage Encounter, Focolare, Communion and Liberation, the Neocatechumenal Way, and others. They fleshed out the vision of the Council. They took distinct shape around differing charisms, personalities, cultures, and life patterns. They all revere the sacramental, magisterial form of the Church but infuse a fresh lay spirituality into marriage/family, economics, politics and all areas of culture and human life. They are an intensification of Catholic life as the mainstream became anemic and diluted, a "Catholic Lite," entrapped within bourgeois comfort. They are a clear, triumphant answer to Cultural Liberalism. In a world gone fluid, mad and diabolical  they are oases of stability, sanity, and holiness.

4. Pontificate of John Paul and Benedict.  Combining intellectual brilliance, personal sanctity, and an astonishing richness of charisms, virtues, and fruits of the Holy Spirit, these two popes (1978-2013) authoritatively interpreted the Council in a hermeneutic of organic continuity and strengthened all the currents that fed into and flowed from the Council. Both were already standouts at the Council, the one as a young bishop the other as a youthful theologian. As they had faced Nazism and Communism, so now they defied the assault of Cultural Progressivism. They found in the renewal movements as well as new religious orders their staunchest allies in the War within the Church and beyond.

5. Theology of Trinitarian Communion. In seamless continuity with the ressourcement theology that informed the Council, the journal Communio was founded in 1968 by DeLubac, Ratzinger and Balthasar to counter the progressivism of the Concilium school (Kung, Rahner, Schilibeeckx, Lonergan) and ground the Church in an authentic, organically conservative anthropology of the human person; of the Church as always bride, mother, sacrament and teacher;  and a moral order that is personalist and established on firm, clear principles. This school looked to the past, Thomas as the "first among equals" of the fathers/doctors, even as it engaged with the best of contemporary thought. Led by John Paul and Benedict it is a sophisticated discernment of modernity, harvesting what is best and discarding the waste.

6. Retrieval within the Renewal. In continuity with the Council and its prehistory and corrective of a excessive progressivism, there emerged, with the blessing of Pope Benedict, a retrieval of elements of our legacy: the reverence of the Latin Mass, home schooling, a renewed study of St. Thomas, classical schools, small colleges with clear Catholic identity, new more traditional religious orders, EWTN network, and revivals of Marian devotion.. This is not a rejection of the Council as a rupture with the past, but a purification, a consolidation, a reintegration of the Church in her core identity as memory and hope.

The Catholic Church in my lifetime has seen immense change, for the better and for the worse. It has been the best of times. It has been the worst of times. It suffers exile, death, decadence; but it is always restored, resurrected and renewed. In the eyes of one who loves her, she is always the Bride of Christ, our Mother. Vulnerable, flawed, and tormented, She is ever resilient, fresh, youthful, and generous. We suffer with her, but we mostly rejoice in her and look forward to an eternity of Glory.

Organic Conservative (Letter 36 to the Grands)

The organic conservative is a small part of a much greater whole: a living, breathing, growing, moving, intentional organism or personality. The human person is created by the tri-personal, communal God not to be an autonomous, lonely monad but to be in COMMUNION with God and other persons in a dazzling universe of communal-personal-organisms: Church, family, nation, tribe, school, team, union, political party, tradition, corporation and club. Furthermore, each of these "communio's", imaging the Eternal Event of Love, is itself not static, closed, or monotonous; but Eventful, Dramatic, Ecstatic, Serendipitous.

Let's contrast this with other types of conservatives. 

The Strict Traditionalist replicates in every generation the pattern received from the past. Most traditional societies...primitive, ancient, and medieval...are such. With the current rate of technological/cultural change and our keen awareness of history this option is not available except to such outlier communities like the Amish and Hasidic Jews.

The Status Quo conservative wants to maintain the current distribution of wealth, power, status and privilege. Traditional Republican economics, normally referred to as "conservative" but now called "neo-liberal," in its defense of small government, low taxes, and minimal regulation is a classic example. The convoluted Donald Trump leads a populist revolt against the conservative establishment and the liberal elites but in his tax plan privileged the wealthy like himself. In that policy he exemplifies the status quo conservative.

A Reactionary Conservative wants to return to some earlier golden period before the fall from grace. Here again Trump is instructive. He calls us to "make America great again." This is very vague. His opponents find this to be racist: there is little hard, real evidence for that. As a fellow "boomer" I know intuitively what he wants. He has no deliberate policy, strategy or vision. He is nostalgic for the post-war era in which we were raised: thriving economy, world dominance, "Father Knows Best," Norman Vincent Peale and Bishop Fulton Sheen and Thomas Merton and Billy Graham, Elvis Presley, Ike, cultural unity and monotony, Davey Crockett, Ozzie and Harriet, a nation united against a clear enemy, gratitude for relief from the Depression and War, and boundless confidence and optimism. Of course for many things were not then as good as this narrative of nostalgia would have it. We have in this world no lasting city. We cannot return to the 1950s.

Organic conservativism is dynamic, intentional, alive, active, dramatic and eventful. But as it changes it maintains an interior integrity, identity, and form. Imagine you see your cousin, now 17 years old, after a 5 year separation. You were last together at the age of 12. The reunion is a wondrous encounter: the very same person but so different in looks, voice, demeanor, intellect, etc. He/she is the same but different. There is change and growth but within a continuity of identity and form. Ideally, he/she is more him/herself: stronger, smarter, happier, more attractive, competent, confident, and holy. 

So it is with a community, organization, or institution that is organically conservative: it retains a continuity of personality but changes in a direction as to become more fully itself: the Church more holy, the family more thriving, the school more wise, the team more competitive, the tribe more prosperous and fruitful.

Clearly, the Catholic Church is quintessentially such a conservative, but dynamic, organism. Her identity, form or essence was given definitively, substantially by the life-death-rising-ascending-Spirit-sending Event of Jesus Christ. But she is not static or stuck; she is not strictly traditional, or status-quo-defending, or reactionary. She does not even seek to return to the Apostolic age, as do so many reformers who despise the actual, concrete, living Church and her splendid but flawed history.

Living in an age of rapid, profound change, we as Catholics need to distinguish between changes that  are organic-wholesome-fruitful and those which are disruptive-destructive-sterile. In the next few letters I want to look back and identify both types of changes that have happened in my lifetime.

Catholic Memories of a Dramatic, Organic, Boomer Conservative

 In the next three letters, I will consider the significant developments or happenings in the Catholic Church in my lifespan, the last 75 years, the post-war era. The previous letter highlighted the organic nature of the Church: living, changing, developing in time. These three will maintain that awareness but emphasize the "dramatic" reality of the Church as she relates to God, the world, and the dark kingdom. Rather than describing "developments" which suggests inevitable, interior, biology-like change, I will speak of "events" or "happenings" or "encounters."  This language highlights the dramatic nature of the interaction of heaven with earth, the engagement of freedoms, heavenly and earthly and demonic. This letter focuses on the three most important happenings; the second on a dozen of secondary significance; and the last on disruptions, deviations and diminishments in our time.

Clearly, in the love affair between the bridal Church and Christ her bridegroom, three events illuminate the last 75 years. These are not evolutionary developments, human achievements, novel innovations, or historical contingencies. Rather, they are initiatives from the Trinity, infusions of heavenly life into our earthly Church. They are:  first, personal encounter with Jesus Christ, God and man, as our brother, Lord and Savior. Second, reception of the Holy Spirit, intimately, powerfully and personally. Third, engagement with the Mercy of our heavenly Father, through Jesus in the Holy Spirit. Together, they draw us into deeper communion with the Trinity.

These three realities have, of course, been the essence of the Church since the coming of Christ. They are not innovative. But this love affair is a dynamic, living, surprising encounter that is acted out anew with every generation and every single person. It is a renewal of the spousal communion, a continuation that is also fresh, free, ever-surpassing, serendipitous. Imagine a couple, celebrating 50 years of marriage, in a second honeymoon: they affirm the very union created between them by God half a century previously; they go to a new place with exciting discoveries and joys; they celebrate all the gifts received from above including children, in-laws, grandchildren, friends, accomplishments and even the failures, disappointments and mutual hurts. This is not a duplicate of the first honeymoon; it is quite different; but the interior form is the same, an abiding exchange of love. It is ever old and ever new. And that applies to every single day: of our own marriages and vows and above all our romance with God in Christ. We might imagine our Church as a bride who is often erratic, cold,  indifferent and even unfaithful to her spouse. But the Bridegroom is ever patient, tender, loyal...although at times stern and forthright. And so he is tireless, relentless, fierce in his pursuit of her. And so, we see these courtly gestures of love from heaven.

Significantly, each of the three was addressed by St. Pope John Paul II in three of his earliest, and arguably most valuable encyclicals: Redeemer of Man, 1979; Lord and Giver of Life, 1986; Rich in Mercy, 1980. With my own spouse, I experienced each of these personally, in remarkable and miraculous fashion, early in our married life in the 1970s. 

Encounter with Jesus as Lord and Savior

The singular failure of the Catholic Church in America 1945-65 was distance from and indifference to the person of Jesus Christ. The Church of that era erected a magnificent edifice of buildings, institutions, schools as well as large families, flourishing religious orders and seminaries. In great numbers we were moralized (taught sexual ethics, social justice, etc.), sacramentalized (inducted into the liturgy and sacramental economy) and dogmatized (taught the basics of Catholic theology.) This huge edifice was built upon a weak foundation: it was not grounded in a personal, experiential, intimate relationship with the person of Jesus Christ. We were not evangelized. We were not properly catechized. Large majorities of us who processed through that impressive religious itinerary no longer practice the Catholic faith; they have been absorbed into bourgeois, moralistic-therapeutic-deistic, careerist-consumerist-technocratic, softly-secular mediocrity. 

I was a product of this system. Blessed by a pious family, good schools, and four years of college seminary, I enjoyed a steady, low-key faith in God's fatherly love, an attachment to the Church in her sacraments-teaching-ethics; and a compassion for the suffering. But I was not so sure about Jesus. I ascribed to a "low Christology" in that I saw him as a role model, the man closest to God, the one to emulate. But I really didn't get his divine nature. I didn't know him personally, experientially, as my own intimate Lord and Savior. My faith lacked, along with my generation, a solid evangelical foundation. I drank the liberal cool aid of the 1960s: accepted contraception as morally sound and leaned into leftist politics and the therapeutic. 

My life changed on April 1, 1973, just over 50 years ago, when I made my Cursillo. This retreat movement out of Spain of 1950s clearly announced the Gospel of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. I heard the message. I believed. I felt his love, his closeness, his intimacy. I knew him, felt him, personally. I experienced an invigoration of all elements of my Catholic faith as now rooted in the person of our Lord. The splendid Catholic symphony, now unified in Christ and Triune love, exploded with love, truth and beauty in all its elements, profundity and complexity.

This rediscovery of the Gospel did not come out of nowhere. It always informed the Church. In the post-war era we had the crystal clear teaching of Bishop Fulton Sheen and an army of preachers, priests and theologians. But it found particularly lucid expression in the Vatican Council and then the dual-papacy of John Paul and Benedict.

What happened to us was not exceptional: the same romantic drama was being enacted across the globe. All the lay renewal movements...Communion and Liberation, Cursillo, Charismatic Renewal, Neocatechumenal Way, Focolare...were driven by this personal-yet-communal love for Jesus Christ in  a popular, down-to-earth mysticism that moved beyond moralism, dogmatism, ritualism, and legalism.

Beyond the boundaries of the Catholic Church the same thing was happening: Jesus movement, global Pentecostalism, and a vibrant Evangelicalism. In the face of the Cultural Revolution, a more conservative ecumenical alliance surged to defend ancient traditions against raging Cultural Liberalism.

This was the same romance the Great Lover has always had with his Bride, but with fresh, creative, and surprising gestures of love.

New Movement of the Holy Spirit

The night after my wife finished her own Cursillo, we attended our first charismatic prayer meeting. This was a second life-changer. We were directed to relax in God's love; to listen to readings from Scripture and preaching; to surrender to song and praise; to open our hearts to the movement of the Holy Spirit. We were to relieve ourselves of agency, moral obligation, guilt, anxiety and yield to expectant faith. I heard the Word! I believed! Eventually we were baptized in the Holy Spirit and experienced a new serenity, direct guidance, praise in tongues, a new appetite for holy Scripture, a zeal to share this banquet of new blessedness. 

This current of the Holy Spirit was blowing, in somewhat different styles, through all the lay renewal movements mentioned above. It was spreading, as Pentecostalism, through all the mainstream Churches and very powerfully across Latin America and Africa. It is surely the most promising happening in the broader global Church in our time. 

As an Evangelical Catholic I share a deep bond, informally, with all who acknowledge Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior. So, for example, when I read the alarming statistics of those leaving the Catholic Church, especially in Latin America, I am heartened to consider that many are leaving a lifeless, mechanical religious practice for a Spirit-filled encounter with the living Lord and engagement with an intensive community of faith, hope and love. Although institutional membership in the Catholic Church decreases, the deeper communion in Christ is a net gain for the mystical Church.

This is the same Holy Spirit that moved over the chaos at Creation; that moved the patriarchs, prophets and kings; and that inflamed the apostles at Pentecost. But this breath of God, this fire of Divine Love, moves in ever new ways in every time. 

Divine Mercy

I read John Paul's encyclical Full of Mercy or Dives in Misericordia at the very time our family was struck by our greatest tragedy: death by suicide of my brother-in-law Al. At that wake and funeral, the outpouring of compassion and kindness was so overwhelming that I could only think, over and over again: "If all these people overflow with such mercy, how much more must God!" The entire death and loss was suffused with Mercy. Al's last acts were: he assisted his aging stepfather to remove his boots; and then he lit a candle, a sign of hope. And he passed. Mercy became my favorite word.

I learned the devotion to the Divine Mercy of St. Faustina. I prayed: "Jesus I trust in you." "Let your Mercy be upon us as we place our trust in you." Trust and surrender to the Divine Mercy, along with love for Christ and reception of the Holy Spirit, became the lifeblood of my heart and soul.

The Divine Mercy is at the heart of Scripture and our entire Tradition. But it is a dense, complex and mysterious reality. It is also infused with Godly wrath against evil, with holy judgement against sin, with fierce Justice and Truth. The mutual interpenetration of Mercy with Wrath, Justice, and Truth is the deepest of mysteries and can elude us in two directions: too severe or too soft.

In earlier times, the threat of damnation and sin was held over us in popular piety in a manner that could obscure the preeminence of Mercy. For example, suicide victims were denied Catholic burial since their last known act was a mortal sin and the Church did not want to encourage presumption about such a grave act. There prevailed a fear of hell and the assumption that many go there because of God's wrath and justice.

More recently, especially over the last decade during the current pontificate, we see the other extreme: a soft, weak or cheap mercy. God is imagined as all-kind-and-nice, forgiving and even indulgent of all behavior. A loving God can condemn no one to hell! Compassion, kindness and unconditional acceptance will conquer all. There is a diminished sense of sin and evil. No lines at the confessional. Mafia hit men are buried and their family sentimentally say "He is at a better place now." Those who have avoided Sunday Eucharist for years and years attend a funeral or wedding and, in presumption and sacrilege, receive Communion like it were a party favor at a birthday party. The negativity of the past has been replaced by something worse: sentimental presumption.

The authentic prophets of Mercy...St. Faustina, St. Theresa of Lisieux, St. John Paul, St. Padre Pio, and countless saints through the centuries...proclaim Divine Mercy in its wrath against sin and evil. They proclaim the weight of our own Freedom: that nothing is automatic or predetermined; that we cannot presume and persist in evil; that the our own eternal destiny, and that of those we are bound to, rests in the Mercy of God and also in our free act of trust-surrender-obedience

Conclusion

Over the last 75 years, the Great Lover has dramatically visited us...our own marriage, the Catholic Church, and the entirety of humanity...drawing us to himself, in the Holy Spirit, under the Divine Mercy. In the Communion, the Event of Love, that is the Trinity. He does so in every life. And in every age and place. Always in new ways.

Trans-Sports: the Misogyny of the Cultural Left Unveiled (Letter 35 to Grandchildren)

 In yesterday's House vote on a bill that would prevent biological males from competing in female sports not a single Democrat vote Yes; all 203 voted No. Feminists are befuddled: What happened to the Democrats as champions of women and their rights?

They should not be! The Cultural Left has for half a century poorly camouflaged its contempt for femininity. It doesn't articulate this; it does something worse...it denies "woman" is a reality. They cannot defend women because they cannot define woman: they deny there is a reality, a form, an interior essence that is "woman."

Imagine two families in which the father fights with the son. In both cases the son storms out of the house swearing to never return. In the first, the father stamps around the house, punching walls, screaming like a maniac: "I will kill him if he returns!"  "I hate his guts!" "I will beat him to a pulp!" The second father quietly says "I disown him. He is dead to me. He is not a reality. His name is NEVER to be spoken in my presence." Which is the worst hatred? Clearly the cold denial of one's reality.

Militant, mainstream feminism from its inception in the 1960s has insisted on the sameness of man and women. It dismisses the worth and reality...moral, social, religious, intellectual...of the bi-morphic structure of the human person as male-related-to-female and female-related-to-male...as oriented to spousal union and the fruition of new, eternal human life. In deconstructing gender as a created, by divine hands, reality, it reconfigures both woman and man into interchangeable units of production and consumption. Women have become, if anything, more contributory to the economy except in a few areas like construction. Women become photocopies of the male as diminished and toxic: productive/careerist, contraceptive but not fruitful; consumerist but not contemplative; sexually "liberated" but not spousal in loyalty; empowered in the "war of all against all" and against their own blood.

In his brilliant, pivotal Flight from Woman, (1965),  neurologist-psychologist, Jewish-convert-to-Catholicism Karl Stern found in the personal histories of the architects of modernity, especially Descartes, an aversion to their own mothers and thus a "flight from woman." This leads to a preference for knowledge as controlling, mathematical, logical, deductive, and technocratic and a denigration of intuition, creativity, contemplation. Autism has been identified as an exaggeration of the male intellect with a diminishment of the more feminine intuition and emotional intelligence. We can see then that our entire society became "autistic" in its engineering, mathematical expertise but diminished in empathy and intuition. It is noteworthy that Flight from Woman was published in 1965, the precise moment when the Cultural Revolution, including the deconstruction of femininity, was about to explode across the West. Stern was prescient.

In the liberal refusal to protect girls from male intrusion in sports we finally see, after 50 years, the contempt of progressivism for the feminine. To be sure there are genuine forms of feminism which champion the womanly as womanly: Edith Stein (St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross), John Paul II, psychologist Carol Gilligan, activists against pornography, and prolife feminists But Cultural Liberalism champions the woman only as a quasi-toxic-male: ambitious, abortive, promiscuous, sexually active but intentionally sterile.

Progressivism has no concern for the person of the woman, the homosexual, or the tortured trans-person. The core value for this ideology is the unrestrained power of the Imperial Self: the unlimited empowerment of the Ego to determine sexuality, gender, identity, meaning, purpose and destiny. Detached from God and the moral order, the secular progressive claims unconditional dominion over what is true and good; consistently, he must protect the autonomous Self who self-defines as abortion-seeking, gay, or trans. Femininity and masculinity can be discarded as outdated. As can the powerless unborn. As can the rights of teenage girl athletes. The only absolute is the imperial Self.

I suspect this issue may give an advantage to the conservative position in the Culture War. The abortion war is at a stalemate, even with the Dobbs reversal of Roe. The blues and reds control and consolidate their own territories with neither capable of a decisive strategic victory: much like the stalemate in the Ukraine at this time. The gay agenda has achieved a rapid and complete victory in the Supreme Court, in popular opinion and especially among the young. This is a for-now-lost-cause hardly worth tons of energy. Conservatives are in retreat on this front; defensive of their own religious freedom and resistant to a woke tyranny that would compel participation and moral approval.  It will be several decades before the broader society recognizes the sad, sterile, futile nature of gay life and moves into a wise and truthful empathy.

But the vulnerability of adolescent girl athletes to the intrusion into competition and locker rooms by biological males who are conflicted in their gender identity is as obvious to common sense as the Emperor's lack of clothing.

This insanity may well occasion a retrieval of an authentic understanding of and reverence for the actual reality of the Feminine, in all its splendor, dignity, generosity, vulnerability and resiliency....the Eternal Feminine as embodied quintessentially in our Blessed Mother Mary in glory.

 

Conservatives and Progressives: The Culture War (Letter 34 to Grandchildren)

A Conservative looks back at the past in a posture of filial gratitude, reverence, docility; at an event, messianic figure, dramatic narrative, body of literature, code of morals, litany of saints and heroes, system of ritual, way of life; that provides meaning, order, direction, and hope to life. This legacy is received, cherished, pondered, protected, celebrated, elaborated, and shared especially with blood descendants but with others as well.

A Progressive, by contrast, looks to the future with optimistic expectancy for liberation into happiness and release from a past seen as oppressive, ignorant, superstitious, and scientifically unenlightened. Three streams of thought flow into contemporary progressivism or liberalism as "wokeness":

- Marxism  sees history as always an oppression by the stronger of the weaker party: capital over labor, men over women, white over black, heteronormativity over LGBTQ+ people. In this view the present and past need always to be overcome as the victim needs to resist and overthrow the dominator. Everything...culture, religion, family, economics...is viewed through the prism of the oppression of the victim. So every dimension of human life is either reinforcing this tyranny or resisting it: "you are either part of the problem or part of the solution."

-Darwinian, Scientific Evolutionary Theory applies the Darwinian understanding of biological evolution to human history and expects positive, virtually inevitable development through scientific advances. This approach denies any original sin or fall from grace; it is a more positive view of human nature than that of the Marxist or the Conservative. It sees the astonishing advances in technology, science and medicine and places a Messianic trust in the power of reason and science to eliminate suffering by overcoming  a past of ignorance/superstition.

- Sexual Liberation expects personal happiness in the release of sexuality from the restrains of traditional religion, especially its reservation to the spousal union as heterosexual, procreative, unitive, exclusive, permanent. Human nature, in this view, is entirely positive, not wounded by sin, but unhappily repressed in its free expression by religion as guilt-inducing, shaming, repressive, moralistic and hostile to the sexual, human body.  The happiness of humanity lies in sexual liberation including: contraception, abortion, homosexuality, deconstruction of gender roles such as paternity/maternity, pornography/masturbation,  divorce, cohabitation, and unrestrained sexual experimentation especially by the young.

These three distinct streams blend well together, without contradiction, in what we know today as Cultural Liberalism or "Wokeness."

The Cultural Revolution exploded in our society in the late 1960s in what may have been the most drastic, profound, rapid and devastating change in human history. Within a few years this revolutionary ideology gained control of our elite, powerful institutions: especially the university but also entertainment, media, law, medicine, the Democratic Party, mainstream religions (Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Lutheran and the liberal wing of Catholicism). In recent years it has permeated big business and even the military. 

As the pervasive ideology or belief system of the upper tiers of society, the affluent and educated, our liberal elites, it is resisted by religious conservatives, especially devout Catholics and Evangelicals who find in the Republican Party a counterweight to the now radically progressive DNC. This political realignment was profound, rapid and in some ways surprising. In 1965,when I graduated high school at the age of 18, if we were told that within a decade the two parties would reorient themselves  around sexual license, sterile sex and abortion against traditional marriage, morality and care for the unborn, most would have predicted that the RNC, party of the rich and of individual libertarianism, would have endorsed the first against the highly Catholic, working class Democrats. That the opposite unexpectedly occurred is a sadness and a puzzle. (Good topic for another essay but here is a spoiler: the passivity, deference and compliance of the Catholic base of the party.)

This Culture War has been raging for over 50 years and is now intensifying rather than abating. It is (in my view) the single most significant historical development of my lifetime. It is in large part a class war: the powerful, affluent liberal class against the religious and resentful lower tiers. Progressivism dominates society through its hold on the affluent and powerful. Religious conservatism remains stronger at the lower echelons of society: the poor and working classes. We have seen a class reversal in politics with the liberal-Democrats now more wealthy and the conservative-Republicans drawing more of low-income people. The Trump base votes consistently against their own financial interests which clearly are defended by the Democrats. This is dismissed by the later as ignorance and racism. It is in fact a triumph of the cultural/moral over the economic. Progressivism, as non-religious, entails a soft materialism in its conviction that money is everything. The conservative coalition brings together two quite distinct groups: religious conservatives on one hand and on the other the angry and unemployed who sense the contempt and indifference of those in power, Republican and Democrat both. The "deplorable" proletariat and the pious unite against affluent liberals.

It is a strange and malicious irony however that the lower, not the higher, classes have been devastated by the sexual revolution. Despite their embrace of sexual sterility and liberation, the rich are smart enough to realize that the primary path to affluence is sexual restrain: do not conceive before marriage, avoid  divorce and stay married, hand on all your privilege to your one or two children. By contrast, the lower classes, while they largely retain conservative values, have in large part submitted to the culture of contraception/cohabitation, divorce, pornography, and infidelity. A perfect storm of unemployment, lack of opportunity, and a degradation of marriage/morality after the Sexual Revolution has thrust large sectors of the lower class into a Culture of Despair. They are swallowed by a Culture of Poverty that is rooted in a degraded culture and a hostile class structure. The black community has been especially devastated by this combination, rather than by the alleged continuation of systemic racism.

Philosophical Contrasts Between Conservatives and Progressives

Eternity or Utopia-on-Earth.  

The religious conservative believes in the eternal, the transcendent, the supernatural, the kingdom of heaven. The eternal has visited this earth and saved us from evil; it dwells even now among us; it is leading us to eternal life. Earthly life is transitional, a journey, a test, a contest. Our eyes are on the eternal so that everything finite here below is relativized in relation to the broader narrative.

 Progressives believe only in this life. This has profound consequences: finite realities take on an ultimacy. This includes physical fitness and wellness ("if you have health, you have everything"), financial security and comfort, global warming, and flight from suffering. Heaven becomes reconfigured into a future utopia on this earth: science will overcome suffering (Darwin), sexual freedom will bring happiness (triumph of the therapeutic), and overflow of the oppressor will bring liberation (Marx). Since these are ultimate, any resistance to them (BLM, gun control, restrictions to experimentation, moral judgment about sex, etc.) or even disagreement is construed as evil and absolutely intolerable. So we have cancel culture, Trump-derangement-disorder. By contrast, the conservative who sees things in view of eternity enjoys a more relaxed, tolerant, live-and-let-live approach to political (but not inherently, morally evil) issues.

Evil. 

The conservative has a deep, philosophical understanding of the Kingdom of Darkness as an "axis of power": the world, the flesh and the devil. Already prior to human history Lucifer, in freedom, led a revolt of angels against the reign of the Trinity. Adam and Eve, in freedom, joined this rebellion; as did every one of us in our particular sin. The result is that systemic evil permeates all our social orders and the compulsion to sin operates in every heart and soul.

The progressive denies such ontological evil and personal sin. The Darwinian identifies human suffering with religion-based ignorance and seeks release in developments in science and technology. The Marxist identifies evil with the power exercised by the dominant class over victim groups so that support of the vicious status quo is the essence of evil. The sexual liberator finds the source of unhappiness in guilt-and-shame-inducing religion and its alleged hostility to sexuality. The three thrusts work well together as the LGBTQ agenda aligns with ethnic politics and together they clothe themselves in a faux-scientific righteousness. Ironically, this has become the ideology of the liberal power elite as they maintain the current class structure but present as messiahs of liberation for victims.

The Human Individual

For the conservative each person is created in the image of the Tri-Personal God and is of inestimable worth (regardless of size, competence, status) and inherently, essentially in relationship: with God; with mother/father and family; as male or female; with a broader family/community; with previous and subsequent generations; with the angels, saints and suffering souls. That one exists at all is GIFT  and every breath, every second, every encounter, every relationship is pure GIFT;  is engagement, in time and place, with Eternal Love.

For the progressive each is an isolated, autonomous individual; the center of his own universe; free to determine his own meaning and purpose. CHOICE, as subjective, interior, unconditional, undetermined agency is the absolute value. One who lacks the capacity for choice and agency, the unborn or feeble, has no intrinsic worth and can be disposed of as useless waste. There is no broader moral/ontological order into which the person fits; rather, all value, purpose, connection and flows from the individual subject. Therefore the Self creates its own personality, gender, sexuality, family, community and value system. In this world there is no obedience or reverence; loyalty is pledged only to the Self.

Sexuality and Gender

For the conservative the human person is sexual/gendered as a gift, that is to be given, and received, in the image of the Tri-Personal God. Sexuality is sacred, personal, fruitful, exclusive, loyal, permanent, donative to the community and glorifying of God. Gender as male/female is intrinsic to the human person, reflective of the difference-within-unity-of-Trinity-as-Event-of-Love, and generous and generative.

For the progressive, sexuality/gender is, like everything else, untethered from any broader moral order or purpose, but entirely the unrestrained preference of the desiring Self. Every individual is set off from every other. The only restrain is the extrinsic contract: I will not violate your autonomy if you do not violate mine. Gender is a personal option like choosing your ice cream flavor. Sex can be romantic, expressive, relieving but has no interior purpose or limits. Sex is itself sterile, meaningless and futile.

It is worth noting that few people are consistently, firmly conservative or progressive, but some mixture of the two. Whatever the issue (abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia, artificial intelligence, woman's rights, etc.) you will usually find perhaps 10% are firmly on one side of the cultural divide, and roughly the same opposed. For example, the vast majority favor some restrictions on abortion but allow exceptions. Most might want access to contraception for all but don't want to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to provide it against their Catholic conscience. The Culture War is in large part waged between these two adversarial minorities. And every personal intellect/will is also a battleground between these two. 

However, the underlying moral logic of the two are mutually incompatible and absolutely contradictory. Eventually this is a binary choice: to be a hybrid conservative/progressive is as coherent as being a man/woman, or a bird/fox, or dead/alive. If every human life is infinitely precious than we cannot decide on our own to carve out exceptions for the very small or the very old. If sexuality is spousal of its nature we cannot carve out exceptions for pornography or homosexuality and honor them as wholesome and privileged. 

Progressivism as Illusion; and Nietzsche 

Progressivism is entirely an illusion: human happiness will never come from technology, sexual license or the Revolution. We are created for communion with God and with each other in God. That is the one and only path to lasting happiness. Sin, separation from God, is our enemy; not ignorance, systemic oppression or sexual repression. These last three are real enough; they are not nothing; but they are not major players in the real Spiritual War in which we finds ourselves engaged. Eventually progressivism, even in its milder forms, is sterile, futile, isolating and despairing. The fantasy concocted out of Marx, Darwin and a reconfigured-liberational Freud (the real Freud was sober, minimalist and realistic) is eventually unveiled, like the Wizard of Oz behind the screen, and we must deal with the true Master of Suspicion. Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche presents as the only real alternative to Christ. He famously announced the death of God.  He is singularly a Luciferian figure that champions the Imperial Self against the claims of the Creator. He is the tireless antagonist of mediocre, bourgeois Christianity. He unveils the cowardly underside of piety as well as the pretensions and falsehoods of Pollyannaish progressivism.  He lived his last years lonely and miserable, afflicted with mental illness. A cautionary tale.

Nietzsche is The Master of Suspicion. His shadow over modernity vastly overcomes the combination of Darwin-Marx-Freud. He is a singular voice of Truth: unveiling the weakness of bourgeois Christianity as well as the pretensions of progressivism. He shows the final, ultimate binary: suspicion and death by despair...or Trust in Eternal-Tri-Personal-Love!

 

 

The Hated "S...." Word

I do not really give a "should"...to anyone! I do not have a "should"...about anything!  I do not take a "should!"...from anyone!

People love to give me "shoulds" about my work directing a residence for women. You should:

"Do big fundraisers!"

"Mount cameras to see whose drinking all the milk!"

"Apply for government grants!"

"Get wealthy, connected people on your board!"

And so forth. No! to all of the above! No I will not do wellness training, yoga sessions, rehab, evangelical preaching, job training, group therapy, preparation for independent living, mandatory rosary novenas or anything else. I do a single, simple thing: provide a decent home. Nothing else"  I do it because I want to. And what I do is plenty of work! These people can take their "shoulds" and go jump in the lake!

I don't do it by myself, I do it with others and with heavenly assistance! Thank God for so many friends who support us, who send money and donations and do service...and never give a "should!"

I don't even take them from God or his Church. But that is why we get along so well. He never says "Thou should keep holy the sabbath"  or "Thou should not commit adultery." He gives only "Thou shall's" and "shall not's." In my almost 76 years as a Catholic I have never heard or felt an "I should go to mass on Sunday." God tells me to do it. The Church tells me to do it. I do it. I don't hesitate, paralyzed in a zone of  procrastination, obligation, guilt or indecision. I simply do it. And I love it. The thought of missing mass is like the idea of not brushing my teeth or not showering or not urinating: Inconceivable."

Living in a "should" is being trapped in a limbo of obligation, moral oppression, indecision, impotence, negativity. It is the enfeebled Ego being torn apart by a raging Id and the Oppressor Superego! It is low-grade but persistent depression, discouragement and despair. I cannot...I do not...I will not...live there.

"Should nots" are even worse! These are look-backs at the past with regret, with sentimental and futile grief. "I should have bought Amazon stock in 1996!"  About as helpful as the turning back of Lot's wife!

This is all part of my aversion to negative energy. Given the limitations of my resources, I have zero tolerance of regret, anxiety, resentment and "should-ness." I can only run on positive energies: gratitude, joy, hope, peace, love, faith, and all the gifts/fruits of the Holy Spirit.

For example, if my wife were to say "We should fix the leaky roof" I will absolutely renounce the "should." I will either do it or not. If it is a big flood, and I have the money or skill, and the time and inclination, I will do it. But that is far less than likely. It is about 95% probable I will do nothing. This for many reasons! Leaks, like most problems (in my experience) go away on their own if they are ignored. This is a rule of life. We don't know why but most difficulties, even those far more distressing than a mere drip of water, simply go away.  It is mysterious. So the first and default response to any problem is courteous indifference, benign neglect, passive expectancy. (I know everyone doesn't agree with this approach! Are you sympathetic to my long-suffering but still faithful wife?) Besides, if it isn't raining now what's the big deal. Besides, I probably have more pressing things to do. If I don't, I really want to take a walk or do my blog. 

What about if there is a real moral necessity but I lack the ability or willingness to address it so that there is an internal conflict...a budding "should." What do I do if I hear the soft, accusing, demonic voice saying "You sh..." I am steadfast: I renounce it, unconditionally! "Here I stand; I can do not other." For instance, I haven't done my 2022 taxes yet. Nor my 2021s.  I may owe the government. I am not worried. First of all it is just money. Secondly, if I am due a refund, I don't need the money. If I owe the government they don't really need it either. Thirdly, I may die before the IRS comes after me. Most importantly, I have a lot going on and can't worry about this. Money is like the wind and the Holy Spirit: it comes and it goes, we know not from whence or where to. Also, the one who does my taxes is trustworthy so I merely give him whatever he requests and don't think about it for a single second. 

But let's imagine it is something less trivial  than a bad leak or overdue taxes: a compulsive vice, a broken relationship, a cowardly pattern of neglect! Even then I will not enter the "should zone." What do  I do? First, I work my first step (that is why it is called the first step!): I acknowledge I am powerless over_____. In doing so, I am not surrendering to despair or guilt, I am already leaning into my second step, my faith that a power greater than myself can take care of things. I make my surrender prayer:  "Jesus, I surrender myself to you. Take care of everything." I make an act of TRUST. I hand it over to God. And then I rest. I wait, expectantly. Joyfully. I wait more. I might get distracted into doing something else. I may return to this ritual: powerlessness, trust, surrender, rest, waiting, joy. This can be repeated indefinitely. But infallibly, inevitably, efficaciously.... something happens. Suddenly the problem disappears. Or, suddenly, I realize what I must do, or at least the next positive step I can take. And then I move my muscles. But never for an instant do I dwell in that toxic, oppressive, suffocating, emasculating zone of "The Should."

Dear Reader: I invite you! Throw off the heavy chains of the Superego Should! Enter into interior Joy, Freedom, Spontaneity! Flee and fight that zone of obligation, guilt, impotence. If God wants something from you just do it. If you can't do it or really don't want to do it, just tell him:  "Sorry God. I can't do this! I don't want to do it. I absolutely will NOT do it..... unless You help me, guide me, heal me, strengthen me."  And then relax. 

Holy Eccentrics

An eccentric is "off center":  odd, strange, non-conforming, weird, not ordinary or balanced or mainstream. Not in itself a malignancy or pathology, eccentricity certainly can entail psychic suffering, anxiety, desolation; but the personality of an eccentric is too dense and complex to be summarized by a diagnostic category like OCD or "on the spectrum." There is a more benevolent than malevolent flavor to it. The eccentric often is endearing, humorous and even comedic, charming, interesting, creative, intelligent, artistic as well as solitary, non-competitive, not approval seeking.  

I am talking here about holy eccentrics. Intrinsic to their strangeness is that they are possessed by the Holy Spirit. Whatever deformity, dysfunction or disability has somehow been overwhelmed by Love, by an indescribable freedom, by a fascinating, captivating holiness. We have in the Church a long list of "holy fools": in Russia, the desert fathers and hermits, mendicants, and so forth. So a holy eccentric has three characteristic: strange, non-conforming, distinctive; intelligent and insightful in surprising ways; holy. A holy eccentric is strange, smart and saintly. Actually, there is a fourth: Delightful!

These figures are especially needed today as Christianity in the West is largely enslaved in bourgeois mediocrity. Such figures are entirely contradictory of "bourgie" comfort, security, conformity, meritocracy, technocracy, normality, and monotony. They are spontaneous, serendipitous, unpredictable, philosophical, poetic, dramatic, indescribable, mysterious and free.

I am not myself a certifiable eccentric. I am too ordinary:  not strange enough, not smart enough, not saintly enough. But I have a pronounced silly bone that some would call corny. I am "weird" enough to know an eccentric, and appreciate him. I will list my favorite holy eccentrics, starting with those closest to me and then my "honorable mention" list.

John Rapinich My best friend, little-big brother, uncle to my kids, was raised by his father, tough sailor-Slovak with no religion or education. In the early 1950s John had a nervous breakdown and then shock treatments in the US Army. He started a coffee shop in lower Manhattan which became a hangout for Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, and the beatnik crew, his friends. On an extended stay in Mexico he prayed at Our Lady of Guadalupe and had a hard conversion to Catholicism. He met our friend Fr. Paul Viale at a prolife rally; joined our charismatic prayer group and became our friend. He lived in the basement apartment of our home. His mother spent her adult life in a Meadowview Psychiatric Hospital, where she was joined in later years by her husband. John worked here as an aid. The family was reunited, in a psych ward!  We had the delight of attending their  sacramental marriage there very late in their life. John was an artist, an autodact, a voracious reader of literature, philosophy, theology. He married at the age of 50; I tried to talk him out of it; I was his best man; I was wrong about the marriage. In the last years of his life he threw himself into the Neocatechumenal Way with the passion with which he did everything. Years before he had done mission work in Mexico with charismatics. When he returned he would pray over us and we were "slain in the Spirit," a mysterious kind of ecstatic trance. He gave SO much to us! He loved us SO! He called us the "Lovable Laracys."

Gilbert Davidowicz. We shared an apartment for about a year, 1970, before I married. Severely neurotic! He told me that once he got on an elevator; got bad vibes from a man who said nothing; and then had to go home and stay in bed all day. He was strange. He was smart: something went amiss with his doctoral director in linguistics and he did not get his PhD. I had the feeling he was a brilliant, offbeat linguistic scholar. He was developing an innovative, global theory of the development of languages. He was not saintly in our Catholic way but was a devout Orthodox Jew, a man of God. We shared a tender friendship. Other than my girl friend who met him once or twice we had no mutual friends and never met each others families. When I learned of his death, I had no one with whom to grieve and reminisce: a sadness I was to experience with other random friends I have loved. Once he told me: "If you were able to know yourself, as another person, you would like you." I have thought about that quite a bit.

Ivan Illich. Wildly eccentric, anarchistic, erudite, brilliant, prophetic, brazenly counter-cultural, this mystic ex-priest was holy, in my view, in his own distinctive manner. Not canonizable! The reader of this blog has heard of him before.

Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete was a world-class holy eccentric in a league with Illich. Scientist, theologian, writer he epitomized the eccentric as charming, funny, quirky, delightful, surprising. He loved deeply and left a deep impact on so many, especially within Communion and Liberation. In his last years he sacrificially cared for his disabled brother, leaving a celebrity life as writer and speaker. I just finished his book Cry of the Heart, a poignant, deeply touching articulation of our call to "co-suffer" with those we love and cannot "fix."

Caryll Houselander was a tortured, idiosyncratic, brilliant, neurotic, single woman immensely gifted to write and care, intuitively and miraculously, for the mentally ill. She fell in love with the actually spy who was the basis for the James Bond character. Her written work in in a class of its own.

Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin with their Catholic Worker were exceptional ideologically in their combination of hardcore Catholic piety with heroic care for the poor, "cult, culture and cultivation,"  and a radical politics of anarchism and pacifism. Who else opposed World War II? Who refuses to pay taxes or adopt tax exempt status in the doing of good work? They were real outliers: not quite right for the mainstream Catholic Church or for leftist, Marxist politics. Even later, in the late 60s and into the 70s when they were widely respected by the New Left they adhered to the rigorous  sexual ethic and alienated many who admired them. Peter was the more idiosyncratic in personality and found in Dorothy extraordinary gifts of intelligence, character, spirituality, and leadership to single-handedly give birth to the eccentric Catholic Worker.

Heather King. After wild years of promiscuity, alcoholism, and multiple abortions, Heather King converted to a life of Catholic holiness given over to solitude, prayer, study, and writing. She is the closest thing we have to Caryll Houselander. I am reading sections of her Fifty Divine Eccentric Artists, Martyrs, Stigmatists, and Unsung Saints."   She is in part the inspiration for this essay as she is not only a world class holy eccentric herself but Founder and Lifetime President of the "I Love Holy Eccentrics Club." I am only Vice-President. I am a a premier member of her fan club and with her of the Caryll Houselander Fan Club.

Simone Weil.  This Jewish mystic and brilliant philosopher identified so passionately with Christ of the poor that she basically starved herself to death. More troublingly, she practiced a "spiritual anorexia" as she abstained from baptism and the sacramental life. Within her, extraordinary spiritual and intellectual greatness combined with a deep, Manichean compulsion to destroy her flesh, especially in its femininity. Years ago, in The Bridge, Monsignor John Oesterreicher wrote a penetrating psychological analysis of her that highlighted this self-annihilating side of her personality. But this does not diminish the splendor of her heroism, the profundity of her insight. Particularly significant is her attention to "attention."  She is perhaps the darkest of our eccentrics. 

Charles De Foucauld. Rich, indulgent, decadent atheist; then fierce, fearless, legendary Foreign Legion warrior in the Sahara; then ground-breaking, astute anthropologist of that dessert; then ardent convert to Catholicism; then most ascetic of monks; then humble servant of a convent of nuns in the Holy Land; then solitary, Eucharist-centered, eccentric hermit-friend of the Bedouins of the Sahara; then assassinated; and finally canonized. He is the most extreme, extravagant of our eccentrics.  

Honorary Mention.  

Theologians. Eccentricity as oddness and non-conformity is hardly intrinsic to good theology. Intelligence and holiness of life are; in that eccentricity and theology overlap. But as I think of the best theologians I have known, even through lectures and reading, I notice that an inordinate number are eccentric. 

Scott Hahn, arguably the most influential, erudite, lucid and animated American Catholic theologian of our time has in his personal library over 50,000 books. That is not normal!

The John Paul Institute for Marriage/Family in Washington D.C. centers itself precisely in the Communio theology of John Paul, Benedict and Balthasar but has gathered a group of mesmerizingly distinct personalities: Adrian Walker, Fr. Paolo Prosperi, both David Schindlers, Michael Hanby, Margaret McCarthy, Fr. Antonio Lopez and others. Add to these high-wired friends like Larry Chapp and Rodney Howsare! One could hardly imagine such a colorful, exciting, disparate, surprising collage!

Even such rock solid, perfectly centered theologians like the great Avery Dulles and his younger colleague Monsignor Tom Guarino of Seton Hall package impeccable theological precision, orthodoxy, breath of erudition and depth of insight in personalities that are distinct and delightful!

Pope Francis.  Some time ago I described our Holy Father as eccentric. This was intended in a largely positive way: free, creative, original, surprising, someone who thinks and acts "outside of the box." I would cherish him as friend, confessor, homilist or retreat director. But as pope such an eccentric is a train-wreck: contradictory, incoherent, polarizing, confused and confusing. He is singularly ill equipped to unite the Church around a clear, faithful articulation of the Gospel!

My Maverick Priest Friends.  Within the last decade, I lost three priest friends (Mark, John, Jerry) who were so different from each other and yet shared similarities: highly intelligent and spiritual, charismatic, fun, interesting, devoted to the Church, idiosyncratic. I knew each well: in their striking gifts and pronounced flaws. Each died in disgrace due to allegations of sexual abuse. Not for me to judge culpability: that is up to God. With the Church I grieve any harm done. I know them well enough to be confident they were contrite for any wrongdoing; that they suffered already here on earth temporal punishment due for their sins; and that any amends not paid is progressing in God's mercy in purgatory. As of now they are more on my "pray for" list than my "pray to list" as they remain on my gratitude list.

My Uncle Bill Gallagher, my mother's brother, is the outstanding eccentric of our family. (Eccentricity does not run in the paternal side.) He was the polar opposite of (and at the very least an annoyance to) my father: the one unpredictable, erratic, comedic, spontaneous, a smoker and a drinker, unreliable, quirky, fascinating; the other steady, stable, organized, disciplined, prudent, sober, unfailingly loyal and entirely trustworthy. I wanted to be like Uncle Billy; but I also more deeply, unconsciously emulated my fine father. The two could not be put together. But if I were able to combine even a little of the best qualities of each I would be a sensation! They played handball and golf together: that was how my mother and father met. So thanks to sports and their friendship I am here today at all. Bill was a wounded and decorated war hero. Then studied at Columbia University. He was in and out of a dozen business endeavors in South American counties: TV tubes, piranha teeth encasements, and all kinds of things but all the time he was really working for military intelligence. He never told anyone: not wife, daughter, sisters. They learned after his death: a perfect double life. He was hilariously comedic, puzzling, fascinating. Very, very smart. On the saintly scale not so strong; not exactly on the path to canonization. But he was a man of faith. His German, born-again Kurt (with a K) kept saying how wonderful was his "witness." This puzzled me as Bill was the very least preachy, moralistic, or overtly pious person in the hemisphere. When I asked him he said: "You have been talking to Kurt (with a K). All he talks about is "born again." I know when I was born again. When I made my first communion." Shortly before his death is memory was weak and he called me: "Help me Matty. I can't remember the Our Father." So we prayed the Our Father together. He once called me his best friend. The best compliment I ever got. 

Thank you, heavenly Father,  for our delightful, strange, holy, flawed, tormented, wise, affectionate, fascinating eccentrics!  May we, even in our defects and failings, delight in each other and in your Joy in us!

An Itinerary Among the Colonies from Heaven

Our world is under the domain of death, sin, hell and Satan. But the invasion, long in preparation, from heaven 2000 years ago succeeded! The battle on earth between heaven and hell will continue until Christ returns. In the meantime, colonies from heaven around the globe flourish in prayer and charity, as they steadily storm the gates of hell (which will not prevail) and prepare for his coming. Our Kingdom aspires to embrace the entire world, even as "the world" despises and assaults it murderously.  This network of colonies is called The Church.

Life in Christ is not about achievement, effort, success. It is about connection, communion, abiding. Out of this ordinarily quiet mystical union, flow our shared life of prayer, work, art, adoration, confession of sin, joy, gratitude, acts of mercy, rest, contemplation, serenity,  reflection, spiritual warfare, asking for forgiveness, witness, suffering, surrender, and self-giving.

As a son of The Church, I have always been fathered/mothered, protected, encouraged, instructed, corrected, inspired, befriended, mentored...within our Holy Mother the Church...in a splendor of specific communities. Who I am, what I do, my very identity/mission/destiny, anything within me that is true and good, is a fruit of these communities. My "curriculum vitae" is no list of accomplishments, degrees, or titles, but this journey among communities radiant with  faith, hope, love and joy. Driven by a passionate desire for a deeper communal encounter with Christ, I have been blessed by an extraordinary richness, depth and diversity of ecclesial engagements. What follows, therefore, can serve as my memoir, eulogy and obituary. (LOL!)

Family

The primary, foundational Church is the family. In this I was twice blessed. Raised by a mother and father who who dearly loved each other and shared a deep Catholic faith, we unconsciously inhaled the air of trust, safety, prayer, modest (albeit flawed) holiness, and loyalty to the Church. Later, my wife and I aspired to reenact, however inadequately, this pattern of life.

Parish

The parish is the skeleton of the Catholic Church, the support and source of life for the family. It is steady, stable, reliable, a perpetual institution. It is there to baptize, bury, marry, comfort, heal, educate, confess, communion and confirm us when we need it, regardless of whether we have been faithful. Through absolutely no merit of our own! Free of charge!  Home of all the sacraments, it is itself...in Church building, school, rectory, convent, cemetery, associations, religious/priests, liturgical practice...the quintessential Catholic sacramental of the perpetual, relentless, dependable, aggressive love of God. for all of us.

St. John's is my childhood parish and mother Church of the Oranges: my paternal great-grandfather taught there (end of 19th century) and my maternal great-grandfather helped build the school. My nephew assists as priest on Sundays. We renewed our marriage, after 50 years, and received a blessing there. My grandchildren in the pews that day marked the 6th generation to worship there. Not bad for an American family! It was, in my childhood, 1947-65, a thriving parish enlivened by priests, sisters and brothers. Our pastor, Fr. Burke, eccentric, strange, dysfunctional, was never around and earned the nickname "no work Burke" but the parish surged with energy and God's graces descended unencumbered. 

I myself have always suffered a dissatisfaction with the parish,  craving something stronger. And so my life has been just such a search for intensive community. But I always return to the parish. And it is always waiting for me. I have never entirely given myself to any religious order or movement, but have benefited from such. The parish is like my family: I go off and make new friends, do novel things, explore wider worlds; but my family and parish are always there waiting for me.

For the last 45 years we benefited from St. Paul the Apostle, Jersey City. Over the years, like the broader Church, it has decreased in number and closed its school. But it steadily serves a diversity of ethnicities with a reliable rotation of fine, loyal, endearing priests.

Catholic Schools

I love Catholic schools, realistically, as I see that they are not always academically excellent, often not affordable, not appropriate for all students, and at the upper levels frequently watered-down regarding Catholic Truth. They are safe, thriving, challenging environments that nurture personal growth, learning, discipline, virtue, wisdom and communion with God. 

I studied in such for over 20 years: St. John's, Orange, NJ, with Sisters of Charity and Christian brothers; Seton Hall Prep; Maryknoll College Seminary; Woodstock (Jesuit) School of Theology, NYC; Seton Hall University. I have taught in such for around another 20 years including Xavier Prep, NYC; St. Mary's H.S., Jersey City; St. Paul's Elementary School, Jersey City; Immaculate Conception H.S., Lodi, NJ;  adjunct at Caldwell College and St. Peter's College; and many years in CCD and Confirmation preparation. I have spent about 40 of my almost 76 years in Catholic schools.

Our seven children have spent almost 140  years in Catholic education. Parish and school...as well as iterations of the renewal communities below...were our reliable partners in passing on the faith.

Institutional

The Church is an institution, in the sense of Yuval Levin: it has structure, form, durability, dependability...across time and generations... as it contains and presents our Treasury of Faith. The Eucharist is an institution; as are the priesthood, sacraments, papacy, canon law, moral principles, customs of worship, social teaching and an entire way of life. Catholicism is a "program" in the sense that schools have academic and athletic "programs."

The institutional is like the skeleton of the human body: it provides the inner, enduring bodily integrity. But the body itself is fluid, organic, fleshly, muscular, spontaneous as it breathes fresh air, grows strong, moves vigorously,  develops organs, nervous system, veins, arteries, skin. The bone-institutional structure works with heart, mind, lungs and free will.  It is best as minimal in allowing freedom of the person, communities and the Holy Spirit. It co-inheres with the theological, active, physical, contemplative, decisional, and aspirational in a living, breathing, moving, suffering, aspiring body.

All of the communities below have an interior skeleton or institution, however informal and latent, and are organically or skeletally connected to the broader Church, the Body and Bride of Christ, our Mother on earth.

Maryknoll College Seminary 1965-9

Aspiring to serve the poor, internationally, as a Catholic missionary priest, I spent the tumultuous, momentous late 1960s, far from sex-drugs-rock-n-roll, semi-cloistered in a supportive, stimulating, wholesome, all-male seminary. These years provided:

- Strong, enduring friendships with a self-chosen group of men who shared our faith (at least at that time), a desire to serve the poor, and a degree of confidence, intelligence, and ambition for adventure.

- A stable, semi-monastic routine of study, prayer, work, recreation, healthy diet, and sound sleep.

- Immense stimulation, from the events in Church and world, to read and study, to absorb all the change. 

- Mentoring by a layman librarian, Pat Williams, who befriended me and encouraged me to study. We were taught by Maryknoll priests, bright men who had been sent to graduate studies because of their intelligence, but whose vocational ambition was the missions, not college teaching. They were interesting men, of moral integrity and quiet faith. Good examples. But for the most part, we young adults were viewed as novice interns and did not get close to them in mentoring or friendship.

- Junior year I threw myself into philosophy, especially Medieval and 19th Century philosophy taught by the insightful Fr. Tom McGinn M.M. He convinced me that 20th century thought was largely a series of footnotes on the giants of the previous century: Hegel, Marx, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Darwin, and Nietzsche. These contrasted sharply with their contemporary John Newman and even more with the 13th Century of St. Thomas Aquinas that continued in our time with Maritain, Gilson, Pieper and others. Intellectually I saw a clear choice: the nihilism of the "Masters of Suspicion" or the radiant Splendor, the marriage of faith and reason, in the Great Catholic Tradition. The decision was easy!

- After the summer of 1968 at his Cuernavaca think tank and language school, I was captivated by the brilliant Ivan Illich who combined, strangely, a deep, if eccentric, mystical, traditional Catholicism with an iconoclastic critique of modernity in its ontological, technological, bureaucratic core. His was a utopian, metaphysical vision that did not serve me well practically as it intensified my intellectual, idealistic tendencies. But he combined cultural criticism with a hard core Catholicism that inspired me. In this I was alone; none of my classmates share this with me. In the long run he remained a subtle influence that helped me navigate the toxicity of our culture and crave a deeper Catholicism.

- In contrast to the exhilaration of my intellect, my prayer life was mundane, routine, largely a continuation of my childhood. Our steady life of communal prayer was, I am sure, salutary; but uneventful, low key, tending to monotony. I recall no inspiration, enthusiasm, or passion. That was to come in the 1970s. 

1970s

After the roaring, flaming 1960s, the 1970s were across society a dismal, decadent era: Roe v. Wade, Watergate, militant feminism and gay liberation, stagflation, rising divorce rate, crisis of the family and fatherhood, gas lines, Iran's defiance of Jimmy Carter, a seemingly endless Cold War, pervasive nihilism and, overnight, a culture of contraception and sterile, non-spousal sexuality. Even worse for the Church: sharp decline in Church attendance, exodus of priests and religious, clerical sex abuse (not known at the time), widespread disinterest in religion, pervasive confusion in Catholic catechesis and morals, a despondent Pope Paul VI widely despised for his courageous Humanae Vitae, intensified polarization between progressive and liberal wings within the Church. A bad time!

My personal life was the extreme opposite. I fell in love, got married, and we started a family. Carefree,  unburdened by career ambitions, and supported by my vivacious, magnanimous, long-suffering wife, I followed my interests: theology, catechesis of youth, friendship with the poor, and the shared life of worship. In 1977, with two of our seven children already on the scene,  a mysterious hidden hand wisely guided me into United Parcel Service which provided well for our family for the next 25 years. Throughout this decade, a series of providential, serendipitous events drew us more deeply into our faith.

My Jesuit Mentors

As I courted my wife, I studied mystical Catholic theology with the wise, saintly Fr. Joe Whelan S.J. at Woodstock Theology, just moved to NYC next to Union Theological and Columbia University. I learned from him and the great Catholic mystics that to love Christ is to love his bride, the Church. He introduced me to the theology of prayer. We read "Theology and Sanctity," the classic essay by Balthasar which showed the theology of the fathers/doctors as rooted in prayer and worship rather than a pure academic exercise. This deepened, intensified, clarified my Catholicism and love for theology.

Additionally, I studied fundamental theology with the great Avery Dulles S.J. whose broad, deep, comprehensive understanding of Catholic theology gave me a rock solid foundation for further study.

I taught religion, part-time, at the Jesuit's Xavier H.S. where my boss, Fr. Neil Dougherty S.J. became a friend and spiritual director. Later, another scholarly, saintly Jesuit, Fr. John Wrynn S.J. would guide my spiritual life for many years. It is curious: ending high school I wanted to be a Jesuit or a Maryknoller; I chose the later to serve the poor internationally; but in the long run it was particular Jesuits that impacted my faith life. I pray to these four (Whelan, Dullles, Dougherty, Wrynn) very day.

During this short but eventful period I taught English-as-a-Second-Language in the South Bronx (very tough area at the time) with the Puerto Rican Community Development program and thus maintained contact with the poor. I enjoyed disparate friendships with endearing eccentrics: Gilbert Davidowicz, my roommate, a charming, neurotic, scholarly, observant, Orthodox Jew; George Lissandrello, my college roommate, now renovating antique furniture an ensconced in the gay community of the East Village; and Tony Petroski, a boss at PRCDP, a pure, authentic, wee-smoking, guitar playing hippie with whom I lived for a time; and some Jesuit seminarians who took me in like a brother. I took courses as well at Union Theological and Columbia.

Union Theological and My Ecumenical History

The ecumenical dimension of my faith has taken four dimension.

Union Theological Liberalism While studying at Woodstock, I took courses, randomly as an non-matriculated, "mendicant" theological student. I chose the very best at this, among the best of Protestant liberal seminaries. These were brilliant scholars, of great moral integrity, and colorful, interesting personalities. Their fields ranged from scripture through history, ethics, liturgy, psychology, and systematics. Delightful, fascinating and inspiring...each one! But something was lacking. The overall Catholic context. Each was a striking individual, operating creatively on their own. But they did not fit together into a greater theological whole. There were Presbyterians, Anglicans and other; political radicals; high Church liturgists; mystics; endearing eccentrics. In fact, the school did harbor an underlying ideological/theological vision: Marxist/Freudian, liberational progressivism that has become stronger with time. The scholars I chose did not fit into this model; each was an individual, a lonely outlier. So Protestant! With the Jesuits, and even more profoundly later at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family, I reveled in that deeper, broader Catholic context. My exposure to Union Theological provoked a reaction by inflaming my Catholic instincts.

Evangelical, Charismatic Catholic. A few years later, within Catholic charismatic renewal, I had a far deeper encounter, this time with Pentecostal/Evangelical rather than liberal Protestantism. As mainstream American Catholicism, especially in academia, became progressive following the Council, a remarkable development occurred: in a contrary direction, the Charismatic Renewal incorporated the strongest countercultural, Pentecostal/Evangelical ingredients including clear proclamation of Jesus as personal Lord and Savior, baptism in the Holy Spirit, classic sexual/family/gender ethics, spiritual warfare, authority and obedience, devotion to Scripture, healings, and a shameless fervor in worship. The genius of this renewal movement was that for me and many, but not all participants, these elements, so new and strange, served to deepen and intensify our Catholic faith.

Culture War.  As we moved through the 70s and 80s, the Culture War (around incompetent human life,  gender, technology, sex, religious liberty) found us conservative Catholics increasingly allied with Evangelicals against progressives.  This social/cultural ecumenism and the charismatic engagement mutually reinforced each other. This significant coalition found theological expression in the "Catholic and Evangelical Dialogue" of First Things, a journal and community of faith and thought I have followed over many years. 

Acts of Mercy and Justice.  In a quite different direction,  our friendship with the poor, especially many years later with Magnificat Home, brought us into partnership with others, often liberals (our antagonists in the Culture War),,,across religious, ethnic, class lines... in care for those suffering and marginalized. This unity in charity is the purest form of union; without diminishing the intellectual engagement at Union, the communion in worship with Charismatics/Evangelicals, and the camaraderie in battle in the Culture War.

Teaching Religion at St. Mary's H.S. Jersey City 1972-6

The principal at this tough, city school was happy to get me as she had no real religion program: the guidance teacher did some kind of group dynamic, the English teacher did themes in literature, and so forth. This exemplified the catechetical confusion of the time. From my study with the Jesuits, I was  clear and passionate in developing a curriculum. Teaching religion at that time and place was quite a challenge: suspicion of authority and tradition, black consciousness, city kids of all ethnicities, disinterest and confusion about the faith. I had good partners, Sisters of Charity and laymen, (see prior blog about my mentor Sr. Maria Martha Joyce). I threw myself into the work. The dissonance between my ideals and performance, including softness as a disciplinarian, caused anxiety. I developed alopecia areata, loss of hair in patches on scalp, due to stress, and sought help for a time with counseling. Like most of my jobs, it was stressful. But invigorating, challenging, meaningful an brightened by friendship with other teachers.

Parish Liason for St. Al's Parish in Duncan Housing Project

During these same years (1972-7) St. Al's employed me part-time to be in contact with the Hispanic community in the local housing project. I knocked on doors and inquired about religious needs for baptism, marriage, communion and so forth. They sent my wife and I to Ponce, Puerto Rico, to improve our Spanish. Coincidentally, my new bride worked Head Start at that same location. Summers I taught in the Bible Summer Camp run by the remarkable Sister Virginia Kean. (Again, see prior blog essay on my mentors.) At one point we started a small prayer group especially for a young man who got caught up in the murder of a policeman. This was a delightful, fascinating experience!

Charismatic Renewal

Just 50 years ago, Spring of 1973, married two years but without children, we both had a life-changing encounter: the Cursillo. I met, intimately and clearly, in a new way, the divine-human person of Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior. Mary Lynn was similarly touched and healed. We threw away our contraceptives; opened ourselves to life; and within a few months conceived our first child. The very night after her Cursillo, we attended the first prayer meeting hosted by the People of Hope at Christ the King, an Afro-American parish not far from our home. That event opened for us a new world. 

Prior to that night, my faith had been in part a moral burden, an obligation of gratitude, to serve the suffering. I had received so much that it was only right that I help others. I accepted the adage, so prevalent in the 60s, "If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem." In fact, however, I had really done little or nothing to overthrow injustice; I lacked competence as a social justice activist; and I suffered a persistent, low-grade liberal guilt as "part of the problem." My Christianity was in part a moralism, a duty to overthrow the system, a burden on my shoulders, a sense of moral inadequacy.

That night changed my life. I heard them say: "Good news! You don't have to do a single thing. Sit back and relax. Listen. Pray and sing along as you want. God is going to do something for you. He has a plan to fill you with his Holy Spirit. You have no duty or obligation. You are free to sit back, relax, take it all in, and respond as you wish." This was not just good news, it was tremendous news. I did not have to be myself a moral crusader, a messianic figure. I could just be myself: a poor sinner in need of God's mercy and love. That inner, striving, stressing super-ego of burden and accusation was cast out, definitively. I relaxed, took in God's Word, and began to surrender to the Holy Spirit. This was a new life: no longer condemned by this external Accuser, I became more relaxed, trusting, serene, hopeful, receptive of and responsive to the many graces coming down on us from heaven. 

We joined with a motley, endearing group of city folk. We loved every minute of it. And we, including our new arrivals, were dearly loved by them. We were led in prayer and life in the Spirit by a remarkable group of holy, wise women. (Again, see prior blog on Sister Patricia Brennan, another mentor.) Our Catholic faith was deepened and intensified. It was a "Camelot" period for about four years. Two of our children were baptized there.  The prayer group disbanded. We joined the local parish as our daughter was now ready for school. We no longer participated regularly in charismatic prayer. Our marriage and shared family life of prayer have benefited. I have identified, ever since, as a Charismatic Catholic.

To summarize, the early-mid 70s were a time of momentous spiritual growth for us: marriage, children, theological study, mentoring by holy Jesuits, work with the poor, catechesis of the young, and especially surrender to an intense Evangelical-Charismatic Catholicism. This abundance of blessings was to guide us through the next 50 years. 

1980-90s

The next decades were less eventful, more routine as we tried to live in accord with the graces we had received so abundantly. We lived a normal parish life; our children attended good Catholic schools; I taught CCD and Confirmation preparation. We enjoyed our extended families as our children adored their many cousins. In addition to our partnership with parish, school, family and friends, we drew upon our charismatic background to engage our adolescent children in summer experiences of more intensive Catholic life: World Youth Days, service trips overseas, Charismatic Family Conference, Magdalen College Camps, NET retreats, and others. We are intensely grateful that our children and their families continue to practice their faith, in a variety of styles, and I attribute this to their engagement over the years in a rich network of "colonies from heaven." 

Mary Lynn created, in a tough neighborhood and modest house, a rich home for our children and their neighborhood friends: large yard, lots of freedom and fun, safety as she was always there looking out the kitchen window, artistic-decorative touch of Beauty on a slim budget, healthy and nutritional meals. Not perfect, but overall a place of joy, stimulation and faith. It was a "Camelot" period. 40 Lembeck Avenue was, for almost half a century, a little "colony from heaven" because of her.  She was, in my view, a superb mother, surpassed by none (although I know others in her league.)

She was equally the best wife of our generation. She demanded nothing of me. Happy that we were financially secure, in a modest fashion given our large family, she supported my UPS career which often required long and difficult (night) hours. With help from our downstairs friend, Aunt Betty, she entirely managed our home. 

Generously, she allowed me freedom to pursue all my interests: graduate courses at Rutgers MBA program, masters degree at Seton Hall University, and doctoral program at Union Theological/Teacher's College. I catechized in the parish; coached tee ball little league; worked part-time as substitute in special education; taught as adjunct at St. Peter's and Caldwell College. St. Peter's was my personal "country club" where I would work out in the gym, visit the chapel, and spend hours reading theology in the library. I was "out and about" freely, connecting with many people and groups.

I was a busy and a somewhat absent father. My sons and son-in-laws are all far more attentive and engaged than I was.  My compensating factor was that I took such immense delight in our children. Fatherhood for me was never a chore, an effort, or a burden. It came to me naturally, effortlessly, like a hobby one loves, partly because Mary Lynn did all the heavy lifting. I have struggled and sometimes fallen short as a teacher, husband, supervisor, director. But my children for me are stress-free; surpassingly and inexpressibly delightful. When I left the seminary at the age of 22 I asked my mother if she was disappointed that I would not be a priest. She responded: "Not really Matthew. To tell you the truth, I always felt that you had to be a father." I may have been the happiest, most carefree father in the world. And later became even happier as a granfather!

 John Paul II and Communio Theology

1978, the papacy of John Paul II, was a momentous event for the world, for salvation history, and for my own personal life. For me he was Moses leading us through the waters, El Cid charging across the kingdoms of Spain, Lawrence of Arabia surprising the enemy out of the desert. He is my hero, my captain, my role model. With him the Church left the age of indecision, confusion, despondency. We entered a land promised (by the Council): clarity, courage, hope, virility, authority, vigor. His catechesis on the human body, gender and sexuality was the decisive theological event of the 20th century. He himself embodied and taught so much more on the dignity of the person, human work, Mercy, morality, ecumenism, and the entirety of Catholic life.

In the journal Communio I found to my delight that he was not a solitary genius (like Ivan Illich or the scholars at Union Theological), but part of a greater whole, a new but traditional Catholic school of thought, a felicitous marriage of the best of the past and of the present, Resourcement or Communio theology. I already knew Balthasar, Ratzinger, DeLubac and others. But now the all-star team was complete. For the following decades, up to today, mostly reading quietly on my own, I have participated in this profound school of theology. This tradition continues: my son earned his PhD and my daughter teaches the psychology course at the John Paul Institute in D.C. Recently I enjoyed the pleasure of attending the funeral of David L. Schindler, the Godfather of this school, and relishing his memory. This school is a powerful "colony from heaven!"

2000 - 2023

At the turn of the millennium, with my children moving into adulthood, I detected a "middle age crisis" in an aggravation of concupiscence and need for stronger spiritual medicine. Providentially help came from two "colonies from heaven." These were distinct but similar in their intensity, reckless honesty, and ferocity in confronting sin and compulsivity.

Neocatechumenal Way

My best friend, my little-big brother John Rapinich was a fervent participant in the first "Neocat" community in the USA at St. Columba's, NYC. He talked about it relentlessly. I became spiritually jealous of the obvious zeal and rigor of this strange new itinerary of faith. When my son faced some difficulties I brought him to their catechesis. I thought it would help him; it helped me; I joined a community. I knew about and admired the lay renewal movements, but this one was different: this was Sparta-like combativeness; the navy seals of the Church;  what the Jesuits used to be. This was serious about life and death, about sin and salvation, about Christ and Lucifer.  Kiko had created a refreshing, innovative presentation of the Gospel as he retrieved essential elements of tradition. Above all it was a breathtaking honesty about our sins and fear of death. The antidote: a long, patient, and difficult journey of faith within an intensive, small community of prayer, reception of the Word, fellowship, and conversion into the freedom of the Kingdom. Here was the most virile, militant of all the colonies from heaven. 

After a few years, I realized it wasn't working. My wife was not involved. It was dissonant with my life as its demands detracted from prior commitments to family, work and parish. Reluctantly, I withdrew. A few years later my brother-in-law was living with us and facing difficulties. Again I brought him to a community, in West New York, NJ. We both engaged. With passage of time it again seemed not to fit my life or his. Again, I withdrew.

I benefited greatly from the  time spent with them. It gave a rigor and vigor, an intensity to my faith. Currently my second son with his family are walking this "Way." I am very supportive of them. I follow their progress, vicariously, with interest. I consider myself a friend and companion, if from a distance.

12 Steps

At around that time a priest in spiritual direction gave me a book about the 12 steps. I read it and a lightbulb lit up in my head: I am not alone; I am like so many others, caught in patterns of compulsivity rooted in unacknowledged of isolation, inadequacy and shame.  I attended a meeting and felt like I was finally home: a safe place where secrets are shared, shame is banished, and together we pursue recovery, freedom, and sobriety, mind and flesh.

I attended a variety of meetings: Alcoholics Anonymous, AlAnon, Emotions Anonymous, Suicide Survivors Support Group and others. Additionally I attended the Recovery meetings of Dr. Lowe which address symptoms of anxiety and nervousness. Not to mention, over the years, much time in prayer-and-support groups with Catholic men.

The 12-step program was, for me, an intensification of Catholic confession and penance: acknowledgment of powerless, surrender to Higher Power, fearless moral inventory, making of amends, and sharing of the program with others. Along with the Neocatechumenate, this program was the stronger treatment for sin that I needed at that very moment to enter deeper into joy/serenity/freedom.

 Our Lady's Missionaries of the Eucharist

A few years later, with our nest empty and a little time available, we were ready for another colony from heaven: OLME. Led by the saintly, wise and inspiring Sister Joan Noreen, this program gathered together into a rule of life elements of classic Catholicism: daily Eucharist, rosary, Lectio Divina, Daily Office of the Church including morning and evening prayer,  fasting, devotion to the saints, monthly meetings and simplicity of life. Unlike Charismatic Renewal and the Neocatechumenate, there was nothing creative here; but a simple, clear, prudent gestalt of Catholic practices. Sister Joan's talks were deeply inspiring. She had an uncanny knack for recruiting gifted priests like scripture scholar Fr. Francis Martin and the Franciscan hermit Fr. Pio. Praying of the Daily Office (however irregularly) as a couple became a particular blessing. The serenity, simplicity and clarity of this program is a perfect fit for us as we age.

Immaculate Conception

A few years into the new century, our children now out on their own, I wanted to do something special for the poor. The plight of those in boarding homes in our area especially struck me and I ambitioned to work in or open one. In 2003, age 55 with 25 years of service in UPS, my wife now working as a nurse, my children well into adolescence and adulthood, I took early retirement and ventured to seek some new,  unknown work. I took some sabbatical time, went on pilgrimage to Guadalupe, did the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius in daily life with Fr. Wrynn, built a deck in my backyard, prayed for guidance from the Holy Spirit, and tried to find work in a boarding home. The last did not work. 

After a time, I took a job, again teaching religion, with the Felician Sisters at Immaculate Conception H.S., Lodi. My time there was happy and serene: by now I was a happy grandfather;  the girls seemed to sense that and received me with filial affection and respect. The Felicians were devout, traditional, full of life and great partners in our shared work with the girls. Six years passed quickly, happily there on a serene colony from heaven.

In taking this position I did not entirely abandon my boarding home dream. I told God directly: "I want to do something for the 'in between people' but it is too much for me. If you want it you have to bring together a team and I will happily do my part."

Magnificat Home

August of 2006, age 59 , I am happily walking the Camino of Santiago across Spain, by myself, praying and visiting Churches along the way. I had just been relieved of a cancer in my colon; our children mostly adults; secure financially; and content with my teaching task. Every day I asked: "Lord, do you have some task for me?"  Immediately I thought of the boarding home people. Immediately I reminded the Lord: "It is too much for me. You have to bring a team together. I will do my part." One day my mind ruminated about all the people, family and friends, who shared my concern for the boarding home people. So many with whom I had conversed. A light bulb lit up in my mind: "Holy Smoke! We have right within our own rather broad family and circle of friends tons of concern, energy and money!" The Holy Spirit was showing me that that team I demanded was already in place. On my return we convened a meeting of the more interested. My mother learned about it and asked the cost. I estimated (accurately) about $100,000. She promised to write a check for $50,000 whenever needed.

We opened in September 2009. It has been a joyful, satisfying and sometimes challenging task. Our residents, all low-income, many special-needs women, are a delight. We have a generous, faithful network of support. We have benefited over the years (going now on 14) from superb workers and volunteers.  Much more than a mere house or residence, it  is a "home."  Our women elicit tons of love and they return it gratefully. It has been, truly, a "colony from heaven."

Moving Forward

Over the last half century, I have benefited (but never fully joined) from seven ecclesial communities: Fr. Whelan and my Jesuit mentors, Charismatic Renewal, Communio school of theology, the Neocatechumenal Way, 12 step fellowship, OLME, Magnificat Home. Add to this a list of Catholic schools. Add to this engagement with works of mercy. Add to this friendship with a range of orders and movements: Maryknoll, the Jesuits, Franciscan Friars of the Renewal; Christian Brothers; Sisters of Charity, Dominicans, and Felicians; Communion and Liberation; the Catholic Worker; L'Arche; Mount Savior Monastery; Bethany Hermitage; National Evangelization Teams; Regnum Chrisit;  Cursillo; Marriage Encounter; Renew.

I look back with immense gratitude and surging joy. But Jesus did tell us "remember Lot's wife!" She turned back to look at Sodom as it burned and was changed into salt. The monk-now-bishop Erik Varden does a magisterial exegesis of this event in a chapter in The Shattering of Loneliness, on Christian Remembrance. In addition to toxic curiosity and craving for the evils of the place, there may have been something more positive in her turning around: she may have recalled the good...affection, trust, kindness, loyalty...among family and friends. Surely these people were not perfectly evil. She may have appreciated and longed nostalgically for what was good there but was about to be destroyed forever. 

And so Lot's wife alerts us to the danger of a sentimental nostalgia that longs sadly for a lost past: we cannot return to the Church of the 50s, to our college years, to the honeymoon years, to the honeymoon with my new bride, to the glory days of Charismatic Renewal. But all that was good and true there remains in Eternity and in remembrance. Such memory gives Joy to our present and boundless Hope for our future.

At this moment, age 75, we remain, we abide, in our family, including extended, network of friends, a fine parish, OLME, Magnificat Home, and more remotely other communities. We remain, we abide in The Church. We are very well connected within this colonial network. We look forward, not backward, to continue our itinerary, through the colonies of heaven, to our final destiny, the Kingdom of Heaven in its full splendor.