[Polycarp IV]

Young Fogey ping!

[Alberta's Child]

Dear Mr. Greeley:

As far as the future of the Catholic Church is concerned, your generation is nothing more than an anomaly of the post-WW2 era that will simply be belched into oblivion within a few decades. By the time you are gone, nobody is really going to know that there ever really was a "progressive" movement in the Church.

[ArrogantBustard]

When I was a young man, I found that the old priests were reliably orthodox, understood the Faith, preached it well, and behaved with the dignity befitting a priest. The young priests, OTOH, were leftist radicals, slobs, liberation theology spouting dissenters, didn't understand the faith, couldn't preach their way out of a wet paper bag, and wanted to be everybody's pal.

Times change. I observe, as an older man, that the old priests (who were the young priests of my youth) haven't changed their stripes, and their radicalism doesn't wear any better with age. Meanwhile, the younger priests have gotten back to the basics of Orthodoxy, Faith, Charity, and Sanctity.

[reed_inthe_wind]

Many of the liberal 50 something priests, headed straight into the seminary at a very young age. I commend this, but it is true that many of the newer priests attended college, and worked and lived an lay adults before answering the call. In addition, the younger breed has the advantage of a seminary experience that has had time to reflect on Vatican II. The older generation were equipped with a seminary curricula that was pre-Vatican II. That seminary experience was quickly made obsolete. It is the 50 something priest that had to rely on the Greely's of the world for an interpretation of Vatican II. The truth is, it is the new priest that is better equipped to reveal Vatican II in all its forms, orthodox and revolutionary. Let us not forget that the new priest actually read and studied the Vatican II documents.

[Antoninus]

I love how Fr. Greeley frames the argument. The young are the reactionary "fogeys" while his generation is the eternally youthful revolutionary change agents breathing new life into the Church--even though most of them are now in their seventies.

No, Fr. Greeley, you've got it exactly backwards. Your generation accomplished a major upheaval which altered many aspects of Catholic life and worship. But it's been a miserable failure, particularly in the West, where it was carried to and beyond its illogical extremes. Now, those who haven't abandoned the Church entirely are recognizing the failures of the Robert Weaklands, Roger Mahoney's, Margaret Steinfels, and Andrew Greeley's.

The cheesy liberal interpretation of Vatican II has been rejected and the young who remain are finding enrichment and fulfillment in the traditions, history, and true teachings of the Church, stretching back hundreds and thousands of years before the 1960s.

The old fogey reactionaries are those who are continuing to focus on things that happened 40 years ago instead of embracing a truly traditional Catholic renewal.

[TheGeezer]

The study revealed a clear divide, too, on the ordination of women

This matter has been defined irrevocably by John Paul II: the ordination of women is not compatible with scripture and long-standing Church teachings. Women cannot be ordained. The matter is no longer open for debate in the sense that it will ever happen.

Greeley is a goofy old radical with many axes to grind. His time about up, he occasionally grouses about something so he can pretend still to be relevant.

I wouldn't put too much credence into any of his opinions.

[Loyalist]

PING to the fogeys, young and old alike.

[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.