“GIMME THAT OLD TIME RELIGION”?

4/17/10

In her second consecutive weekly column on the “crisis” in the Catholic Church (“How to Save the Catholic Church,” Wall Street Journal, 4/17/10), and her second consecutive column on that subject with which I, for the most part, agree, Peggy Noonan was going good, advising the Vatican to be more open and to “elevate women,” the latter of which I hope meant what it sounded like it meant. But then she said

“They (the Vatican) need to let younger generations of priests and nuns rise to positions of authority within a new church.”

First, and ancillarily, Ms. Noonan, I’m sure, meant to say “sisters” instead of “nuns.” Though most people, and most Catholics, don’t know the distinction, a “nun” is, by definition, cloistered. Most of the people to whom we refer as “nuns” are not nuns but, instead, are sisters, or we wouldn’t have contact with them. But that is another of those nits I often pick that drive my wife, and others, crazy.

Second, I am hoping, as I mentioned in the last sentence of my first paragraph, that Ms. Noonan’s advocacy of letting “nuns” rise to positions of authority means what I think it meant.

Third, and most important, Ms. Noonan may be mistaken in her desire to give “younger generations” more authority. Ms. Noonan, and anyone who genuinely desires reform, should be doing whatever she can to keep most of this youngest generation of priests as far away from power as she can.

I have no statistics on this, so I might be wrong, but look around your parishes and read the Catholic media. It seems to this Catholic that it is the “younger generations of priests” who are a big source of the problem. It is they who have come of age as this latest bout of Church conservatism, which seems bound and determined to roll back Vatican II and return us to the halcyon days of Pius IX, has gained more sway in the Church. It is many members of these generations who seem to be the most doctrinaire in terms of the trappings, rather than the substance, of Catholicism. It is they who like to dress up in the most auspicious of garb and lord it over their flocks. It is they who are so bound and determined to make sure everyone toes the line. As I said to my wife as we listened to one of these popinjays deliver a homily on ending lackadaisical Catholicism and returning to what he seemed to think was the true doctrine, the pure essence, of the Church, “Only someone so young can be so certain.”

On the other hand, Vatican II ended forty five years ago. So only the very oldest priests, like the Pope, did not come of age in the post Vatican II era. It seems, at least to this observer, that, generally, those who desire reform and openness in the Church ought to be cheering for those priests who came out of the seminary in the late ‘50s though early ‘80s. An inordinately large concentration of those in the later classes of seminarians, at least in my experience, would turn us back even further to the days of “Pray, pay, and obey” and “Yes, Father, indeed Father, whatever you say, Father, shine your shoes, Father?” And we all know the results of that kind of unquestioning obeisance and sycophancy.