The Cruel Curse

Whenever I read the National Catholic Reporter, the house organ of the anti-Catholic Catholics, the 'bitter and twisted' old 'liberals' who espouse the "spirit" of Vatican II rather than its substance, who led the desacralization or, as some of them proudly call it, the Protestantization of the Catholic Church, who completed the work of the Reformation in what Eamon Duffy called in his book on the destruction of traditional religion in England between 1400 and 1580, The Stripping of the Altars, who call on the bishops to "listen" to the laity but who themselves are unable to hear the voice of the young who thirst for orthodoxy and piety, who revere JPII and B16, who come to World Youth Day in their millions, who choose seminaries and religious orders that are orthodox in faith and morals and that value devotion and piety, letting the old orders and seminaries with their aging dissidents wither... 


then I am reminded of this passage from German writer Martin Mosebach's book on the destruction in Europe of liturgy, altars, sacred music, art, and architecture over the past 40 years, The Heresy of Formlessness:

The 20th century cult of youth culminates in a cruel curse: while the aging process cannot be stopped, the aging human being is not allowed to mature. and is condemned, until his life's end, to play the long-dead games of his youth. This is most clearly seen in the world of art--which is so closely related to religion--where the avantgardisms of 1905 are still being repeated again and again, as an ossified ritual, a hundred years later. And, with her famous aggiornamento, the Church thinks that, in order to survive, she needs to 'open herself' to these senile avantgardisms!" (pp.81-82).

Mosebach is decrying the postconciliar devastation of the Catholic Church in Europe, but with a few minor word changes his point can be applied to those who claim the mantle of the Sixties generation as a whole, in the seminaries, universities, and media, secular and Catholic alike.