The identity, itinerary and destiny of ever male: to receive the love of the Father, in the Son, in the Spirit of filiality; through the love of mother and father; to interiorize this love in his own paternity as iconic of the Father's love.
The third most monumental event in human history was: the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s in the West. The first chronologically and second in gravity was the Fall into sin which launched us into history; the second sequentially but first in significance was our salvation in the Person/Event of Jesus Christ who is to come to finalize history; the third, to date, was the reconstruction of the human person through cultural patricide.
The core of the Revolution was the rejection of paternity: a rupture with our own fathers, with the very form of paternity, and with God as our heavenly father; and desecration of our own paternity.
At the heart of the Revolution is an echo of Lucifer's word to Eve: "Do not fear to break the commandment! Take and eat! He is not to be trusted! He is not a loving, powerful Father! He is a toxic patriarch!" Mary, already detached from Adam, listened and trusted him; she surrendered to envy and distrust of her Father. She took and she ate. She then invited the original patriarch, Adam, to join her in sin.
The crucial technological basis for the sexual revolution was the Pill. The pill is the first technology intended not to heal what is sick or fix what is broken, but to ruin that which is whole, the spousal reality of marriage and family. It is a toxic eating, like that in the garden. It is the contrary of the other, wholesome and natural eating in paradise and what we do at every Eucharist. No other technological breakthrough...not fire, gun powder, electricity, automobile, computer, internet, cell phone or IE...has so profoundly changed, broken the reality of the human person: male/female, father/mother, brother-sister, son/daughter. By tearing sex from conjugal paternity/maternity, the Revolution deconstructed the family and the person, rendering us as naked, disconnected, autonomous individuals. This aligned with the turn against the Father.
Oedipus
This ancient Greek myth in which the protagonist kills his father and marries his mother has been boundlessly excavated by Freudian thinking regarding the development of the boy. But here we follow others in applying it to a generation, a society, a momentous revolution. Our thesis: in critical mass, the generation growing up after the war stayed enclosed within the maternal embrace and renounced the paternal, thus failing to transition into adult paternity. They "killed their father"...not the specific man who was their father...but socially, the historical legacy, the tradition offered by their fathers collectively. The Pill, detaching sexuality from procreation/marriage/family/paternity, allowed the young man to become fixated in an infantile, entitled, indulged state and thereby renounce the "paternal," here understood spiritually as the father figure, the primal male, the authority who represents the transcendent, eternal order and all values around obedience, loyalty, sacrifice, heroism, justice, retribution, chastity and moral integrity.
Prequel:
The Greatest Generation returned victorious from the war to raise and support large families and build magnificent economies: financial, ecclesial, cultural, political and physical. The women happily stayed home with the kids. The economy exploded with prosperity. The kids were spoiled by Mom and by affluence. With Dad so busy, they became Momma's boys and girls.
Well into adulthood, the kids stayed in school, 16 years or more in what is an extension of the maternal enclosure. Prior to this, the young married early and launched into the adulthood of maternity and paternity. At work the boys learned discipline, restraint, obedience, teamwork, integrity. At home the women gave their heart/soul/body for the family, immediate and extended. But the boomer generation were spared (catastrophically) this rite of passage as they remained protected, sheltered, entitled and indulged under the cape of a toxic maternity.
The Pill allowed men especially to avoid the tough passage into paternity/virility by remaining fixated, sterile, contracepting/cohabitating, and passive, within the feminine embrace. In other words, the pill destroys the man's own paternity. He indulges himself sexually, closed off to new life, closed off to the rigors and demands of paternity, closed off to the tradition offered by his own father, closed off to the transcendent plan of the Father, and closed off to the very feminine, maternal otherness of his bride. He regresses into an infantilism that is perfectly expressed in consumption of pornography and the despairing enclosure of sex-with-self.
This generation at once renounced the paternal legacy offered them and destroyed their own paternity by self-sterilization.
Because of the higher level of schooling, boomers considered themselves superior to their parents. The parents highly valued education and were proud to see their children advancing in school. They put them on a pedestal, bestowing a status that was not earned. The children interiorized this sense of superiority and unconsciously looked down upon the parents. Here we see the beginnings of the oedipal patricide.
The advances in technology, science, business and culture were so drastic, profound and widespread that a novel new society exploded as the boomers entered adulthood in the late 1960s. Works like Future Shock announced a "new kingdom" which the young, but not the old, could comprehend and navigate. Experience and age, previously esteemed, were now looked down upon as youth, in their innocence and capacity to learn, gained status.
The Generational Break with Father
The Vietnam war triggered a clear divide between the generations. Fathers and sons, broadly across society, faced off against each other. Like so many wars, it was at once two things: part of the contest between the West and the Soviet Union and therefore worthy of our support; but it was also a nationalist, populist rejection of the Diem regime and therefore something we ought not to enter. Even to this day, it remains a morally ambiguous event. The war ended in a decade, but was important spiritually as it pitted father against son. It was a clear occasion by which the son rejected the father.
We had two distinct rebellions against paternity. The New Left was a political rejection of the entire order constructed by our fathers: capitalism, racism, the Military-Industrial complex, and other. It was a declaration: what you have built is not good! We will do better! Revolution! In another direction the Hippy movement rejected culturally paternal values around work, accomplishment, merit, law and order and retreated into passivity, drugs, free sex, and avoidance of adulthood as responsibility. To be sure, not all of us were radicals or hippies, but that critical mass flavored our generation.
In both manifestations, we had entered "The Age of Aquarius" and could "Imagine there's no Heaven!" A critical mass of our generation's best and brightest, and to lesser degrees much of the rest, renounced the legacy of our fathers. A new era had dawned, much better than that we had received. This is ironic: no generation in history had ever come of age in such prosperity, privilege and abundance. And yet, in both the New Left and the Hippie Movement, the son rejected the legacy of the father.
Feminism and Anti-Patriarchy
Feeding into the mega-Revolution was a militant feminism which attacked paternity as toxic patriarchy. The father figure (echoing Satan in the garden) was reconstituted as oppressive, greedy, destructive. Gender was deconstructed, leaving both man and woman as neutered, androgynous, isolated individuals, competing for status, power, achievement and wealth. "Patriarchy" became a very bad word. Masculinity and femininity became non-entities except in the arena of sexual pleasure, now entirely recreational or romantic, but not spousal, paternal or maternal.
Gay Revolution
In this new fatherless world, homosexuality is redefined as "gay," suggesting something happy, celebrative, festive. The shameful image of one man, physically submitting to and receptive of another, so contrary of the dignity of paternity, is elevated to just another form of sex, no different from heterosexual sex, now contracepted and sterile. The gay movement was widely embraced, by most of society, because it represented sterile sex already approved in contraception. But also because the gay condition is itself fixation within the (toxic) maternal embrace and rejection of the (toxic) father and his identity.
Liberal and Progressive
The word "liberal" had previously been understood as "free" in the spiritual sense, or in regard to study of the humanities, or of a political order defensive of fundamental rights of speech, religion, rule of law and the democratic process. With the Cultural Revolution, it came to mean sexual license, release from traditional boundaries and rules restricting sex to marriage and family. It came to mean triumph over the past, over oppression of the libido, over the ignorance of religion. It came to mean technological control over life and death.
"Progressive" came to indicate an endless triumph over the past as deprived, ignorant, oppressed. Whether in the Darwinian model of constant progress or the Marxist one of revolution of the underdog, hope was always in the future. The past was not to be received, obeyed, revered, and echoed but was to be defeated by advances in science, technology and education.
In this new paradigm, the "father" as authoritative representative of the past, of a previous Revelation and tradition, is now reconfigured as an evil figure. He must be lowered from his position of authority. He is just another one of us. He does not represent the paternity of the heavenly Father because the new secular order recognizes no such supernatural, transcendent, eternal reality.
Post Council Catholic Church: Anti-Patriarchal, Anti-Paternal, Effeminate, Toxically Maternal
By the strangest coincidence, the Vatican Council ended just as the Revolution exploded. That Catholic event was a move to recover elements of tradition and to engage the world in a positive but not uncritical encounter, all rooted in the person of Jesus Christ. It was a fresh approach, in organic continuity with tradition and Church authority. It exercised the concept of "analogy" to recognize similarities between Catholicism, other religions, and the contemporary world itself. It was very positive; not sufficiently suspicious or vigilant. It happened, just as the boomer generation was renouncing paternity.
And so, the progressive/liberal movement within the Church surrendered to the camouflaged Oedipal rejection of the past. Within the Church, we have a "Spirit of Vatican II" which had no connection at all with the actual consensus of the Council Fathers, but was expressive of the dominance of a toxic, indulgent "maternity" hostile to all elements of traditional paternity. We have:
1. Insistence on women priests and denial of any paternal or masculine dimension to priesthood.
2. Emotional repression of the Latin rite mass under Pope Francis. That which served our fathers for over 15 centuries is disparaged as retrograde and reactionary.
3. Articulation of a emasculated, sentimental "mercy" which is catastrophically forgetful of truth, justice, wrath, retribution, and heroism.
4. A soft virtual-pacifism, in denial of the imperialism of Evil whose aggression requires just, rational use of lethal force. So, we have sympathy for "defund police," open borders, prohibition of capital punishment, capitulation to the Chinese communists, and an idealistic attitude towards wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
5. Infatuation with a "synodalism" which replaces apostolic (paternal) authority with group dynamics.
6. Tolerance of legal abortion which not only destroys the little, powerless, dependent One, but violates the sacredness of maternity and paternity.
Retrieval of "Pietas"
What we understand as "piety" does not correspond to the ancient Roman reality of "pietas." The former indicates churchly religiosity. At its best, such suggests authentic prayerfulness and holiness. But more frequently, with "pious" we imagine elderly women or effeminate men indulging in repetitious, sentimental, possibly self-righteous religiosity. By contrast, the Romans, in pietas, see something virile, heroic, honorable. It is gratitude, obedience, loyalty, courage, ferocity, reverence, and sacrifice in regard to nation, tribe, family, ancestors, the gods, mother and father. It implies "magnanimity" or greatness of spirit, an abundance of generosity, a humility that is at the same time bold and assertive. The embodiment of this is, of course, "pius Aeneas." Aeneas famously carries his father and guides his son out of Troy to Rome where he founds the city.
For our sake, we see pietas as gratitude...to mother/father, family, community, nation, Revelation, tradition, our saints and ancestors. It is built upon the foundation of reception, trust, gratitude, It matures into virility and finally paternity, as generous, fierce, fearless, assertive, reliable, and generative. The core duality is filiality and paternity/maternity. This is no progressivism that despises the past as inferior. Rather, it is an organic conservatism, a creative traditionalism that glances at once back to a glorious past of Revelation, tradition and heroism and towards a future that flows creatively out of that past.
The fourth commandment, "Honor thy mother and thy father," comes to us from the Jews, not the Romans. But it shares with the entire ancient world this reverence for, loyalty to what we have received, the traditional. This indicates tender reverence for our own mother and father, but also reception of, loyalty to, and courageous service of a legacy, a Deposit received.
Ours is the lost generation. In large part, but not entirely, we have abandoned the faith of our fathers. We have surrendered to the bourgeois, the therapeutic, the narcissistic. Enslaved within the toxic maternal, we have violated our own filiality, renounced our fathers and our Father, and desecrated our own holy paternity.
In our few years remaining, may we revive what was offered us from the past! Even more: may our children and grandchildren receive what has been given! And move into the future, hopeful/confident/magnanimous and enlivened by the love of the Father and of our fathers/mothers!
