My new parish in Richmond Hill, Georgia is a very young parish and quite diverse. We have a huge number of army people from all over the country.
We have about 800 registered households. We have 50 children preparing for First Holy Communion and another 50 or so for Confirmation.
Our young Catholic families have four, five and six and more children!
We are NOT an EF parish and our Liturgies are quite middle of the road with all the things that most ultra conservative Catholics despise. But our liturgies are reverent and according to the GIRM and rubrics.
So what's up with younger Catholics having so many children today and not just EF Catholics?
10 comments:
Humanae Vitae came at a time when two major forces seemed to be in free-fall and collapse: The institutional Church and the social order. Protest was the order of the day and all things that bore the label of tradition or authority were called into question. To make matters worse, Paul VI didn't exactly put his foot down on priests who went too far. By the 1970's, many religious orders had completely changed or nearly evaporated and the faithful didn't know for sure who to believe or what to believe. We've had priests who told people in the confessional that their violations of the 6th commandment in various forms or decision to contract were "not sins" or "don't worry about it" and most Catholics didn't. This created a Church ripe to accept just about anything, including "Catholic" politicians who support abortion, homosexuality, Communion in the hand, the idea of woman priests, and just about anything else a bad bishop or hippie-fied priest was willing to foist upon his comfortable pew-sitters in the name of Vatican II.
Subsequent generations have no such attachments to the entire culture of liberalized morality and social protest. I suspect many of them look at aging protesters and blue-haired out-of-habit nuns with amusements. While Germany may be rife with Archbishop Hunthausen and Rembert Weakland types, the situation here in the United States, with the exception of our overpopulated super-cities, is very different.
Do the young people hate Humanae Vitae? Doubtful. I'm not sure that they love it either. They simply aren't part of the protest pedigree that defines the dying liberal Catholic Church.
My previous post should have read, "their deicision to contracept". Auto-correct is a pain in the _ss.
Hatred? Do they even know Humanae Vitae exists?
1968 was probably the worst year since World War 2, not of course because of Humanae Vitae but because of the Vietnam War, the Kennedy and King assassinations, riots in the streets of Chicago at the Democratic convention and unrest elsewhere in the US. Glad I was too young to remember all that!
Anon 6:21. Add to the list of 1968 worsts the election of Tricky Dick Nixon.
Anonymous 8:03
I grew up in a family of Roosevelt Democrats and I can still remember how disappointed my father and grandfather were when Nixon was elected. When he would come on TV, my grandfather would say, "There's old hog jaw!" However, aside from his loyalty in covering up for the Watergate crew for a crime he only knew about after the fact, Nixon was, in many ways, a good president. He ended the draft. He inherited a war that would ruin ANY president (lest we forget what it did to his predecessor, LBJ). He began talks with the USSR and China. He pursued reforms in welfare, health services, civll rights and environmental policies. He created the OMB and Office of Clean Energy Policy and supported the Clean Air Act of 1970, besides establishing the EPA. Every civil rights bill passed by Congress was signed by Nixon. He continued the work of desegregating southern schools. Even the Uber-liberal Gore Vidal said in the late 1970's that Nixon was the most effective president we had had in the last decade.
There seems to be this political mindset we fall into where we look at politicians, especially those from political parties that we oppose as either "all good" or "all bad" and that is just not realistic. Just like the rest of us, many politicians have positive and negative sides and just about every president has positive and negative accomplishments. I think it's the sign of an larger mind to be able to find something positive to say about people we may not like or people we disagree with. Looking back at Nixon certainly forced me to do that.
Finally, does anyone really think that Hubert Humphrey would have been any better?
Nixon was actually a very good President. He also passed more Civil Rights legislation than Johnson. His appearance and personality made him easy to parody, however. Watergate seems like very small potatoes compared to the crap that has gone on since.
Gene,
Anonymous (you know who) prefers left-wing simpletons like Obama (who thinks Austrians speak "austrian")
Nixon was not a good president. He was an evil, paranoid man who accomplished some good things while in office. He was certainly very progressive in Civil Rights.
However, he intentionally derailed Johnson's Paris peace talk efforts in order to prolong the war so that Johnson would not have the victory of ending the war, thus derailing Nixon's presidential hopes.
Watergate - subverting the Constitution - does not seem like "very small potatoes" unless one has little respect for the Constitution and the rule of law.
Anonymous Kavanaugh,
You could substitute the name "Obama" for Nixon, except Nixon was at least competent.
Obama subverted the rule of law and flouted the US Constitution throughout his presidency through his politicization of the IRS, the FBI, and the DOJ, but you ignore that, God knows why. You must live in a veritable fantasyworld
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