Posted on 08/07/2005 9:17:25 AM PDT by Teófilo
A response to Fr. Joseph O'Leary's The Rise of the Neocaths Continued from Part III
Folks, I know this is taking too long, but I don't want to leave any allegation unanswered. I foresee one more substantial post and one concluding post. Please, bear with me. I appreciate your patience thus far.
Fr. O'Leary was saying (in blue and italics) and I was retorting:
Do you find the boundary of orthodoxy too constricting? Well, Father, the Church is not your private theological preserve. The Church extends to the past, through the present and on to the future. I belong to the Church because it makes those who went before me immediate to me; they are with us in the same Church. I treasure what they left me. I am sad to see that you have lost that sense of the Church's past as a living reality; you only see it as confined in the pages of some dusty books or manuscripts.
- [Pope John Paul II's] tactic recalls that of Mao in China. Implication: we "neocaths" have been brainwashed by the cunning of Pope John Paul II and as a consequence we've been moved into a frenzy in order to throw the Church into the throes of a Cultural Revolution. To equate the late Pope with Mao is beyond the pale; to ascribe to him sinful motives is presumptuous; to imply that those of us who want to carry on his legacy have been somehow brainwashed by him is a collective ad hominem attack, fallacial, and without substance.
- The more warmly the youthful crowd applauded [Pope John Paul II], the deeper the intellectual chill that fell on the Church. Only if the self-proclaimed intellectuals taught their own thing not according to the mind of the Church, Fr. Joseph—I'm talking directly to you know, Father. When are you going to learn your place, Father? You don't rule the Church, you are not a member of the Magisterium, you serve the Church and if you serve her, then you are supposed to love and cherish what she teaches, what she stands for. This is a very basic teaching, that I should not be reminding you of.
Edmund Chia says that the JP2 generation are "distinguished by their unflinching devotion to all that the beloved and late Pope John Paul II stood for. They were present in huge numbers at the late pope’s funeral. Unlike the baby-boomers or the generation X-ers, the JP2 generation has a greater sense of uncritical loyalty and obedience to ecclesial authority and is more likely to prefer conventional values and traditional church life. Tradition and uniformity are their bywords, while conformity and submission are their operating modes. This is the JP2 generation's way of “rebelling” against their elders, especially those wont to employ a hermeneutics of suspicion when apprehending religious symbols and ecclesial institutions. In a way this new generation is the “born again” generation and feeds perfectly into the restorationist programs advocated by the pontificate of John Paul II, where the hermeneutics of retrieval is given greater emphasis. This involves retrieving what the previous generation questioned or threw out altogether, e.g., the doctrine of papal infallibility, devotional activities, the wearing of the roman collar, cassock or habit, and the reception of holy communion on the tongue."
My generation treasures critical obedience, Father Joseph. I can be obedient to the Church and be critical in the broad sense of the term "critical." I am not a traditionalist in the narrow sense; nor am I a fundamentalist—in any sense. Critical obedience is free obedience, freely given, Father Joseph. The difference between you an I is that you rationalize disobedience and disrespect, building behind it intellectual constructs so that you can justify the unjustifiable and feel good about it.. "Critical obedience" is for you a cliché, a permission to disobey the Church's Pastors and deconstruct the Church accordingly. Not to me, and I dare say, not to my generation. This we repudiate from your generation, this we disregard, not uncritically, but soberly, due to the harmful consequences your generation has brought to the Church.
What's wrong with a priest wearing a collar or a cassock, or a religious his/her habit? What's wrong with the testimony this kind of dress gives to the world? What's wrong with some people not wanting to touch the Holy Bread with their hands?—I have no such qualms, btw. What's wrong with holding to the defined dogma of papal infallibility, or to any other defined dogma?
Answer: there is nothing wrong with any of these. The "previous generation"—Fr. O'Leary's super-boomers—was wrong in rejecting them and thus eliminating an elloquent countercultural testimony that was so much needed, and it's still needed today, a testimony of consecration, dedication, humility, and respect. See if the lack of this kind of testimony has helped enhance any of these qualities in today's dominant culture.
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