1960’s baby boomers in 2022 and completely engaged in today’s synodal church process:
First of all, all things are connected. There is no way that people in the Church today can rewrite this history (in the video), out in plain sight, and say it had no influence on the decline of the Church at that time that continued in the subsequent decades. These people easily gave up one style of the Catholic Faith and embraced an “upside down” version of it, a la the 2010’s Netflix drama, "Stranger Things.”
What the video in my post below this one doesn’t show are Catholics, both clergy and laity, who were fighting the kind of nonsense we see in the video. I don't mean to imply that were not some good things discussed and intentions weren’t evil, but rather good intentions run amuck.
MT offers an obituary of one of the radical priests in the video who died recently, in schism with the Church and his schismatic community now gone. But in the news real he’s held up and a model of virtue for the future of the Church:
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/tribnet/name/william-nerin-obituary?id=12850838 In 1975 A.D., Father Nerin had abandoned the Church...then he married. His experimental parish, the Community of John XXIII, had separated from the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Here is the Catholic Advocate news article: https://thecatholicnewsarchive.org/?a=d&d=ca19750306-01.2.7&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-------- OKLAHOMA CITY INC) "The first experimental, nonterritorial parish established in the U.S , the Community of John XXIII, has withdrawn from the jurisdiction of the Oklahoma City Archdiocese. "The withdrawal followed several months of impasse between the community and Archbishop John Quinn of Oklahoma City over liturgical practices in the community, ending in the archbishop's withdrawal of the assignment of the community's pastor."
The other thing that is evident in the video is the role of then baby boomers in this upside down Church they were fashioning. These are people now my age and much older, like Pope Francis and his bishops that he has appointed. The 1960’s was a time of engagement and exhilaration in the Church with an eye of creating this upside down Church in rupture with all that had preceded it and for centuries. Like the pot they were smoking the the LSD they were taking, it was quite a trip for these 1960’s youth. BUT THEY WERE ENGAGED IN THE THE LIFE OF THE CHURCH AT THAT POINT.
But these baby boomers, like the priest in the obituary above, eventually abandoned the Church and quite quickly, by the mid 70’s. And they did not raise their children in the faith but something else. There was no discipline and true commitment to the Catholic Church and local parishes from many of these youthful revolutionaries.
Compare that with the Synodal Process today, trying in vain to capture the religious imagination of today’s youth, so they will be like the aging baby boomers trying to recapture their youth of the 1960’s.
THE YOUNG ARE COMPLETELY DISENGAGED FROM THIS SYNODAL PROCESS, COMPLETELY. ITS ALL OLD AGING BABY BOOMERS STILL CARRYING THEIR REVOLUTIONARY TORCH FOR THE CHURCH OF POST cATHOLICISM. THEY ARE ALL FATHER NERINS!
5 comments:
My predictable comment being they were not being led to know God with no ifs/ands/buts, and so bailed out as finding it a waste of time.
The Churches, Eastern and Western have devolved into self-referential sacrament-dispensing-stations and rule books, out of touch with their purpose, which is to bring people to union with God.
Teach people to experience God, and they will not leave, they will see the rules are required for souls to stay united to God, and they will stop quibbling over rites or seeking to change the rules so that an otherwise empty life can be more enjoyable while it lasts.
Ranting, trash-diving, religion-shopping cultural warrior Rod Dreher was recently in Poland and talking with young Catholics about the collapse of the Church there, and those youth echo nearly verbatim what I have been saying for years....
"One woman complained that the clergy are just going through the motions. "The priests tell us what to do and what not to do, but there's nothing more behind it," she said.
A man agreed saying that priests act like what I have called before "managers of the Sacrament Factory". He said, "I know that there is nothing more important than the Eucharist, but there has to be more than that to the Christian life."
I think the mega church that I reported on had a significant part of what is needed today, to involve the laity in various ministries of outreach through the parish but also to have a welcoming community that forms people to love God and neighbor. The emphasis needs to be positive and the parish must be a forgiving community, especially expressed through the Sacrament of Penance.
I agree too much moralizing and being negative about everyone from gays to democrats turns about half of the Catholics in the USA off. I’m not sure how to be prophetic and inclusive at the same time, especially when elements of gay and democrat ideologies are so opposed to the Person of Jesus Christ and His Church. Pastoral theology, though, is an art not a dogma and human priests and laity need to practice it.
All what you mention are worthy things, but lacking an experience of God, all those assorted "ministries" are only busywork, and no different than social services. Our purpose is to KNOW God, to LOVE God, where then we can serve God.
Absolutely nothing does more damage to the Faith than ministries/ministers preaching of what they themselves are ignorant. People come to church looking for answers, not busywork.
The purpose of the Church is to unite souls to God, likewise the purpose of the sacraments. Neither are ends in themselves and they have been cut free of their purpose today leaving only rote observance, the very thing Jesus spoke so strongly against.
People leave when they cannot find God.
I think Bob you put it well.
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