To the JPII Generation from the John23 Generation, with Love

Continuing the subject of the importance of living the truth in love, my friend The Hermit brought to my attention a blog post by Fr Seamus Griesbach, a young parish priest of the Diocese of Portland, Maine. Fr Seamus reflects in this post on the Church and the world that he and his cohort–those he refers to as the JPII Generation–have inherited. Like many of peers, Fr Seamus finds that inheritance nothing to write home about, and–also like many of his peers–he blames my generation for having messed it all up.

Culturally, we were raised on washed out themes – the words to “Hear I Am, Lord” ring in our ears, reminding us of the tear-filled retreats of youth even if we know that half the time we were just being emotionally manipulated. Even though we know we should, we don’t know how to live a life rooted in ritual prayer because our parents didn’t even know what that looked like. And so even basic spiritual discipline requires herculean effort for us. Intellectually we lack rigor, we were told that every opinion was valid for so long that we have a hard time being critical, even if we are suspect of what we hear. We tend toward reactionary extremes, and toward a certain nostalgia for times when there seemed to be greater regard for human excellence and virtue. But we’re really not sure what that looked like or how to achieve it, because we’ve never experienced it in a living culture. Instead we grew up on the Nintendo and MTV, the St. Louis Jesuits and cut out butterflies. A washed out culture, a decadent culture, and a largely secular culture.

This is not news to me. Since my reversion, I have spent quite a bit of time in mea culpa mode, being expected to apologize for the poor catechesis, moral relativity, tone-deaf musical sensibilities, architectural bastardization, liturgical hokey-pokey, and general letting-down-the-troops that I and my cohort inflicted on Mother Church and America the Beautiful. If the Church were a cocktail party, I’d be the one in a corner sucking down straight gin, shaking my head in a chastened fashion as a circle of the righteous repeated “What were you thinking?” in ever higher dudgeon, and discreetly checking my watch to see how soon I could safely escape to my peace-stickered station wagon and blast my St Louis Jesuits CDs.

Most of this, as I told Fr Seamus in his combox, is just to be expected. Replace the list of specific ills, and we of what I suppose might best be called the John23 Generation could have written just such a jeremiad about the Church and the world we inherited from our elders. (Some of us, unfortunately, are still writing them.) As I learned in a long ago lit class, Killing Daddy is a necessary part of claiming one’s own maturity. It’s only as you get to be as old as Daddy yourself, if you’re wise, that you come to appreciate that the old man wasn’t such a dummy about everything after all. So I would ordinarily add Fr Seamus’s post to the list of things I shake my head at and move on–except for one particular charge he levels against my generation, which I can’t let stand.

He says our sin was that we loved too much.

We were basically taught that the heart of the Gospel was to love others, and that that meant we should always compromise conviction in favor of the person. The only virtue I recall being drilled into my head was that we seek to be on good terms with everyone, regardless of their point of view. To be likable. It was the underlying subtext in most moral narratives: the protagonist gives up his or her convictions or preconceived notions in order to love the antagonist.. . .[M]any of us realized that the generation before us had sold us a useless bill of goods, rather than the Gospel. We had not been taught the fullness of the faith, we were not given adequate tools to handle real life – to deal with evil, to seek what is good. We were not trained in the virtues, we were not given a solid foundation in logic and critical thinking, we were not exposed to the cultural and religious treasures of our western heritage. Instead, we had been brought up by a generation that was convinced that the way to show their love for us was by being likable and entertaining us. The youth ministry mantra was, I’ll never forget, the “4 F words”: food, fun, friends, and faith.

Fr Seamus, respectfully, the heart of the Gospel is to love others. Surely no one needs to quote you chapter and verse upon chapter and verse in which Jesus makes that perfectly clear. That you believe this–or more properly your flawed interpretation of it–to be a “useless bill of goods” may be the fault of bad catechesis (which exists in every age, in every generation) or poor understanding on your part, but it is terribly sad in either case. Love, as Paul notes in 1 Corinthians, is the enduring virtue upon which all others rest and from which they flow. It is the only good with the power to resist evil, and every sin–especially the deadly ones–begins as a failure of love.

I am sorry that you are under the mistaken notion that faith, for my generation, could be summed up as “food, fun, and friends,” and that we had no concept of the real world and its evils as we cut out butterflies and held hands and sang “Kumbaya.” You are not alone in that distorted view; it’s particularly common among recent converts who don’t know better. It’s quite possible that we of the John23 Generation have not made a strong enough case for the rigorous, countercultural, and dangerous virtue of love. That may, in part, be due to the fact that many of those who might speak most compellingly are dead, having given their lives for the love of God’s littlest and least ones. If you want to know at what cost the love at the heart of the Gospel comes, you might need to take it up with Archbishop Oscar Romero, with Jean Donovan and the religious women martyrs of El Salvador, with the Jesuits slain in their front yard for loving God’s poor. When you say, “I don’t recall hearing anything about principles, about virtue, about sacrifice, about the truth,” I wonder if, perhaps–like all of us, when we’re young–you simply weren’t paying attention.

And for you to blame our generation’s “overemphasis” on love (which you have incorrectly defined as “niceness”) for the tragic mishandling of the abuse scandals, and for your generation’s loss of innocence after the 9-11 attacks, is just foolishness. Both of these had roots that go back much deeper into the history of the Church and the world–not to mention the depths of human sinfulness–than a few dozen years. You will learn that, too, as you grow up. You might begin now by recognizing the parallels between Islamic fundamentalism of the sort that wishes to war against modernism with Catholic fundamentalism that does the same.

The important thing for Fr Seamus and for all of us to remember is that these differences between generations are not the tragedy he makes them out to be. Each generation begins by being precisely the Church that is needed at that time in human history. Because human history is as flawed as the humans that make it, however, no one generation brings the Kingdom, and over time its response to the world becomes ineffective both because it has succeeded in righting some wrongs and because it loses its youthful immunity to the world, the flesh, and the devil. When Pope John XXIII threw open the windows of the Church to the spirit of aggiornamento (on my 10th birthday!) it was precisely because the Church and the world would have suffocated without that deep breath. It’s a different time now, and it may well be time to replace the windows and see to the weatherstripping.

The pendulum swings. Balance is dynamic in living creatures; stasis means death. When you are sailing before the wind, my sailor friends tell me, you have to tack. You make constant course corrections that sometimes look like zigzigs and reversals. So the next generation rises up, not to take the Church back to some imagined Golden Age, but to help carry it and the world forward to the Kingdom’s fulfillment. That’s proof, not of previous generations’ failings–though those always exist, and are always most visible to those who come after–but of the living, dynamic presence of the Holy Spirit.


Fr Seamus ends his post on a dark note.

We came of age during a time that was nothing short of spiritually catastrophic. The bastions had been razed. Christian culture in the West had been devastated. Through no fault of our own, we are building from scratch . . .