Our recent discussions about Vatican II have triggered a good deal of reflection on my part. I'd like to briefly share one strand of thought here. I mentioned, in a recent post, that my parents, both products of the pre-Vatican II church, loved the church of that era, from the Latin Mass to Marian devotions to Notre Dame football to the Legion of Decency to, eventually, John F Kennedy and, for all I know, Fulton Sheen. I hope that list didn't include Fr. Coughlin and Senator McCarthy, but I see those latter two as rather extreme examples of spirituality which I take as having been widespread.
If I had to characterize my parents' spirituality, it would be quite different than my own. To describe theirs, I'd choose words like "loyalty" and "suffering".
My parents both lived, not just their spiritual lives but the entirety of their lives, according to a code that would have done credit to Notre Dame offensive linemen lining up across from Army in the 1940s and 1950s: they believed in being tougher and more disciplined and working harder than anyone else, and that was the secret to getting ahead.
It wasn't just my parents. Many of the priests and some of the religious sisters I knew in my youth were cut from the same cloth. And many of my older relatives on both sides of my family.
Charles Morris, in his history of the American Catholic church, American Catholic: the Saints and Sinners who Built America's Most Powerful Church, wrote that Catholics from my parents' era were well-suited for work in large command-and-control institutions such as large, urban police forces and fire departments, the armed services, and even the telephone company. As a matter of fact, one of my dad's sisters spent her career working for Michigan Bell, first as a telephone operator, and eventually as a sales rep for corporate long distance service. The idea was that the Catholic Church formed these worker bees and instilled in them a sense that the institution's mission was more important than the happiness of the individual; and it was honorable and virtuous to spend one's entire career with a single employer, pursuing that mission.
When I was a student at Loyola in the early 1980s, it was said that the FBI and CIA recruited on campus, presumably for some of the same reasons that Charles Morris described in his book. To be sure, no spy agencies ever asked to interview me; I was emphatically not their material. I was a bearded free spirit who partied too much and placed academics 4th or 5th on my priority list.
In my parish, there still are some parishioners, of my parents' age, who are cut from my parents' cloth. In some ways, they are a square-jawed and grim lot, although they are capable of geniality and even joy. But most of the Catholics I know, of my generation and younger generation, are different. Perhaps those of you who take the time to plow through my homily texts would agree that "loyalty" and "suffering" are not the cardinal virtues I am likely to preach.
What do you think? Have Catholics changed over the course of your lifetimes?
I have no deep insights, but I was in high school during Vatican II, graduating from LaSalle High School, an all-boys school in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1965. My teachers there were mostly Christian Brothers, with occasional lay teachers (all men).
ReplyDeleteI had gone to Catholic school in grades 1 through 8, being taught mostly by nuns. There were a few lay teachers along the way, all women except one. I had the same teacher for both 7th and 8th grades, a somewhat severe nun named Sister Marion (Osterhage) who was probably the best teacher I ever had and who left such an impression on me that she still makes occasional appearances in my dreams.
This is all gone with the wind. My elementary school (Assumption School) no longer exists, and whatever children from the parish who now attend Catholic school go to Our Lady of Grace Catholic School, a private Catholic school drawing from four parishes and costing $5700 a year. My high school still exists, but there are no Christian Brothers teaching there any more, and though there is no formal connection to the Christian Brothers (FSC) any longer it describes itself as "in the LaSallian tradition." Tuition is about $12,000 a year, but the web site notes that 92% of attendees receive financial assistance (averaging $5000 a year).
I am no expert, but it seemed to me the unravelling of the Catholic experience I had as a child was very much the result of Vatican II. One of the brothers from my high school—whom I'll call BC—became a close friend of my family when I was a senior, and remained so for a number of years after that. Through him and the grapevine of those of us who kept in touch when we all went off to different colleges, we heard the stories of one after another of our former teachers who left the order. It sometimes seemed that "good ones" were the first to leave. According to BC, one of the reasons for the departures was that their once highly structured and regimented life inside the community eased up, and they had much more free time on their hands. And according to BC, they realized that they were lonely. He left the order himself, got married, and had three children. I managed to find again a message written by son on Facebook, April 22, 2018, which read as follows: "My father passed away last night. Alzheimers, melanoma, and prostate cancer had been stalking him for almost a decade. The Alzheimers erased most of who he was over the last 10 years, and I've missed him so much. Rest in peace."
My autobiography will be continued in later messages, but my point at the moment is that the experience we had as kids going to Catholic school back in the day is forever gone, I think. The 2022 version of my high school and the successor to my grade school, as far as I can tell, are great schools with much smaller class sizes and much more elaborate facilities. But compared to what my parents paid to send me and my sisters and brother to Catholic elementary school and high school, they seem prohibitively expensive.
Just one more point. My experience as a Catholic child was, I think, very similar to my mother's experience (born 1918) growing up. (My father was not Catholic.) So nuns, priests, and brothers were familiar and important presences in all of our young lives. How many Catholics is that true for today?
DeleteDavid, many thanks for these reflections and memories. What has happened to your Catholic schools, has happened to mine, too. I think I may have mentioned: when I was a freshman at my Catholic high school, I believe the tuition was a few hundred dollars for the first kid from a family, with a sliding scale for additional siblings. I'm a bit younger than you, so by the time I made it to high school, most of the teachers were laypersons, but there were diocesan priests teaching religion classes, and an order of religious sisters, the Adrian Dominicans, teaching and acting as administrators. I don't think the tuition at my high school has reached $10K/year yet, but most students do receive some form of financial aid. The tuition for the local Catholic high school in this suburban area has tuition that probably is closer to $15K/year. I don't think Loyola University cost that much for tuition and room and board when I was a student there in the 1980s. Yet the Catholic school teachers make less money than their public school colleagues in this area.
DeleteDavid, I think you make an important point: priests and religious were much more numerous in the pre-Vatican II church in the US, and my impression is that virtually all Catholics knew some of them, especially because of Catholic schools, but also via parish life, and perhaps via other avenues of the "thick" Catholic culture that prevailed then. I remember parish priests occasionally coming to extended family gatherings when I was a kid. And some families had produced vocations of their own; there were no priests from my extended family, as far as I know, but one of my dad's cousins was a religious sister, in the order that taught at my elementary school (Monroe IHMs). She had attended the same school when she was a girl, and I'm sure that's how she ended up in that order. As I say, my own schooling was a mixture of religious sisters, priests and lay teachers, but the lay teachers were predominant all through elementary and high school. And at Loyola: I had a handful of Jesuit and diocesan priests as instructors, but most were lay. Some of my own kids attended Catholic elementary school in the area where I live now; their school had one religious sister on staff, who was in her 80s or 90s, but none of my kids had her as a teacher. One of my kids taught at a Catholic school for a few years pretty recently, and there were no priests or religious on the faculty or staff there, either. So our family's experience is that your point is exactly right: kids growing up these days have very little contact with priests and sisters.
Tuition at The Boy's Catholic school 20 years ago was $6k per year. Very poorly paid and trained teachers. No art, music, gym, or "frills." Good religious instruction. We raised him Catholic, but I don't think The Boy ever met a nun, and never saw a brother or monk other than occasionally on our trips to the Cross in the Woods run by the Fransiscans. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_in_the_Woods
DeleteThe Catholic grade school we attended didn't charge tuition, but there was a $50 book fee. Last time I checked the tuition at our parish school was $1500. Most people get some tuition assistance and there is a heavy diocesan subsidy. There lot of scholarship fund raisers, coupon and receipt collections, and script sales. They aim to make it so that any family that wants to attend can. They ask the parents for a lot of volunteer work.
DeleteWhen I was a kid, it was no frills, so my mom stepped up and was the volunteer music teacher on Fridays. Another mom who had an art degree was the volunteer art teacher on Fridays. I liked Fridays.
Well I'm pretty sure that $1500 for parish grade school tuition isn't current. I tried looking up what it is now, and all I found is that the area average for K-6 is $3600. It is not on the school's website, all it says "call the office for more information".
DeleteRates were higher at The Boy's school for non-Catholics or Catholics outside the parish. We were both, so we paid top dollar, no scholarship, Protestant rate. I learned later that the secretary in that parish told everybody that we had "turned Catholic" to pay less. Had I known that, I would have given her an earful, but we "turned" after we put The Boy in public school, so maybe she figured it out eventually.
DeleteJim, I think Catholics have changed, but not in the same way in every location. I recognize the things you describe in your parents' life, but not from observing it personally or living it.
ReplyDeleteYou all know I grew up in a small farming/ranching community. Those people were the very opposite of worker bees who fit into a corporate mold. Our hometown was, and still is, about 20% Catholic. It wasn't possible to exist in a Catholic bubble. There was a lot of intermarriage, including my family. One time we got to figuring it up, and the last marriage in my direct line of ancestry that wasn't mixed took place in about 1840. That was on my dad's side. On my moms side there were no mixed marriages before she married dad, because they were all Protestant.
The Catholics in my childhood were devout, but didn't wear their faith on their sleeve. There was an ethic of neighbors helping each other, regardless of denomination.
My siblings and I went to Catholic grade school, and I think the nuns we had must have thought they were still in mission territory. In a sense, they were.
One thing that was in common with the life that Jim's parents lived, was an acceptance of some suffering, "into every life some rain must fall". You offered it up and soldiered on.
It sounds like it would have been a recipe for a whole bunch of " nones" in the next generation, but my siblings are all still practicing Catholics.
The "change" I mentioned probably came about because of Vatican II. I think we experienced it mostly in a positive way, though there was for a time a nostalgia for the Latin Mass, especially on my dad's part, though he grew to like the English Mass. I even missed it a little myself for awhile. There was a whole lot of stuff going on in the general culture; such as Vietnam, the assassination of Kennedy, the cold war (and then its end), and the sexual revolution, etc. I don't think we blamed VII for the way things played out.
Katherine, that's interesting about your siblings. Most of mine are still connected, too, to on extent or another. Our parents and our childhoods leave marks on us. I claim in the post that I have a different spirituality than my parents, but I'm sure I've picked up bits and pieces of theirs, and my siblings have, too.
DeleteMy dad's attitude toward the Latin Mass and the English Mass is a bit mixed, from what I can tell. When I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, he was fairly open about how distressed he was about the changes happening in the church, including the mass. At some point in the 1980s or 1990s, one of those nouveaux Latin Mass religious orders (Institute of Christ the King) established a beachhead in the town where my parents live, taking over a the church of a closed parish. The order established a Latin Mass community in the town which, I think, still continues today. My dad hung out there for a while. But after a time, he found his way back to the neighborhood parish. He's not a loquacious guy, so I haven't heard a lengthy explanation of that odyssey, but I think he liked the aesthetics of the Latin Mass, but found some of the cranks who were regulars there to be a bit trying. And my mom had no interest in going back to the Latin Mass. She sang in the choir at the neighborhood parish, and had a lot of friends there, and didn't want to leave any of that behind.
The person who embraced the changes of Vatican II most wholeheartedly was my paternal grandmother. She was born in 1892. She was a very kind, gentle person, and I think some of the harsh edges of the older church chafed her, especially the school of thought that was willing to cast non-catholics into outer darkness.
Delete"1892" should have been 1897. She wouldn't have appreciated me adding five years to her age!
DeleteWhen the moto proprio came out (I think 2013?) making the 1962 Latin Mass more available, I asked Dad if he wanted to hunt up a Latin Mass for old times sake. He said, "Nah. I'm so hard of hearing now, it all sounds like Latin."
DeleteGreat quotation, Katherine.
DeleteAt the risk of being a rambling crank:
ReplyDeleteI do find what others have to say about their Catholic upbringing interesting. But the increasing "memory lane" nature of the discussion topics here leaves me with nothing germane to contribute, hence I end up deleting most of my ramblings.
Cradle Catholics who grew up in the 1950s and went to Catholic school and had wide exposure to priests, monks, nuns, altar boys, and practices like rosaries, novenas, weekly Confession, fish on Fridays, etc. are deeply immersed in a certain "cultural Catholicism" in a way converts are not.
The RCIA Church Ladies spent an inordinate amount of time yearning over their experiences in devout Catholic homes of the 1940s and 1950s. The underlying message to us converts was that we had an obligation to try to recreate this experience for our own children: "John needs to see you saying your rosary, maybe while you make breakfast for everyone like my mother did. You need to start making him say grace before meals. He needs to get used to saying no to play mates on Sunday mornings to fulfill the Mass obligation."
But I am not a "cultural Catholic." No convert is. I sought the Church because I believed in what it said about Jesus, the communion of saints, and saw it as a true guardian of the faith.
Talking about the Golden Olden Days when the Church made Mom and Dad suffering worker bees with eight kids is completely out of my experience.
It also ignores that the Catholics in my neighborhood in the 1960s were the most vociferous union members and civil rights proponents. Good workers, but they didn't bow their heads to The Man or the status quo.
Jean, glad you're commenting again. I don't see you as a rambling crank, but if you are, you're our rambling crank. I think what's going to come out of this conversation is that everyone has a different narrative, depending on what they came from, and what they came to.
DeleteThe church ladies ought to know by this time that you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, especially if it was never there in the first place.The golden glow of memory is deceptive, they remember the parts they liked, and don't remember the parts that weren't so great. And telling people how to raise their kids never ends well.
Yeah, Church Lady Number 2 lost me at "make breakfast for everybody." Raber and The Boy made their own breakfast after I left for work. I doubt rosaries were part of that ritual.
DeleteWhen she started going on about how Sundays should be spent making love with your spouse after midday dinner, some of us laughed outright. Yup, we'll just lock the bedroom door for a couple hours while the toddler shoves breadsticks and cheese slices in the VCR slot and starts yelling that he accidentally let the cats out.
Well, I’ve shared too much of my story recently, but …. I agree with Katherine - everyone has a different narrative. David and I are the same age, but had different experiences. My mother was a big fan of the Legion of Decency, Bishop Sheen, and, unfortunately, Sen. McCarthy. She voted Democratic until FDRs fourth run when she switched parties. I remember that she and her mother argued a lot about Kennedy- my mom didn’t vote for him. She followed the lead of Pius XII in seeing communism as THE threat, and supported Franco. We never had priests at our home. We never said family rosaries. She seldom talked about her religious beliefs, but I don’t think that she saw suffering as being a positive in any way. My mother was older than Jim’s parents, obviously, but while her life was influenced for the worse by Irish Catholic Jansenism, she and my dad did not share the same viewpoints as Jim’s parents about putting institutions first and suffering My dad was seldom home, and he was totally indifferent to religion. I went to a parochial school through 4th, and then a Catholic women’s college. Most of the nuns who taught there were brilliant. Most left religious life in the 70s and 80s. Once, when visiting the LMU campus, I spent some time with one of the women who left the order, still a professor at the university. She said that she had joined the order because she wanted to teach at the university level, and few opportunities existed for women in academia outside of women’s colleges. Also the Catholic colleges paid for their sisters’ studies to get a PhD and beyond. So she signed up. As women started getting new career opportunities and rights beyond teaching at elementary/high school level, and nursing, fewer women joined religious orders and many left them, because they finally had many options besides homemaker, nurse and teacher. I had a childhood friend who joined a nursing order after high school. She told me that was the only way she could afford to get an RN and she had originally intended to be with the order forever. But as she got older she realized she wanted marriage and children so she eventually left. The 40s and 50s were unique in American Catholicism. It was almost entirely cultural, and, as Jean notes, not a factor for most adult converts. Once Catholics were pretty much fully assimilated, moving away from the Catholic ghettos of the first half of the 20th century, and with the Kennedy election being the inflection point, the iron grip of cultural Catholicism weakened. Many men and women left religious life. Many Catholics in the pews also realized that they could make other choices in their own religious preferences also. Unlike Jim and Katherine’s families, I know few Catholics my age, raised in the pre- Vatican II church, whose siblings are all still practicing Catholics. The change from Latin to English had nothing to do with it. Most of my friends who were raised in devout, traditional Catholic homes eventually left the RCC because they rejected the Pre-Vat II form of Catholicism, and the popes after John XXIII reversed course on VII.
ReplyDeleteOur neighbor's daughter was an ex nun. Left the convent in 1966, volunteered to teach at the Catholic school across the street for a couple years, then moved on to teaching high school English at a nearby public high school.
DeleteNice woman about 30 who seemed rather shell-shocked, but we were told NEVER to ask her about being an ex-nun, which made us speculate madly.
The only details we got were that she found the other nuns very mean and didn't like their teaching methods. Teaching with the Dominicans across the street was supposed to be a penance for leaving the order, but that may have been made up by the Catholic kids.
Before she moved on, she gave me her yellow rug for my bedroom. She told me yellow was her favorite color because it meant happiness. I wish I knew the rest of her story.
That’s interesting, Jean. I could speculate but speculation is not enlightening. I too would be interested in her story. But I’m confused - she can’t be 30 recently if she left in 1966. I guess you originally knew her when she was about 30?
DeleteMy husband’s family had a vacation cabin on the Chesapeake. A small log cabin, unheated, no insulation and few “mod cons”. The community was started in the 1930s. It had interesting restrictions- only college graduates could have a cottage there, no racial minorities, no Jews, no Catholics. Those rules were gone by the 60s, thank goodness. My mother in law often talked about a couple with a cabin there. As a Protestant she was fascinated by them. He was an ex priest, she was an ex nun, and they were very active Catholics. No kids. Apparently they were very well liked in the community. They did a lot of charitable work. Everyone was shocked after their deaths to learn they were multi- millionaires. There was a long story about them in the National Catholic Reporter that I sent to my husbands’ siblings. They had all spent summers there when they were growing up in the 40s, 50s and 60s. Nobody ever suspected their wealth - inherited. They were a truly remarkable couple.
Their obituaries- both written by Fr. Peter Daly, whose columns appear frequently at NCR.
https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/ralph-dwan-he-brought-beatitudes-life
https://www.corpus.org/index.php/in-remembrance/528-ralph-and-mary-dwan
Interesting story about the ex priest and ex nun. I think a lot of those who leave religious life go on to do service work. There is an ex priest in my cancer group who is married and works in some capacity in the foster care system.
DeleteThe ex nun was about 30 when I knew her. Her vocation was teaching, and your story about how the Church paid for education of nuns made me think of her.
I can easily believe that idealism wanes as one ages. People who were gung-ho to devote their life to prayer, teaching and chastity when they were 19, may not feel the same way at 31 or 55. For that matter, some people who thought their spouse-to-be was their life partner, may find their thinking changing after 5 or 15 or 25 years.
ReplyDeleteThis may be one reason so many Congressmen become lobbyists, too. Idealism wanes.
If Vatican II "gave permission" for many religious sisters to leave their orders, I really think that was humane. Of course, as we have been discussing, it had many consequences across the wider church. The church is still figuring out how to adjust.
Just to say explicitly what I tried to be more indirect about in the post: I think the church cultivated a different sort of person in my parents' day. And I think it's possible that the church today attracts a different sort of person than would have been attracted in the pre-Vatican II days.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure the Church ever cultivated any one sort of person in the 1930s or cultivates another sort in the 2020s.
DeleteI apologize if I am missing your point or don't understand what you mean by "cultivate, " but doesn't the communion of many varied saints indicate that the Church is wide and varied?
I think of insular Protestants like my Amish and Baptist relatives as the ones who attract certain sorts of people at any given time and shun the ones who don't fit.
Though I do think Catholics who want to be choosier about who gets the sacraments and to impose months of scrutiny so they can weed people out run the risk of attracting and keeping a much less varied and much smaller group.
I'm also not certain if you are mourning the loss of Catholics like your parents and wish the Church still made people like them?
I'm sure they are good and virtuous, but did other factors outside the Church influence them? Maybe some of those factors had more to do with society at large than the Church?
Good observations and questions, Jean. I hope Jim reads them soon!
DeleteJean - no, I'm not mourning. I love my parents, but the suffering-and-obedience crowd never has been particularly congenial to me. I'm cut from a different cloth, and I'm grateful the church has room for someone like me. I wouldn't do well with a pastor who demanded unquestioning obedience.
DeleteYes, I'm sure you're right that factors outside the church have changed all of us, too. The church doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Thanks. I never thought of you as high on suffering, but certainly very strict on obedience.
DeleteDeacons ;(and priests) have to promise obedience to their bishop and his successors at ordination, so it goes with the territory.
DeleteThe obedience part, I feel I've entered into willingly, with eyes wide open. It's something I guess I reaffirm every time I choose to obey. It's possible I could be presented with circumstances some day which I'll feel I won't or can't obey. I assume any adult can understand this.
DeleteI was horrified when I read the oath taken by cardinals. God was mentioned in passing. Or maybe it was just Jesus who was mentioned in passing. The entire oath except for the passing mention was about obedience to the pope, and a pledge to secrecy when needed to protect the church - not to protect THE church - the people of God - but to protect the institution.
DeleteYes, I understand choosing obedience in one's decisions.
DeleteIn making my own decisions, and in making health care and end of life decisions for my parents, I find that the rules and obedience are quite fuzzy, especially given that most of us ever has all the info we need.
I think Jim mentioned that hospice kills people by dehydrating them. I wonder every day if I let them kill Dad.
I also don't know to this day if I made the right decision for my mother after her arrest. A priest couldn't have parsed it out unless he'd also been a doctor. I go over and over it nearly every day.
So obedience is all well and good for lying, coveting, adultery, stealing, swearing, and skipping Mass from being hung over. But not all situations are clear cut.
I don't think hospice kills people. We attended the funeral today of a long-time friend. He had a heart attack and never regained consciousness. Tests indicated he had suffered several strokes after the heart attack. He was unresponsive and the family made the decision to take him off the ventilator. He only lived a couple days after that. They had opted for comfort care only.
DeleteMy mom was in a similar state at he time of her death, basically comatose. She did have oxygen and a morphine drip. Letting someone go when they are near death isn't the same as killing them. You're right that these situations aren't clear cut, but we aren't obliged to take heroic measures to keep someone alive. Hopefully we let family members know what we want if we are in a state vwhere we can't speak for ourselves.
Can't find Jim's comment, but he said that it was the policy of some hospices to withhold water to get patients to die quicker, and that would be a sin unless the patient would suffer more by drinking. I never asked what the policy was, never thought about it, though we were told not to give dad anything to drink in his last 24 hours, but he also had throat ulcers.
DeleteThere is just a lot of info you don't have at death beds to make these decisions sometimes.
I should say that I have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, so my responses to things these days are a little looney. I have a tendency to obsess over offhand comments and have trouble not revolving stressful past situations over and over.
Social media participation may not be really good for me right now. So that's my over-sharing for the week.
Jean, anxiety has stalked me almost my entire adult life. I’m not officially diagnosed, but I’ve studied the problem and know that I have anxiety disorder. It sometimes disrupts my decision making inn serious ways and I am paralyzed , unable to act, so I have to find ways to recognize reality, not overblown fears, stop always expecting catastrophic results, and stop ruminating about the past. I pray for everyone here every day. Perhaps there is no divine intervention to prayer,, but maybe a bit of care, hope and positivity can get through .
DeleteI am very sorry to hear that, Anne.
DeleteMine seems to be situational, too many losses, stressful situations, and physical health problems in too short a period of time. The things I normally might do to improve mental outlook have been somewhat curtailed by the pandemic, which still limits things for those of us with lowered immunity.
Social media can help people connect, but in a mentally weakened condition, offhand remarks can throw you into a tizzy.
With work, the worst of the nightmares and insomnia are subsiding, and getting regular sleep seems to help.
Not trying out for the anxiety olympics or anything, but anxiety is quite familiar to me as well. It is specific; I can't be a calm passenger in a car, I have to be the driver. I was the passenger in a bad car accident in which I suffered physical injuries. Some of which are still with me, and always will be. I don't have a very good comfort level driving in heavy traffic or unfamiliar settings, but if I was the passenger I would be a total basket case. I had to drive I-680 (aka the Indy speedway) through Omaha yesterday coming home from the funeral we attended. Said lots of prayers to guardian angels and nothing bad happened. I have had lots of "It's not you, it's me" conversations with my husband.
DeleteThree out of thrree women here have anxiety issues of one sort and another. I wonder if it's more women than men statistically?
I can relate, Katherine. The reason I will not fly is because I cannot drive the plane myself.
DeleteMy theory is that control issues are at the root of a lot of anxiety. But I'm not a shrink.
Never thought about difference in anxiety rates gender-wise. Rates of anxiety between men and women didn't strike me as much different according to study below, though anxiety seems to make women sicker. More here from NIH portal:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21439576/#:~:text=The%20lifetime%20and%2012-month%20male%3Afemale%20prevalence%20ratios%20of,disorder%20which%20showed%20no%20gender%20difference%20in%20prevalence.
I hate driving. I get anxious when I drive. I drive super defensively to avoid confrontation. In the NE US, the level of insanity seems to be boiling over. You can avoid road ragers here all you want, but sooner or later, whether you want to or not, you will end up in their crosshairs. In my case, however, my anxiety is not about what they'll do to me but about what I will do to them if they aggress upon me and my self defense instincts kick in. I have a lot of self control but I have my limits.
DeleteJean, I agree - control issues are a big part of anxiety.
DeleteIf there is a really worrisome situation I now say a rosary. I’m not normally a big fan of it, but I’ve learned it’s almost like a mantra- the repetition is calming. It’s very helpful too when I can’t sleep from worry. It usually doesn’t take more than one or two decades to fall asleep. I name my anxiety and worry before starting to pray the rosary.
My Catholic grandparents (German, Polish, Lithuanian) were Catholic because of their ethnicity. They all spoke to their own generation their native languages but made little attempt to pass their languages and ethnic culture onto their offspring. None of my grandparents were particularly good church goers. None of them saw religious education as being very important. They did not have access to Catholic schools.
ReplyDeleteMy dad’s parents were dairy farmers. The cows did not understand that it was Sunday. They rarely got to church except around Christmas and Easter. They were Catholics whether or not they got to church on Sunday. They assumed that because they had their children baptized that their children were Catholics, too. Religious education was something that was more important to the parish then to them. They were not Irish Catholics who worried that their children would become Protestants. In their world view the only way their children would become Protestant was to marry one. They were on their way to becoming ethnic Catholics, i.e., having church culture rather than ethnic culture bind them together. To stay Catholic, you married a Catholic. Sociologists have often remarked that Catholicism in America functioned more like an ethnicity that you did not gain or lose.
Mom grew up in a mixed marriage where her father was not Catholic and not religious. He had agreed to the requirement of raising his children as Catholics. So, the children went to church regularly. However, my mother’s mother often did not go to church because she was very sickly. The children were raised in public schools since there were no Catholic schools. Since mom as the oldest child did most of the housekeeping and cooking, she did not have time to get involved with much outside of Mass.
My maternal grandmother likely thought of her Catholicity as part of her German heritage. Her parents (my great grandparents) immigrated to a town in central Pennsylvania which was also the location of the first Benedictine foundation in the USA. The family ran the hotel there and had good relationships with the Benedictine Priory. They had many children who scattered around Pennsylvania. My great aunts and uncles spoke German, but none of their children. Education in German ceased with the First World War, as well as German newspapers largely because Germans no long emphasized their ethnicity But of course they emphasized their Catholicism, again they were in the process of becoming ethnic Catholics where religious rituals and family holidays took the place of civic ethnic culture.
What happened in my parent’s generation is that Catholicism with its culture allowed my parents to let go of their parent’s ethnicity. That was particularly evident in my maternal grandmother’s opposition to my mother’s marriage to my father because he was Polish even though he was Catholic. My mother was not yet 21 and needed the consent of her parents. She got that from her mother when she threatened to go to West Virginia where she could be married outside the Church at eighteen. It is interesting that grandma objected to mom marring a Pole when she had married a Protestant. I suspect that was because grandma married up to a WASP who was also a steel plant foreman, and that she was secure in his German Catholic identity.
That WASP grandfather regularly took his children to visit their German grandparents. They all talked fondly of those visits. I suspect my mother’s religious identity was formed by those experiences plus the local Irish priests who did encourage religious education and Mass attendance.
she was secure in HER German Catholic identity.
DeleteLike my parents and three of my grandparents, Catholicism was something that I inherited, an identity that I had from birth.
DeleteLike my parents and grandparents, Catholic education was not available at the grade school and high school levels. And the parish religious education that was dull and boring to me was likely just as irrelevant to them if they had any at all. They never talked about it.
What I did get from my parents, and grandparents where the theological virtues, that faith, hope and love of God were important aspects of life, and also many moral virtues, such as honesty, integrity, care for others. The specific forms these took in my parent’s life became very much a part of my life.
There was not very much specifically Catholic about these virtues, although being Catholic meant that we should be living this way.
We all accepted going to Mass, observing the major feasts and the fasts of the church as part of our Catholic identity, but we also did not see failing to do them for some reason as losing our Catholic identity. We did these things because we were Catholic, they did not make us Catholic.
I am largely a self-educated Catholic. My attraction to Gregorian Chant and the liturgy as a server led to the discovery of the Divine Office. When I got access to Saint Vincent’s library at sixteen, I learned that originally there were as many variations of the Latin Rite such as there are many variations of the Eastern Rites. I lamented that lost and so was ready before Vatican II for reform of the liturgy into the vernacular to pave the way for many Roman Rites again.
I am glad that I skimmed and skipped religious education and plunged into the Divine Office, Merton and the various spiritualities of religious orders. I thought of all this as mining the great treasury of my religious heritage despite the shabby liturgies and religious education available in our parishes.
Of course, I was not alone in this, I had found a great model in one of my lay high school math teachers, and another in one of my lay English college teachers.
Again, all this existed before Vatican II. I saw the universal call to holiness as an affirmation that all laity were called to explore our spiritual riches, not just priest, religious, or more recently lay ecclesial ministers. None of us needed them.
America reports Fr. Richard Rohr is stepping down from public ministry due to his cancer diagnosis and treatment. In discussing what kind of Catholics we are, it reminds me that I've always looked for great voices to expand and refine my faith. I miss those voices when they leave us. I've never looked at the past as an ideal age and have always looked and hoped for betterment and completion.
ReplyDeleteRichard Rohr is the main reason that I was able to hold on to being Christian, even if only by a thread. A light in the darkness for millions who have been disillusioned by conventional institutional religion. He survived all the many personal attacks, the complaints to bishops, the charges of heresy from the conservatives in the RCC. Cancer has stalked him for many years. Melanoma, prostate, and now this. He is 79 and I imagine has to focus his energy on his most recent cancer treatments. It’s in the lymph nodes, and hopefully will be stopped from spreading through the lymph system.
DeleteWill his work continue? His books and talks will survive - for a while. But having been virtually ostracized by the officialdom of the RCC, it might have to be carried on by progressive Protestants instead. So sad that so few Catholic parishes encouraged their parishioners to study Rohr. He is accessible - no high blown intellectualism that sails over the heads of 99% of Catholics. Ordinary, non- theologically trained people can easily follow his talks and books. He articulates what so many think, and feel, and sense about the type of religion they were raised in, knowing it was often destructive, wondering why so much of it doesn’t reflect Jesus, but have trouble sorting out on their own. But too many Catholics, especially in officialdom, feel threatened by him. Better to ignore him. I wish him a well deserved rest, and some peace, and pray that he has some meaningful amount of time left to enjoy it.