A movement...political, spiritual, cultural...is the eruption and spread of a coherent pattern of ideas/values/beliefs/practices across society, for a limited period, in mimetic contagion and deliberate advocacy, leaving an impact on the culture and its institutions.
An earlier blog essay inventoried the institutions which have defined my world and myself; here I will review the movements which have shaped myself and my world over the last 8 decades. Institutions are stable, permanent, reliable across time; they preserve, protect and advance values as they shape those of us who serve them. Movements are temporary, transient, novel and revolutionary; they arise, engage culture, and disappear, leaving an impact and sometimes new institutions to preserve their values.
The last 8 decades have been a time of rapid, deep, pervasive change...and many movements, spiritual and political. Life has been similar to a surfer: we ride a wave until it crashes on the beach, then paddle back to await another good wave. The immense ocean and the sturdy board represent the stable, enduring, permanent; while the waves are change, movement, novelty.
We will consider first religious movements that have shaped my own faith and that of the Catholic Church. Then, broader political movements that have formed our world and my view of it.
1. Post-war Catholic Revival in the USA 1945-65.
Just prior to my birth, my father's courtship of my mother consisted of weekly attendance, with his mother, at Miraculous Medal devotions. They prayed, I am sure, in 1944-5, for the end of the war and return of their brothers. (All five came home safe; every man from Our Lady of the Lake, West Orange, returned home safe.) Our family of 9 children, quite common at the time, prayed the rosary along with the global crusade of Fr. Patrick Peyton. Our parents participated in Cana. They read America magazine and books from Sheed and Ward, the flourishing Catholic company. Fulton Sheen and Thomas Merton were celebrities; John Kennedy became president. By the early 1960s, when I was in high school, there was a wave of confidence and enthusiasm about sending missionaries and Peace Corps volunteers to Latin America to assist. Small wonder that I chose to attend Maryknoll Missionary Seminary for college.
2. Vatican II Renewal 1962-78.
Immediately after the Council, in college, I was caught up with much of the Church in a Dionysian frenzy of hyperactive argument, reading and criticism about change in Catholicism and the society. So much to read, digest, engage: politics, psychology, theology, culture. I spent about 6 years in a steady state of low key euphoria about ideas, books, theories. Intellectually it was overstimulating. But so much fun. Spiritually, not so good. Most of my classmates in the seminary fell away from practice of the Catholic faith as they were pulled into politics and psychology. We did not receive a solid catechesis on the Christ-centered focus of the Council. A tsunami of ideas assaulted us and no one was available to situate them within our Catholic legacy. For myself, prayer life and closeness to God were at best at a plateau, but more probably diminished as attention went to new secular ideas and enthusiasm. I was largely typical of most Catholic intellectuals engaged in this.
3. Catholic Charismatic Renewal 1970s.
Our young marriage and family that was to come were powerfully impacted by engagement in the Charismatic Renewal in 1973. Coming off of Cursillo in which each of us encountered in a personal way the person of Jesus Christ, we were swept into a new surrender to the Holy Spirit and immersion for several years in an intensive, exhilarating Bible-center, evangelical-Catholic community. This brought prayer to the center of our marriage and family and has directed the course of our life since.
4. Dual Papacy (John Paul and Benedict) and Communio Theology. Post 1978.
When John Paul became Pope I had already dived into the theology of Balthasar as presented by the Communio school in Washington DC. And so I voraciously devoured every word that came from his teaching: on Divine Mercy, Theology of the Body, labor and the social order, the primacy of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and more. This deepened, clarified and intensified my Catholic faith in all its essentials.
5. Other Spiritual Movements.
Coincident with the above major developments were a series of smaller ones which strengthened and deepened our Catholic faith: Divine Mercy as revealed to St. Faustina, the Catholic Worker movement and related groups (Madalein Delbrel, Catherine Dougherty), Cursillo, Marriage Encounter, Marian devotions including messages from Medjugorje, Communion and Liberation, Neocatechumenal Way, the 12-steps, Our Lady's Missionaries of the Eucharist.
Significant also was the influence of psychology, the (in)famous "triumph of the therapeutic." The challenge here was, of course, to harmonize good psychology with our Catholic philosophy. Helpful here were people like Fr. Charles Curran (psychologist), Paul Vitz, Fr. Groeschel, Eric Erickson, and others. Along these lines also were psychology-inspired contributions to spirituality: healing of the memories of Ruth Carter Stapleton, deliverance of demons as practiced by Neal Lozano, the "scrutinies" of the Neocatechumenal Way, the gentle spirituality of Adrian Von Kaam, and the Catholic evaluation of psychology of Paul Vitz.
So we see here four major and ten minor movements, renewals, or revivals that directly impacted my own life as well as the Church and society around us. Now we consider of political movements.
Political Movements
Prelude: victory of Allies which structured the world into which I was born.
Cold War.
Labor movement. (Important for my family of union men.)
Development of the "third world" out of poverty.
Civil Rights.
Farm workers.
Anti-war movement and the New Left.
Countercultural Hippie Movement.
Reagan Revolution.
Prolife Movement.
Neoconservatism, specifically of First Things, and the Evangelical/Catholic dialogue.
All of the above impacted me significantly, and our world, for the good.
Toxic Movements
Actually, not all movements are to the good. The decisive, destructive movement of my lifetime is the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. This was many things but importantly: liberation of sex from marriage/family/children, deconstruction of gender, rejection of Tradition, gay liberation, militant feminism including abortion, eruption of technology into sacred domains of life and death without restraint by the natural order. More recently this movement has developed identity politics and the culture of self-pity, victimhood and grievance.
More recently we have the MAGA movement, a study in moral ambiguity. On the one hand, Trump is the singular political figure that has defied and (at the moment) pushed back imperialistic Cultural Progressivism and restored order and reason to our border and other things. On the other hand it is toxic with his egoism, disregard for truth and reality, inflated nationalism, contempt for constitutional order, xenophobia, cruelty to the undocumented, lack of fundamental respect and dignity. And so, we find ourselves forced, in some degree, to ally with this disorder against the greater threat.
Conclusion
The above litany is subjective, personal, and autobiographical but it does cover a shared history.
When you are grounded in the solid rock of the Catholic Church, family, and American constitutional democracy, you can move fluidly with the movements, currents of novelty and creativity.
We live in interesting times.
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