The Decline of Liberal Catholicism

 From The Catholic Thing:

Over the last few years, men ordained priests in the 1970s have been marking their fiftieth anniversaries and are retiring from the active ministry. They are being replaced by men who weren’t even alive in the 1970s! Indeed, the men in the cohort of younger priests now were only ordained in the last two decades. These younger priests are doctrinally more conservative than the priests they are replacing. This is not just anecdotal; the survey research bears this out too.

This has produced not a little bit of friction as the “spaces,” to use the parlance invoked above, have gone from “safe” to “unsafe.” Again, not in every instance, but changes are apparent in the pulpit, at the altar and in the Confessional, and in the classroom where there are parishes with elementary and high schools. In contradistinction to the examples I used from my first assignment, Holy Hours are regular occurrences in many parishes now, Pre-Cana presentations are more apt to point out not just the incongruity but the sinfulness in cohabitation, and, relatedly, that marital chastity is not attained so long as contraception is practiced.

We always have to be careful with the words we place immediately before “Catholicism” in our speech or in our writing. We are, after all, referring to our faith, which is not, taxonomically, a political phenomenon. Nevertheless, there is a clear pertinence to conservatism since faith has attributes that most definitely tend in the direction of preserving whole and undiminished what is being “handed on.”  In this sense, then, there are distinctive biblical and ecclesial correlatives with conservatism. (Read more.)