A sadness hangs over our Church: a tragic divide between older priests, overwhelmingly progressive, and younger priests, unanimously conservative. Recent polls are clear: older cohorts, meaning the silent and boomer generations, identify theologically and politically as liberal/progressive, younger ones not at all. I know of good, seasoned priests who do not want to talk to their younger clerical brothers.
Holy, loyal priests, now in their 80s and 90s, are in decline and dying off, without spiritual, priestly sons. The younger priests were not fathered by the older. They were fathered by John Paul and Benedict, the lay renewal movements, World Youth Days, Latin mass communities, conservative and traditional families, and of course the surprising and unexpected workings of the Holy Spirit.
Pope Francis is iconic of this. He harangues tirelessly about clericalism, rigidity, and such. He is scolding the generations of John Paul/Benedict priests who greatly displease him. How many young men are inspired, by his negativity, to pursue the priesthood? None! Our seminaries (outside of Africa, which is its own Catholic world, immune to the toxins of Western progressivism) are declining in his pontificate. We do not have, we will not have "Pope Francis priests." His legacy seems to be contradictory and ironic: he appoints progressive bishops and cardinals, but they lead local presbyterates that are entirely conservative. Somehow the Church goes on!
The difference is the response to modernity. Younger priests cherish Catholicism...traditional, stable, clear, reliable, rooted...as an antidote to modernity as secular, nihilistic, individualistic, sterile, and despairing. By contrast, those who came of age around the time of the Council experienced the peak of the post war honeymoon between American modernity and Catholicism. Theirs was a virtually erotic ecstasy of embracing the broader culture in all its exuberance and richness: culture, politics, American superiority and unanimity in the Cold War, as well as the exciting renewal movements (ecumenical, biblical, liturgical, social justice, etc.) that had been percolating for decades and culminated in the Council. That generation of priests retained as "euphoric recall" that positivity, even as the broader culture descended into godless dystopia. They somehow blocked consciousness of this decline.
Progressives are not paternal to the degree that they are not filial. A son who is well fathered and responsively filial becomes a good father; a man who is not fathered (in some fashion) cannot father. The progressive is advancing into the future by overcoming a past viewed as ignorant, backward, deprived. This is the opposite of filial gratitude, piety, loyalty, obedience. It assumes a posture of superiority over, rather than deference to the past, tradition, the "fathers." In that sense, Catholicism as filial and maternal/paternal is NOT progressive, although it is fruitfully, creatively, serendipitously conservative.
Young clergy, in the 1960s, the time of the Council, consumed what might be called "the Xavier Rynne" narrative of that historical event. Those influential, anonymous letters from Rome provided the logic widely diffused by secular media and aggressive progressive leadership within the Church: the Council was a revolution against a powerful, regressive curial college, headed by the infamous Ottaviani, on behalf of freedom, openness, creativity, and reconciliation on many levels. In this story line, Ottaviani is the bad father, repressing his sons, who revolt successfully. This is the narrative of rupture, rather than continuity. There is, of course, some truth here. But the Council was far from a radical break with the past. It was a retrieval of traditions, a "return to the sources," the fathers and doctors as well as Scripture and traditions around liturgy and other things.
What the Council, as well as the entire "Great Generation" that implemented it, did not do was prepare the Church for the Cultural Revolution about to explode in the West at that very moment. Significantly, the Council did NOT address contraception, but left that to Pope Paul a few years later. By the time he spoke with such prophetic clarity in Humanae Vitae the Church was already divided about modernity which had become blatantly libertarian, individualistic, sterile, anti-authority, Godless and anti-tradition.
The Church of the 1970s, of Paul VI, was paralyzed, confused, and inarticulate as the sexual revolution infected our culture. Priests who came of age during the Council abstained from the Culture War: they neither resisted nor assisted. They would not, largely could not, deliver a sermon for or against contraception, women priests, "reproductive rights," porn/masturbation, or homosexual acts.
We might say that in a sense this generation was itself not "fathered" in that they were not prepared for the chaos that exploded on their watch. They truly became the "silent generation." When John Paul came on the scene, they were largely oblivious of his recasting of the tradition, especially in his catechesis on the human body. When the iconic "Xavier Rynne" (actually Fr. Francis Murphy) was asked late in life about this pope, he responded: "Well, he is a conservative pope presiding over a conservative curia. But he does reach out. So I don't know what to make of him." That was an honest, truthful response. He did not understand John Paul because he was still stuck in his paradigm of the Council: triumphant victory of progressive over regressive conservative. He did not really recognize the Cultural Revolution for what it was; nor could he absorb the brilliant organic, creative conservativism of the Great John Paul
As a boomer seminarian myself in the 1960s I recall with delight the intellectual-moral excitement of the liberalism of the time. And so I share the enthusiasms of the older priests. I have gratitude, affection and reverence for so many who have "fathered" me or been good big brothers to me. However, in the 1970s after immersion in the charismatic renewal I found the theology of John Paul and Benedict as the authentic, organically-creatively conservative implementation of the Council. While I am a staunch critic of Catholic Progressivism, I do emulate all the good qualities of that "silent" generation of Vatican II priests: care for poor, ecumenism, devotion to Scripture, and openness to what is best in the broader culture.
At the same time I cherish the conservatism of our younger priests as a vigorous Catholic counterculture against modernity as Godless, individualistic, toxic and dystopian. And yet the "silent generation" now slowly dying off retained so many cherished Catholic values: liberality, magnanimity, openness, compassion, care for the needy, ecumenism in outreach and embrace of all human communities. We do not want to set the young against the old, the "conservative against the progressive."
My dear friend, teacher, and pastor, of happy memory, Fr. Bob Antzcak, was one of the most progressive priests in the Archdiocese of Newark. A highly intelligent man, he had the heart of a true priest, but was (in my view) confused theologically. Late in his life he expressed to me his visceral disgust for the Neocatechumenal Way, in which I was "walking." Shortly after that he retired to a parish in Bergen County. A new, young priest from that "Way" was assigned to Bob's parish. When the young priest arrived, he found the elderly Bob, in poor health, on his knees preparing the room for the new arrival. I understand the two became fast friends before Bob's passing. This is a happy story!
Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, a prominent Francis progressive and a decent man, has now as his personal secretary (a delicate, significant position) a talented young priest from that same Neocatechumenal Way. The two are at opposite extremes on the Catholic spectrum of doctrine and morality. I understand they share a deep affection and respect for each other. This is another happy story! We see that the Catholic bonds of faith and love are deeper and stronger than theological differences, which are themselves very important.
May we move forward, like the gospel steward who draws from the new and the old, in a Catholic synthesis of what is best across the generations. May we grow in filial loyalty to all our priests, that we ourselves be paternal/maternal for those who look to us.
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