Being Sure

A younger generation of Catholics have become attached to various particular aspects of the Church in a way that prior ages would have found curious. The "JP2 generation" admired the Polish pontiff's life and morality teachings; an educated, hipster-esque demographic have assigned themselves to the so-called "EF" (whatever that is) and artful celebrations of the Pacelli-Montini rite; perhaps a slightly older, but relatively youthful, group of proto-Libertarian Americans have found solace in the social teachings of Leo XIII and Pius XI of happy memory. And it all begs the question, why? Is there something wrong with these "rigid" neo-Pelagian people or is something else at play?

Years ago the then-pastor of the FSSP parish in Roma and liturgical restorationist, Joseph Kramer, observed that the rebels immediately responsible for the Church's current state of affairs were reared under "super discipline", their parents having grown up during the Great Depression and two World Wars. Post-modern youths live under antipodal circumstance and seek greater direction in the practice of faith.

That discipline and direction once upon a time came from Catholic culture prevalent in ethnic communities in America and in the village life back in the "old world." It was devotions, catechism, family customs, patron saints, Blessed Sacrament processions, the romanticism of the Mass, and so on. All of that is gone, or near gone, in most parishes; where it exists it has been recrafted, not continued from previous times. Bereft of these cradle-Catholic inheritances and living in a secularized society, Catholics understandably latch on to the firmer things that make sense to them, older things with clear continuity to the past, things that possess a gravitas that assures one that the object of interest carries a greater weight than the one engaging it. No one you know may care about the significance of additional ministers at Pontifical Mass or Rerum Novarum, but for many years faithful Catholics did, and in caring one can normalize one's interests in their company.

Converts felt a similar struggle a century ago. Louis Bouyer, who came to the Church from French Lutheranism, was drawn to the Church by study of the Fathers and the Roman liturgy only to be told by cradle co-religionists that "real Catholics don't care about that sort of thing." Bouyer buried himself in the Scriptures and the liturgy, which directed him to the Church through the ancient Fathers, knowing that these artifices did not belong to a vague Christianity, but were in fact proper to the Church, irrespective of others' disinterest in that fact. John Henry Newman had a similar struggle upon entering the Church and leaving his prestigious position as a don at Oriel for the religion of the Irish. 

These aren't necessarily unhealthy trends on their own; the Apostolic Fathers possessed no Catholic culture, nor a Jewish one after the failed revolt of Simon bar Kokhba. They lived merely on the certainty of what the Apostles and their immediate students told them. But what of the muddled middle who do not seek out special interests? Culture once fortified their hewing to the Church, but without it they wane....