Some recent thoughts I've been having about the Church about about
where we find ourselves and where I find myself as a young Catholic:
I am a JPII priest. Seeing Blessed Pope John Paul at World Youth Day in
2002 swept away the final reservations I had about entering the
seminary. “Do not be afraid,” he told us, “to set out into the deep for
a catch.”
By then we knew, I knew, that entering the seminary meant setting out
into the deep. New revelations in the priest abuse scandals were
breaking daily. Every year it seemed that another priest left ministry
with a lover, male or female. The Church had been declining in youth
and vigor in Maine for decades. It was not hard to conclude that my
ministry as a priest would be carried out during dark and difficult
years for the Church in the West.
The seas had not always seemed so ominous. I grew up in the Bernadine
years. The years of consensus leadership, of being welcoming and
tolerant. Dialogue was the way to address any disagreement, any
difficulty.
I don’t recall hearing anything about principles, about virtue, about
sacrifice, about the truth. It seems that a whole generation, the
generation before me, had been turned off by such things. They
distained talk of objective right and wrong. Of good and evil. Of
virtue and sin. And they pointed out continually that such dichotomies
were either the mark of simplistic and naïve thinking, or the propaganda
of those who seek to control others.
We were basically taught that the heart of the Gospel was to love
others, and that that meant we should always compromise conviction in
favor of the person. The only virtue I recall being drilled into my
head was that we seek to be on good terms with everyone, regardless of
their point of view. To be likable. It was the underlying subtext in
most moral narratives: the protagonist gives up his or her convictions
or preconceived notions in order to love the antagonist.
I think 9/11 was the first sign that the Bernadine years were over.
People kept asking “Why do they hate us?” We looked at ourselves, we
all seemed likable enough to one another – so we were completely thrown
by the idea that someone could possibly not want to get along. Didn’t
they know the golden rule? What kind of rock were they living under?
Then, for Catholics, came the pedophilia scandals. And all of a sudden
many of us realized that many, many likable people, bishops, priests,
and laity alike, had been so concerned about being likable that they had
turned a blind eye to horrendous evil right in front of them. Being
likable, being kind, had aided and abetted some of the worst criminals
in society while they perpetrated unmentionable crimes right before our
noses.
It was all coming down around us in that summer of 2002, the summer of
World Youth Day. And I think it was then, as we looked upon the humble
yet strong frame of that man of God, John Paul II, that many of us
realized that the generation before us had sold us a useless bill of
goods, rather than the Gospel. We had not been taught the fullness of
the faith, we were not given adequate tools to handle real life – to
deal with evil, to seek what is good. We were not trained in the
virtues, we were not given a solid foundation in logic and critical
thinking, we were not exposed to the cultural and religious treasures of
our western heritage. Instead, we had been brought up by a generation
that was convinced that the way to show their love for us was by being
likable and entertaining us. The youth ministry mantra was, I’ll never
forget, the “4 F words”: food, fun, friends, and faith.
But in the face of terrorists trying to kill us, criminal priests,
divorce, substance abuse, psychological illnesses, violence, and
promiscuity, the 4 F words just didn’t cut it, being likable and
entertaining didn’t cut it either. Many of my pears left the faith,
tired of being around a bunch of people who seemed obsessed with being
likable, rather than being good. Who didn’t have any answers for the
larger questions of life. Who didn’t seem to want to talk about
suffering and death and desire and addiction.
But there were some of us who, through God’s providence and grace-filled
guidance, were able to hold on to our faith. And with much struggle
and prayer, we began an arduous transformation, a fundamental shift in
the understanding of what it means to love and be loved as Christ has
shown us. To this day we are trying to make that shift, even as we
remain a conflicted generation, this JPII generation.
The conflict within the JPIIs is caused by a dissonance between the
appetite and the intellect. Temperamentally, we are deeply
uncomfortable with conflict and want people to get along, even if that
means sacrificing what we know is right. Culturally, we were raised on
washed out themes – the words to “Hear I am, Lord” ring in our ears,
reminding us of the tear-filled retreats of youth even if we know that
half the time we were just being emotionally manipulated. Even though
we know we should, we don’t know how to live a life rooted in ritual
prayer because our parents didn’t even know what that looked like. And
so even basic spiritual discipline requires herculean effort for us.
Intellectually we lack rigor, we were told that every opinion was valid
for so long that we have a hard time being critical, even if we are
suspect of what we hear. We tend toward reactionary extremes, and
toward a certain nostalgia for times when there seemed to be greater
regard for human excellence and virtue. But we’re really not sure what
that looked like or how to achieve it, because we’ve never experienced
it in a living culture. Instead we grew up on the Nintendo and MTV, the
St. Louis Jesuits and cut out butterflies. A washed out culture, a
decadent culture, and a largely secular culture.
And yet even as conflicted as it is, I believe that gradual conversion
was begun and continues in the JPII generation, my generation. Slowly,
and with God’s grace, many are breaking free of the appetite for a
Church experience that is characterized by a warm and fuzzy group hug
among people who like each other, and instead developing the desire for a
new and more profound ecclesiology that is rooted in a common fidelity
to Christ and sacrifice for the sake of what is true and good and
beautiful. This conversion of appetite in my generation has been
largely due to the reforms undertaken during the last 25 years to some
of the fundamental structures of the Church. Doctrinal soundness and
rigor in formation has been restored in seminaries for the most part.
Core doctrines of the Church have been clearly expressed in the
Catechism and in many wonderful encyclicals and other papal teachings.
The liturgical excesses of the 70s and 80s have for the most part been
cleared up and the new translation has brought us into greater
continuity with our tradition. Bishops are for the most part speaking
with one voice and in union with the Holy Father. The basic structures
necessary for the continuation of Christianity in the West have been
buttressed in recent decades, and the JPII generation is the first to
really experience the fruit of these reforms. Thus we really bear the
name of the great reformer: John Paul II.
Yet as much as the JPII generation has been graced by the reforms of
these last years, I pray that the hell that is fermenting in the West
does not break lose until our children come of age. They will be much
more competent to handle the wiles of the evil one. They will have had
the advantage of clear Catholic teaching from their youth, of being
formed by a reasonably intact liturgy and reconstructed domestic ritual
of prayer. And they will not have to contend with an older, ideological
and jaded generation that second guesses every effort at holiness and
is threatened by any attempt at human excellence.
I am not sure how my generation would handle the full weight of what
this culture of death is capable of throwing at us. The reforms are so
new and have only had a decade or two to sink in. We are still very
weak and our training cursory at best. We are not well supported by
family and friends. Too often we foolishly resort to political power
plays, are distracted by worldly fears. We are easily side-tracked by
minor skirmishes, we underestimate the cunning and force of the enemy.
And we are too attached to the things of this world – to our stuff, our
esteem, our comfort. God’s will is often not the first thing on our
minds. We lack the spiritual imagination, depth, and discipline
required for the all-out pitched spiritual battle that approaches.
Thus I think that it is critically important that the JPII generation
realize in all humility its limitations, the limitations inherent in the
time and place that we were born. We came of age during a time that
was nothing short of spiritually catastrophic. The bastions had been
razed. Christian culture in the West had been devastated. Through no
fault of our own, we are building from scratch and our generation
therefore lacks the sophistication of many generations of Christians who
have gone before us. We are largely incapable of the aesthetic beauty
of gothic stained glass, of the heights of contemplative prayer, of the
theological prowess of the great doctors of the Church. Mounting such
heights required the dedicated work of successive generations of
Catholic men and women, not one generation alone.
And so such heights are probably not for most of us. Ours is instead
the work of John Paul: the work of the quarry. We have been called to
lay the foundation for such heights to be attained once more. To take
up the backbreaking toil that falls to a first generation: slogging into
the mud, into the trenches, working to gradually break up the rubble of
vice and error and to lay the foundation stones of virtue and human
excellence. In doing so, we can work to ensure that the Church that is
rebuilt upon our shoulders stands not upon the sand of likability and
false tolerance, but upon Christ, clearly present in lives rooted in the
sacrificial love and fidelity. And this work, far from being a
drudgery, can be a source of joy as we find comfort and consolation in
knowing that, as a first generation in the process of building an
authentic Christian culture, we stand shoulder to shoulder with the
first apostles and countless missionaries who have undertaken such work
over the course of the Church’s 2000 years.
In short, our holiness, the holiness of the JPIIs, is unlikely to lie in
heights of virtue and excellence – it is more likely to lie in blood,
sweat, and tears. In fidelity: in sacrifice and toil unconditionally
offered for the love of Christ and his Church. It will not be
particularly beautiful. But foundations do not need to be beautiful –
they just need to be solid. And, with the grace of God, we can do that.
-
Fr. Seamus is a parish priest sharing thoughts on
God, life, and culture with parishioners, family, friends and others at sparksandstubble.blogspot.com.
Father Seamus was ordained for the Diocese of Portland, Maine on June
29th, 2007 and received his licentiate in Dogmatic theology from the
Pontifical Gregorian University in June of 2008. He now serves as
parochial vicar at Saint Paul the Apostle Parish in Bangor, Maine.
