The Collapse of Catholicism 1965

By strange coincidence, the end of the Vatican Council in 1965 was followed immediately by a catastrophic, rapid collapse of Catholicism in the USA: exodus of priests and religious by the thousands, decline in mass attendance, and so forth. It is understandable that traditionalists are tempted to blame the Council itself. I disagree.

Thought experiment: imagine that we didn't have that Council! The Church would have marched forward, as she was, into the 1970s and the cyclone-tornado-tsunami of the Cultural Revolution and other social transformations. Would the Church have fared better without the Council? I think NOT!

I envision immense pressures and tensions as a reactionary Church, rigid and brittle, bereft of flexibility and resiliency, evokes increasing rage from a Catholic population now assimilated and acculturated into mainstream society. Three consequences seem likely. First, a Council is eventually held amidst rage and polarization, entirely different from the amazing serenity and consensus that prevailed in the actual meeting. Secondly, we can imagine a real schism, between  traditionalist and progressive factions, in contrast to the moderately conservative/innovative center so strong in 1962-5 and later revived by John Paul and Benedict. Thirdly, we can imagine a flood of people into the Episcopal and mainstream congregations.

In retrospect, it is providential that the Council deliberated calmly when the Church  was at her very best in the West: prosperous, peaceful (except for the Cold War), confident, thriving. This allowed a posture of serenity, a docility to the Holy Spirit that would have been improbable in the chaos that was about to explode. Overwhelming majorities of bishops agreed to all the Council documents which summarized the Ressourcement ("return to the sources") theology that had been percolating in that century.

The collapse of Catholicism is a vastly complex, overdetermined event that can be partially understood as the confluence of three mega-social developments: the passage of ethnic-working-class Catholics into the middle, professional classes; the Cultural Revolution; and the myriad of social-technological-organizational changes. 

But first, two truisms bear repetition. First, we need again to sharply contrast the actual meaning of the Council documents with the alleged "Spirit of Vatican II" which is in fact indifferent to the actual reality and is an embrace of the Cultural Revolution in all its anti-Catholic pathologies including rejection of tradition/authority, deconstruction of masculinity/femininity, and liberation of sexuality from marriage. Second, we do well to acknowledge that the flourishing Church of 1960-65 was rich in buildings, money and numbers but weak in its spiritual/intellectual foundations, otherwise it could hardly have collapsed so spectacularly.

1. Catholics Become Bourgeois.  In the years after World War II, Catholics were assimilated into the middle, professional/managerial classes. They left their urban ethnic ghettos for the suburbs; were accepted in every prestigious institution previously reserved for WASPs; made lots of money; achieved well in higher education. They were entirely accepted into late-Protestant, increasingly-secularizing society. The tightknit Catholic ethnic culture in the poor urban neighborhood around family and parish disappeared. The suburbs of the 50s offered economic security, comfort, status, and an ecumenical and welcoming civil religion of lukewarm Christianity. Bourgeois life is not inherently anti-Catholic, any more than agricultural, urban or nomadic life is anti or pro Catholic. But it did make the populace vulnerable to the second development.

2. Cultural Revolution. Like everyone else in the suburbs, Catholics became comfortable, secure, materialistic, consumeristic, careerist, status conscious, removed from death and evil, and residually religious in a superficial and sentimental fashion. They were sitting ducks for the Cultural Revolution. Lulled into complacency, comfort, security, they lost their Catholic taste for the supernatural, spiritual combat with sin and evil, a heroic sexual ethic, closeness to the poor, tradition and authority, sacramental efficacy, the consecrated life, and the sacredness of marriage, maternity and paternity. And so they embraced contraception, sterile-sentimental sexuality, one or two child families, androgyny, the absoluteness of production/consumption, individualism, and careerism. It was the invasion of the body snatchers: people identified as Catholic but they had become, in their souls, secular, materialistic bourgeoise. 

3. Structural Changes in Society.  Concurrent with and conspiring with this change of soul was a revolution in the body of society. Technology, science, bureaucracy, expansive corporations and states all worked together to replace smaller organisms of agency, community, intimacy, religion, and the family. Intermediate organizations (business, charities, recreations) increasingly were swallowed up by mega-organizations of enhanced sophistication and efficiency. The human values of immediacy, agency, cooperation and interaction were replaced by machine-like productivity. Local cultures, traditional faiths, and family structure were all depleted and replaced by the impersonality of the meritocratic world. The end result: individualization. The isolation of the person and increased dependency upon large, impersonal corporations and governmental agencies. 

In this view, the Council was God's gentle, guiding hand, preparing the Church for the storm ahead. Vatican II returned to the foundation, the person of Jesus Christ, as proclaimed by the doctors and saints. Engaging the modern world, post-Enlightenment, it rejected the reactionary defensiveness of traditionalism as well as the naive credulity of progressivism. Rather, it articulated a sophisticated, nuanced discernment, accepting all that is good and renouncing the bad. The double pontificate of John Paul and Benedict continued this legacy of a reverent conservatism that is open and creative. May we ourselves receive, cherish, enhance, defend and share this rich heritage.

 

The Return of Moral Clarity and Certainty

The world today is more violent and ominous than at any time in my lifetime, since World War II. The good news: demise of moral confusion and return of clarity and certainty.

The political world of my childhood/youth (1947-65) was one of luminous clarity and serene certainty. This was due to my natural immaturity, but also to the objective structure of the world.

Bad: Soviet Gulags and totalitarianism; Nazi concentration camps and genocide; the attack on Pearl Harbor; slavery of the Africans and Jim Crow; selfish, rich capitalists; and Mike Fink, King of the River.

Good: USA, allies and the entire generation of our parents who prevailed against the Axis powers; Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement; labor union, the Democratic Party, the Catholic Church; and Davey Crockett.

That lucid, bi-polar, night-day world collapsed, after 1965, into a deep fog of confusion, complexity and ambiguity. The Vietnam War: resistance to imperialistic Communism or arrogant repression of a national movement? Capitalism: freedom of enterprise or oppression by the rich and powerful? Masculinity: heroic or misogynist and toxic? Aid to the undeveloped world: humanitarian generosity or cultural imperialism? Authority in all its manifestations: a radiance of the Fatherhood of God or dominance by the powerful? Compulsory integration of schools: justice for minorities or violation of family rights? 

This moral disorientation has clouded domestic and foreign policy for over half a century: our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan: liberation or colonialization? Communist China: future friend or foe? Capital gain tax cuts: boost to the economy or favoring of the already rich? NATO: protective of Europe or provocative of Russia?

With the invasion of the Ukraine, the massacre of Jews near Gaza, and the emergence of a new Axis (China, Russia, Iran) we again enjoy both clarity and certainty. We see here Evil in pure, undiluted form. We are engaged again...in global war. Putin must be resisted! China must be restrained! Hamas must be destroyed! Iran must be opposed. 

There is an interior peace, stability, strength and even joy in such certainty. Such passionate, consuming agonistic engagement with Evil.

Sources of Continued Moral Confusion

1. Woke Oppressor/Oppressed Paradigm. The left sees all political life simplistically through the model of powerful over weak: black/white, male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, transphobe/transgendered, Israeli/Palestinian. And so we witness now an exaggerated sympathy for the underdog moving into antiSemitism and other pathologies.

2. Isolationism. Fatigue with costly and apparently futile combat in the Middle East has drawn our younger generation away from the American internationalism of the last 75 years. This combines with residual Boomer anti-Vietnam anti-Americanism in a failure to see that our county, with allies, is the only force holding back the new Axis of darkness.

3. Naive Liberalism. Secular, humanistic progressivism, even more than a denial of God and heaven, is a compulsive avoidance of Lucifer and deep evil. Obama took office, confident that rid of the oil-obsessed Republicans, his reasonable, genial warmth for the Muslim world would usher in a period of peace. The opposite occurred: that world exploded in violence. Biden has continued the appeasement of Iran, giving them billions of dollars which fund Hamas and others. Pope Francis, who should know better, has assumed a "Spiritual Emperor of the Globe" role as he presumes to transcend binaries (West/Russia, Israel/Palestine, Religious Freedom/Communism) and bring peace by a moralism of equivalence, holding NATO partially responsible for the Russian invasion, downplaying the radical evil of the new dark Axis and advancing his own clericalist agenda of open borders, disarmament, and environmental justice.

Conclusion

Today's news is that Russia is devastating the Ukraine because our aid to them was so long delayed by the hard right and Biden is withholding arms from Israel due to pressure from the pro-Palestinian hard left. Our current President and his entire team epitomize the moral weakness, degeneracy, indecision, confusion, timidity and cowardice that descended upon our political left in the Cultural Revolution. Trump is another, if lessor, symptom of that malignancy, as are the Clintons and the Obamas. 

Can our younger people overcome the moral decadence of the boomer generation and retrieve the heroic moral loyalty of the Great Generation?  We hope and pray for that! 

Who is "My Community?" Memoir of an Odessey

 "List the resources available in your community for those who suffer mentally and emotionally." This question initiated the training session we recently attended on "mental health first aid." I couldn't answer it. I was stumped because I couldn't identify "my community." I thought:

We recently moved from Jersey City to Bradley Beach, which we love, but I know by name maybe 10 people. Hardly "my community."

Much more do we love our new parish. But again, we know maybe 10 people by name. Our pastor I like and admire very much but he is clearly disinclined to get to know me beyond "have a good day." Also, we attend perhaps three different parishes a week and probably 40 to 50 a year. Parish mass and sacraments have always been a fundamental structure of my lived-cosmos, but we are wildly, passionately promiscuous with regard to parishes. 

Obviously, my family is my community. But our children are spread across several states; many we do not see for months; so that leaves my wife and myself. Not big enough to be "my community." My large extended "family of origin" and in-laws are even more dispersed.

My adult life has been, in large part, precisely a search for "my community"...even as I have always enjoyed a strong, close family; a network of friends; and closeness to the Church.

In college I was drawn to: small Christian communities; the "Communidades de Base" inspired by the leftist radical Paolo Freire  in Latin America; the extremist, secular Ecumenical Institute in Chicago; the "Saul Alinsky" social justice activism of Monsignor John Egan; and the deep-Catholic anarchism of Cuernavaca's Ivan Illich.

Early in adulthood and married life I moved away from social justice activism but flirted with: Catholic Worker, the sensitivity group "Second Chance Family," the Bruderhoff; Cursillo; and Marriage Encounter.

We were deeply involved in and influenced by our charismatic prayer group, but never joined a Covenant Community and so did not deliver that dimension of our faith to our children.

I walked for a few years with two different Neocatechumenal Communities but left that even though I now support my son and his family who continue "to walk,"

We are friends with Communion and Liberation, through our daughter, and attend their New York Encounter every year, but are not full participants.

I have befriended many Jesuits (with whom I taught), Maryknollers, and Christian Brothers and spent time in Benedictine monasteries, in hermitages and the Franciscan Friary in Newark. I have worked closely in education for many years with religious sisters of the Charities, Dominicans and Felicians. 

I consider myself a practitioner of 12-step spirituality and have attended many meetings but do not do so at the present.

I retain affectionate bonds with my college classmates, Maryknoll College, 1969, and see a handful from time to time but look forward to our reunion every 5 years.

I have studied at the graduate level at Seton Hall, Rutgers, Woodstock Jesuit Seminary, Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University, Teacher's College and Jewish Theological Seminary; but have only a masters degree; retain no real bonds with those communities; and am not a certified academic, but remain a mendicant student. 

Twenty-five years working at UPS left me with no steady friends, memories of stress and challenge, but gratitude for a good income for my family.

I faithfully read  Communio, First Things, Crisis, Catholic Thing, National Catholic Register and so enjoy a distant, intellectual fellowship with them. I also have read, for well over 60 years, the NY Times with which I have an ambivalent relationship.

I consider myself a patriot as well as a Catholic internationalist; with a keen sense of the anti-Catholic animus of the Protestant America of the past; the leftist, secular progressivism of the present; and even  right wing libertarianism, individualism, corporativism and crude MAGA-ism.

As a moral conservative and culture warrior I am a registered Republican, with liberal leanings on social justice issues; a never-Trumper who has not voted in recent elections but will be forced to reluctantly pull the lever for Donald against  the ever-deepening moral depravity of the DNC. I have hopes for a "New Right" which coherently engages class/culture war against the elites on behalf of the have-nots, economically and morally.  This is a niche position of course and arguably a utopian illusion.

We made promises in joining Our Lady's Missionaries of the Eucharist and keep many, but not all of them. We have not been attending meetings because of distance. But those promise still structure our lives.

A third degree Knight of Columbus, I am proud of the organization but do not join in meetings or activities.

Throughout my life I have been drawn to and attracted to myself a wide variety of "weird" friends: random, eccentric, tormented, fascinating, sensitive, offbeat, insightful, entertaining, non-bourgeois, non-normie, spiritually and philosophically profound. These dear, cherished friendships are all one-on-one; precisely NOT community. But Oh So Precious!

Magnificat Home, our residence for women, now almost 15 years old, is for me a "second family." Dear to my heart are the residents, staff, volunteers, Board, and the supportive network of family and friends.

As I write, we are exploring new communities. We signed on to NODA (No One Dies Alone) whereby we are able to sit vigil with hospice patients who have no family or friends available. This drew us further into being volunteer chaplains in our local hospital and part of a marvelous group of people. This led to participation, monthly, in a Faith Council which joins local activists concerned with the homeless, the addicted and the isolated...a tremendous group, mostly leftwing non-Catholic Christians with huge hearts. Last week we were oriented to jail ministry with other volunteers, mostly NA and AA folks, tough, weather-beaten, many ex-cons themselves, with lots of tattoos and humble hearts of pure gold. 

To Conclude...

Blessed with an extraordinarily happy marriage and family, my primary community, my soul remains restless. Life continues to be a pressing, almost manically urgent search for more and deeper community; a journey from one group, movement, engagement to another. I relish each encounter; but remain with urgent longings, and so move on. 

This journey continues, always within the more foundational community, The Church. And within the Church, there is the point of rest, of peace, of completion:  Christ Himself in the Eucharist. This is Goal and Destination, already present here, so small, white, tasteless, quiet, anonymous!

As we consume and are consumed by the Host, we taste already our final home, our TRUE community: the heaven of the Holy Trinity. As I approach my 77th Pentecost, I am reminded that we have in this world no "lasting city"...no final community. No romance, marriage, family or community can satiate our restless souls. Even the Church herself, on earth, the very body and bride of Christ, is so often a sadness, a disappointment, even a betrayal! So we raise our eyes to Graceland, to the heavenly Zion, to the actual Ithika!

At Saturday's funeral for my beloved cousin Rich, his daughter Mary read his favorite poem, the Homeric classic made famous previously at the funeral of Jacqueline Onassis Kennedy: Cavany's "Ithica."

As you set out for Ithaka

hope your road is a long one, 

full of adventure, full of discovery...

Keep Ithika in your mind.

Arriving there is what you are destined for.

But don't hurry the journey at all

Better it last for years,

so you're old by the time you reach the island, 

wealthy with all you've gained on the way...

Our eyes are tranquilly fixed upon our Destiny. And so that Destiny animates, motivates, guides and accompanies us. A still point, of rest and peace, in the turmoil of the journey as it moves us from one grace to another, from glory to glory, in every attentive moment, act of gratitude, of generosity given or received, of reception and action, of faith and hope but above all Love.

Our Stable Catholic World

Now well into my 77th year, I reminisce and wonder: has the Catholic lifeworld of my own childhood and youth...not the broader social world in all its technological-cultural-political-social change...but the immediate, concrete, experiential, formative cocoon...been basically replicated or replaced in that of my children and now grandchildren? 

In the current season of Easter, May and Spring, our immediate family is celebrating three first communions, one confirmation, two graduations, and the funeral of a dear cousin as we await two births. In the midst of this Joy, I gratefully conclude: the three worlds are essentially the same. A wise, powerful Providence is clearly and firmly in control: protecting, preserving, strengthening, and guiding us and our way of life.

Basic Structure of our World

1. Spousal Communion is the core, the skeletal structure of the formative cocoon: stable, faithful, bi-gendered, prayerful, open to life, companionable, hetero-erotic, romantic, energetic-synergetic, fruitful, inclined to request and give forgiveness, receptive of and generous to the community and Church. The anchor of the family is the tender, attentive mother, rooted in her threefold love (God, spouse, children), who subordinates career ambitions to the care of the family, and is herself supported by and collaborative with her husband who is confident in his own masculinity and authoritative paternity.

2. Church, Roman Catholic and catholic ("embracive of all that is true-good-beautiful"), is the enclosing "womb" that shelters, protects, and guides the smaller family.  Four generations, including my parents, are all firmly embedded within Christ's sacramental, authoritative, hierarchical, militant,  Marian "Communion of Saints." Notwithstanding immense technological change, the sexual revolution, the culture wars, societal decadence, breakdown of the family, and ominous world events...ours remains a "Hobbit" world: modest, happy, secure, comforting, trusting, filial, innocent, childlike and child-centered.

3. Schooling. All of us...my siblings, children and grandchildren...take to school like a duck to water. Without any tiger mothers, we all perform beautifully, fluidly, happily and mostly free of undue stress. There is something in our cultural, family DNA that predisposes us to flourish in the world of education...lots of books at home? respect for and trust in authority? a home environment of conversation, especially with the attentive mother? This is, of course, a key to success in the broader society which is so centered on education and credentials.

Similarities and Differences

1. Sports. My father's generation loved sports...handball, golf, and watching football and baseball. My own cohort did not know organized athletics, but played casual, free, unmentored sports. My own children played lots of unorganized sports but also formal activities of little league, basketball, and especially high school track. But my grandchildren, with the broader society, play organized sports from an early age. This is a mixed blessing. It is guarded and safe...arguably to an extreme. It includes a bonding of parent and child. But it is a loss of the spontaneity, freedom, risk-tolerance, experimentation and adventuresome of play and competition free of adult supervision. The high parental investment makes it less available to bigger families.

2. Work is a component of all three life-worlds but was more important to my generation of big families, less affluence and a memory of real poverty in the Depression. Through high school we all worked: paper routes, caddying, library, baby sitting, bus boy, etc. For us three brothers, caddying filled up our summers and garnered for us the respect of our parents as we made good money for that time and our age. Our children and grandchildren give more time to athletics.

3. Politics. My family of origin, with a union organizer father, was passionately committed to a Democratic liberalism (FDR, JFK) that was at that time very Catholic-friendly: pro-family, pro-life, pro-working man, patriotic, internationalist, anti-communist, pro-civil-rights, concerned for justice and the poor. In the wake of the sexual revolution of the 60s, I diverged from most of my generation (as did my brothers, but not so much my sisters) in reaction to the new cultural liberalism, even as I retained my allegiance to social justice concerns. Our own children in large part share my values: conservative on moral issues of life and sexuality, but more liberal on economic justice; disgusted by both Trump and Biden; more opposed to the anti-Catholicism of the DNC but uncomfortable with classic Republicanism of low taxes, low regulation and trickle-down-economics and the MAGA cause. There is a near consensus among the 15 adults in our family: a plurality cannot vote for Trump or Biden, while a few of us will vote (reluctantly) for one or the other. A basic continuity holds about politics.

4. Romance and Sexuality. We are all of us, across the generations, "late bloomers." Without any explicit instruction, we predictably wait for romance until about the end of college or early adulthood. This happens in an organic, spontaneous fashion. In my view this is wholesome as I ascribe to the thinking of psychologist Eric Ericson: genuine intimacy is available only when identity is firmly established. And this occurs, especially for the male, after adolescence. This works towards a stronger marriage and family structure.

5. Career. Our family leans heavily into the human services of education, psychology and medicine. Even our ex-JAG-lawyer son works in distributing medical benefits to veterans. 

6. Location. We moved into Jersey City when we married; raised our seven children there; and none of us remain there. We are unattached to any location. Our children are dispersed: three in NJ and four in other states. Interestingly, five of our six in-laws remained near their childhood homes and their parents; two in the same house in which they were raised. I have a slight jealousy for the location-loyalty of Wendel Berry and the Jersey City firemen/policeman with whom my children grew up. Mostly I aspire that my children find, wherever they live, the Church and all the good things that accompany that.

7. Neighborhood. Raised in a modest, urban, working class neighborhood, I deliberately preferred the same for my children. This turned out to be a congenial place to raise a family: strong Catholic parish and schools, warm neighbors, diversity, lower income people, freedom from the pressures of aspirational suburban life. Our youngest daughter lives similarly in York, Pa; our oldest in Bayonne NJ, near our home in Jersey City. The rest live in suburban  areas, ranging from modest to more affluent. As such they face the pressures of middle class life but they seem well aware of these and reactive against the worst aspects of it.

8. Class and Finances. Coming of age in the Great Depression, my parents knew real deprivation and were entirely happy with their modest resources in raising the nine of us in the 1950s. My father got a better paying job as union organizer for the UAW by the early 1960s and our family, with the broader society, enjoyed security and a touch of affluence. I, with my siblings, enjoyed an extended education, but retained a loyalty to the poor and working class and a quiet antipathy to affluence, prestige, and status. My children and their spouses seem to retain this viewpoint. They are all thriving at a modest, middle level of the professional class as teachers, nurses, psychologists, etc. 

9. Culture War. This did not exist for my parents and in my childhood and adolescence. In my early adulthood I reacted strongly against the social revolution and maintained, intellectually, for the rest of my life the posture of a culture warrior. Our children share our values, but express them in a variety of ways. Our younger son and his wife are more radical and countercultural, by disposition and participation in the Neocatechumenal Way. The rest of our children are comfortable in the mainstream; critical; but with less of an edge than I have. In this they mirror a combination of my wife and myself.

10. Fertility. Our children retain our Catholic love for big families. To my knowledge, neither my mother nor my wife experienced miscarriage. But our children have had perhaps ten, along with 27 births and now 2 pregnancies. A miscarriage is always a mystery of great sadness. Our hope, of course, is that our grandchildren retain this love for new life.

11. Internet and Smart Phones.  Our children have been fighting a battle we were spared: "screen time." My overall impression is that they are well aware of the dangers; that they are reactive against them; and while there is no final victory, harm has been minimized by restraints and vigorous involvement in studies, sports, Church and family life.

12. Piety.  As a child we prayed the rosary every night after dinner, like many Catholic families of the time. Early in our marriage, as we started our family, we were deeply impacted by the charismatic renewal. However that prayer group disbanded and we raised our children in a standard parish. It is, for me, a faint disappointment that we did not pass on the charismatic dimension as we lacked such a community. But the evangelical energy we received moved us to direct our children to a rich banquet of experiences, especially high school summers, including evangelical and catechetical programs, pilgrimages, immersion/service trips, world youth days, and other. We were convinced that the negative forces across our culture had become so powerful that the combination of family-parish-school was not adequate to form a resilient, vigorous faith. This succeeded: our children and now their spouses all share a vibrant faith as well as an openness to the renewal movements. At least to some degree, the next generation seems to be following a similar itinerary of faith

13. Cousins and Extended Family. Connection to a broader, extended family provides identity, comfort,  delight and a sense of belonging. This is an invaluable resource in a society that increasingly isolates the individual and the nuclear family, inducing dependency on the immense impersonality of the state and corporation. Especially enjoyable is the friendship shared across the generations with cousins.

14. Gender. Masculinity/Femininity and Paternity/Maternity are alive and well across our generations. Among my greatest delights as father/grandfather is to observe the organic, natural, gradual but irrepressible development of manliness and womanliness. The women prioritize their motherhood as they all excel in their chosen careers; my sons and son-in-laws are intensely involved with their children;  a wholesome partnership informs each couple.

Conclusion

My wife and I share a primary life ambition: to hand on to our young the Catholic faith, way of life and heritage that we ourselves received. Aware of the human frailty of this faith and the ferocious anti-Catholic energies active in our society since the 1960s, we are all the more grateful to see the hand of God at work in a marvelous cosmos of faith: friends, family, priests and sisters, neighbors, organizations, and other. We are particularly in awe of our children-in-law, the wise choices our children made about spouses. We are endlessly surprised and delighted as we encounter the underlying stability along with the creativity and freshness of our younger family members.