Monday, November 20, 2006

You had to have been there...


SEVERAL YEARS AGO BBC Scotland broadcast an hour-long programme in which three Scots clerics - a Calvinist minister, an Anglican theologian and a Cardinal - wandered around the Holy Land sharing their reflections on the life of Our Lord. The Calvinist Minister, a rare soul from the remote West Highlands, said a number of penetratingly beautiful things about Jesus; the Anglican, erudite and devout, offered a number of very interesting and orthodox insights; the Cardinal, God rest his soul, bored on almost exclusively, and to general incomprehension, about the Second Vatican Council.

Cathcon links to this priceless article, which begins as follows:

Noticing that the words “Vatican II” evoked no response in her high school students, an Irish nun recently told me she asked them what Vatican II was. After some time and with much hesitation, one of them asked: “Would that be the pope’s summer residence?”

The Central Event of Human History is receding from the consciousness of Catholics. It's not on the radar of the young. How can this possibly be happening? Sense the scandal, the wailing and gnashing of teeth. Savour it.

There's hope yet: anyone who imagines this unaccountable indifference among the young to the Second Pentecost might be reversed by earnest perusal of the memoirs of Fr Yves Congar belongs in a rubber room. But we knew that anyway.

Oh, my sides....

2 comments:

Arturo Vasquez said...

It's odd: once the revolution happened,and all those impassioned causes of aggiornamento and active participation finally won the day, people of my generation don't really know what all the fuss was about.

The revolution won, but was all that came before it worse than the banality and total lack of any theological content that I experienced growing up. What was all the fuss about? People my age may never really know how evil those nuns who used to beat Latin into children really were. Well, at least they had nuns back then.

Maybe this will all change once all the aggiornamento hippies die, and Papa Ratzi is the last of them. But to think that something better than what we have now will take its place may be overly optimistic. Besides, I've already abandoned ship, as you well know.

Hilary Jane Margaret White said...

I couldn't read the article you linked to.

The link worked fine, but there must be something wrong with the screen. As soon as I got past the first sentence, my eyes unfocussed and glazed over and I literally could not read it.

Odd.