Young Fogeys: Young reactionaries, aging radicals-U.S. Church's unusual clerical divide

The Atlantic Monthly ^ | January/February 2004 | Andrew Greeley

[Maximilian]

By the time you are gone, nobody is really going to know that there ever really was a "progressive" movement in the Church.

That's like saying that by the time Lenin and Stalin were dead no one would remember that there had ever been a Russian Revolution. Very unlikely, especially when there are millions of corpses to testify to the reality of what occurred. Same thing with the Catholic Church. There are tens of millions of souls that have fallen away from the faith thanks to the revolution that has occurred since 1962. This is not something to be forgotten, but something to be taught to future generations as an object lesson in the catastrophes that occur when man usurps the place of God.

[Maximilian]

That only 2% of the American clergy thinks the sexual abuse situation was a "big deal" shows just how out of touch they really are.

This is true. Even if the "young fogeys" are an improvement over the horrendous 70's generation, they still fail to grasp the enormity of the situation facing the Church today. It will take many years before the full extent of the damage from this scandal will be fully appreciated. And that is just one part of the overall damage suffered by the Church since 1962.

[TheGeezer]

infecund

I learned a new word today! Thank you!

[Polycarp IV]

I think it is the perfect word for all liberal dissent, literally when it comes to liberal moral theology and figuratively in regards to liberal philosophy. Read especially the "related terms" below.

INFECUND: Unfruitful; not producing young; barren; infertile.

Related Terms:
acarpous, arid, barren, celibate, childless, desert, desolate, drained, dried-up, dry, dull, earthbound, effete, exhausted, fallow, fruitless, gaunt, gelded, impotent, ineffectual, infertile, issueless, jejune, leached, literal, menopausal, mundane, nonfertile, nonproducing, nonproductive, nonprolific, prosaic, prosing, prosy, regrettable, sine prole, staid, sterile, stolid, stuffy, sucked dry, teemless, uncultivated, unfanciful, unfertile, unfruitful, unideal, unimaginative, uninspired, uninventive, unoriginal, unplowed, unpoetic, unproductive, unprolific, unromantic, unromanticized, unsown, untilled, virgin, waste, wasted, without issue

[Polycarp IV]

And Doc, you have to put a "Greeley Alert" warning in the title of these threads lest one reads the content and becomes corrupted!

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima fogey culpa.

[The Iguana]

This is true. Even if the "young fogeys" are an improvement over the horrendous 70's generation, they still fail to grasp the enormity of the situation facing the Church today. It will take many years before the full extent of the damage from this scandal will be fully appreciated. And that is just one part of the overall damage suffered by the Church since 1962.

The results do seem shocking. But as I said to Sinkspur, I am still a little skeptical until I see how the survey was worded and structured. Were choices given or were respondents asked to provide their own lists? How was the question worded? And when were the surveys sent out or collected? Was it before the most recent wave of revelations?

Moreover the survey had to have been a voluntary one, which means the respondent pool was necessarily self-selecting. On the other hand it was apparently 1800+ priests, which is about 4% of the national population of priests. If only 2% of that 4% honestly think that the sex scandals are a serious issue confronting the church, that's hardly a good sign.

I don't doubt that the real percentage - whatever it is - is lower than it should be.

There is, to be fair, the possibility that some may feel it is not a problem in terms of current and future priestly development: that the seminaries have (motsly, at any rate) cleaned up, decent safeguards are now in place, and that the main offenders are pretty much rooted out. And there would be some justice in that view based on what I know. Unfortunately there still remains the cleanup of past problems, which will dog the Church for years to come; to say nothing of the crisis of confidence that has erupted as a result of the scandals. Even if the root problems have been fixed these aftermaths will continue to be a problem for the Church for years to come.

[Notwithstanding]

All of the priests I know, in fact, do think it is a big deal that a small % of priests homosexually abused boys and young men.

They also think it is a big deal when any priest commits the sin of having homosexual relations (or condoning them).

[Hibernius Druid]

Fr. Greeley's findings, Deo gratias, are mirrored in postsecondary education, where the tenured radicals running the academy face an increasingly conservative student body with each passing academic year.

As one of those conservative professors outnumbered ten-to-one by postmodern "progressives," I'm delighted to witness this return to sanity.

[TIPPERARY]

Many years ago Fr. Greeley and I – being of the same age - studied from a now passé little book called “The Baltimore Catechism” – a simple, yet effective, primer directed at helping to set the course for our character development.

We studied it hard – if for no other reason than to avoid the wrath of Sr. Mary Watchout when her inevitable call came in class to recite from it. Poor motivation? You bet. A reality of our then lives? You bet. Effective? You better believe it! Did we learn the purpose of life . . .why God made us . . . the Works of Mercy . . . the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes? No doubt about it. That snot-nosed little fat Albert kid sitting next to us in class might well trip us in the playground at recess, but – by all that was sacred to us – we were determined that absolutely no one would ever be able to find a flaw in our ability to buzz through the Catechism. Being able to conquer the little book of life was a hell of a lot more important than avoiding Fat Albert’s playground challenges and harangues.

Fast forward some many decades – decades beset with much more ‘learning’ through empathic involvements in the intricacies and nuances of the process called maturation – and, through sound and quiet reflection ask, “. . . what has changed from those pristine days spent in grade school where we sweat the flash card drills, . . . the geography and spelling lessons,. . . the history workbook assignments, . . . the ‘Palmer methodologies’ writing drills, . . . the “stand-at-attention” when Father Highbritches walked into the room, . . . the dreaded trip to the Principal’s Office for talking in class or sassing back at Sister What’s Her Name when she told us to clean the erasers after school?”

Boiled down to one simple word what has changed is simply “focus”; focus drifted away from the Beatitudes and the Ten Commandments and now obsessively ‘locked-in’ on annihilating that guy who is still with us – Fat Albert. The Fat Albert then, is, for Fr. Greeley today, none other than his political opposition now – the President of the United States.

With this change in focus blessed and embraced by the “Greeley Generation Clerics”, we have exchanged principle for politics, relegated the lessons of the Baltimore Catechism to the back shelf and replaced them with a new set of rules and procedures. We have embraced expediency at the expense of eternity. In a most disturbing fashion, we have forgotten the one simple and elementary question - “why did God make me?”; a basic question, the answer to which we once so well knew and proudly heralded.

We have permitted the Father, Son and Holy Ghost to be replaced by the “Pro-Choice” tripartite alliance of Beelzebub, the NARAL crowd and Americans United For Separation of Church and State. Playboy magazine outsells Our Sunday Visitor while “God Bless America” has become a treasonous epithet.

We have permitted the prenataly lobotomized relativist thinkers du jour to supplant the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church in our thought processes.

We have embraced a style of expedient manipulation in lieu of forceful frontal confrontation with the patently absurd and fatally flawed egalitarian carpe diem doctrines of the times.

We genuflect at the altar of Political Correctness to such a degree that it has replaced the Promise of Fatima. The once simple and humble concept of public prayer is now as feared as a diagnosis of diphtheria was a century ago. The writings of Fulton J Sheen and Daniel Lord, S.J. have been supplanted by the blather of the social engineers of the day a la ‘Bill & Hill’, Kim Gandy and Gloria Stinem.

In short, we’V made a Faustian pact with the devil himself wherein political advantage trumps the Ten Commandments, the Natural Law and all of the once “good news” we got from that now out-dated and much forgotten Baltimore Catechism.

We are not, with these comments, suggesting that “we put Christ back into Christmas” as Christ has never left Christmas. We are – as with the “new” clerics of which Fr. Greeley complains - suggesting an honest and sincere return to Christmas; a return burgeoning with a rededication to the concepts and tenets so clearly and basically outlined in our Baltimore Catechism; a return, to be very specific, for those among us making up the cabal of miscreant “catholic” social engineers and pontificating political figures who have, with hardly a peep from the bishopric, worked in the past to derail the likes of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, together with other comparable legislation aimed at protecting God’s most delicate and beautiful human treasure; the treasure worth dying for – our kids, in utero and beyond.

With the assistance of the Holy Spirit,and the young clerics about whom Fr. Greeley so vociferously complains, we – as a human race, made in the image and likeness of Christ – shall succeed.

[american colleen]

The priests know about it, and 98% of them don't think it's any big deal.

Evidence please? I think you are full of $*&@ and I am offended - very offended - that you would actually think this not to mention type it out.

There is NOT ONE priest I have ever met who is not sick about this. Sometimes I think you actually hate priests.

[sinkspur]

Read Greeley's survey. The sexual abuse crisis is not a major issue to only 2% of the priests in the United States.

Direct your profanity to him, not me.

[sinkspur]

Astonishingly, only forty-seven priests thought the sex-abuse scandals worth mentioning

Out of 1854 priests, that's actually 2.5% of American priests who actually think the abuse crisis is a major issue.

[Petronski]

... belched into oblivion .... bump!

[american colleen]

That is crap. The survey didn't ask any questions about the scandal- never mentioned it in fact - it asked what the major problems facing the Church's laity are.

The major problems facing the laity are the same problems we've had for years... Mass attendance has not fallen off in the last two years which one could attribute to the scandals.

You and Fr. Greeley are inserting something into a questionaire that wasn't even touched on in the questionaire and then extrapolating from your insertion exactly what you want to assume. For the record, the laity is more concerned with (in the context of the scandals) the behaviour of the bishops - just ask Voice of the Faithful people.

I have not met ONE priest who wasn't sick over this whole thing - not ONE. The liberal ones, the progressive ones and the orthdox ones, all of them.

[sinkspur]

You and Fr. Greeley are inserting something into a questionaire that wasn't even touched on in the questionaire and then extrapolating from your insertion exactly what you want to assume.

Read the article again. You're missing it.

[TradicalRC]

There is an old saw in the social sciences that says the plural of anecdote is data.

[mom3boys]

My husband gives my 3rd grade son (homeschooled) new flashcards to memorize from the Baltimore Catechism every week. He tells us he wants to save those flashcards to use with HIS kids someday.