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Looking Backward
From his perspective in the future, an older
priest writes to a newly ordained friend
By Rev. C. John McCloskey
January 1, 2030
Dear Father Joseph,
Thanks so much for the invitation to be an integral part of your ordination at the Cathedral and to preach at your Mass of Thanksgiving at St. Thomas More Church. I was overjoyed to be at both events. Since I have known you from your teenage years when I started to give you spiritual direction and our friendship continued through your college years and early professional life, you can imagine what a moving moment it was for me to clothe you with your chasuble and concelebrate with you: a new priest of Christ and his Church. No higher calling is imaginable.
One of the great saints of the last century, recently proclaimed a doctor of the Church, once insisted that every priest should leave behind at least several priestly vocations to take his place. Happily, through God’s grace, several dozen directly or indirectly have followed in my small wake. As you know, I will leave off my formal pastoral duties with the parish on reaching my 77th birthday, which is coming up in October. Knowing that you are continuing in “the long black line” is a great consolation for me. Priests, of course, never retire, as long as they can pray, hear confessions, and celebrate Holy Mass; happily, I am able to. My mantra through my 50 years of priesthood—”prayer, diet, exercise, and sleep” —has stood me in good stead, so perhaps I have a decade or two still left in God’s service. Or perhaps there will be even more time, given these last few decades of improvement in medical technology. As it turns out, those years in prison and the torture were wonderful for my spiritual life and did not leave me incapacitated at all—not like the confessors of the 20th century.
I thought I would take a few minutes of your time to give you an overview of the developments in the Church since the last Great Jubilee of the year 2000. After all, as you are only 25—barely of canonical age—you don’t have much memory of the events leading up to our present vigorous and healthy state of the Church in the Regional States of North America. No doubt you had some excellent professors of Church History at the seminary, who paid special attention to what in its time was known as the post-conciliar period after the great Second Vatican Council. But I have my own particular perspective; the post-conciliar period was the era of the first 25 or so years of my formation as a lay Catholic, and later the first 20 years of my priesthood.
I was delighted, by the way, to see that you had six courses in Church History in the seminary. Many of the problems of the 50-year period after the close of the Council could have been avoided, particularly in the West, had they been seen in the perspective of the history of the Church, with its ups and downs, and saints and sinners. Yes, Ecclesia semper reformanda! We have been in post-conciliar times, after all, ever since the Council of Jerusalem in the year 50, but no matter.
Conciliar corrections
From our perspective today, 30 years into the new millennium, many of the elements of that post-conciliar era appear both tragic and comic, while other elements seem simply like a nightmare. You know that over the years I have written many articles about that generally unfortunate period for our country and our Church, when so many souls were lost, so much confusion was sown, so much that took many decades to build was destroyed so rapidly. There is no need to say more here. You have probably studied some excerpts from books by the great European philosophers Maritain and von Hildebrand, and such insightful North American authors as Hitchcock, Kelly, McInerny, Wrenn, Baker, and Roche, who explained succinctly what can in retrospect be seen clearly as at least a distortion of the teachings of that great Council, and in some instances purposeful misinterpretation and betrayal.
There is nothing new here, of course. In your studies of the councils of the Church, you saw that many of the Councils historically were called to answer some crisis and carried on their deliberations under very difficult circumstances. Yet the challenges they were called to address often lasted for several more decades before the conciliar corrections were put into effect. It is not surprising that the Church has the longest view of any institution because of its supernatural nature. As the expression goes “Roma patiens quia aeterna.” (There is no need for me to translate for you, I know, since all seminarians now take six years of Latin in addition to a full year of Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic. We will convert those Muslims yet!)
To meet the post-conciliar confusion came that unexpected supernatural intervention in 1978 in the election as Supreme Pontiff of John Paul the Great. I was a seminarian studying in Rome when he was elected and I heard those words from his own lips in St. Peter’s Square: Non Abbiate Paura: Do not fear. (All right, I know you know Italian too. I hope you get a chance to use it doing some graduate studies in Rome at Santa Croce; but first get your hands dirty with some pastoral work.) Strangely enough, many good people during John Paul’s pontificate kept looking for an iron fist to crush dissent and to restore some of the beauty, certainty, and discipline of the 1940s and 1950s—you know: Sheen, Spellman, Notre Dame football, the Cross furled inside the Stars and Stripes, and all that. The apotheosis of this supposed “Catholic Moment” came when Bing Crosby sang “True Love” to Grace Kelly on a sailboat in the movie High Society. (Have you ever heard of Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly? They were Catholic movie stars. You can download the film if you’re interested.)
St. John Paul, however, was looking ahead to the next century and to the “springtime of the Church” which I am now enjoying in my waning years, and you will now enjoy at the beginning of your priesthood. He was like Moses, who led the Chosen People through the desert right up to the gates of the Promised Land. He crossed “the threshold of hope” and soon went to his reward after his eagerly awaited pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
This great Pope simply applied to the universal Church, in improved form, the principles set forth in his book Sources of Renewal—the same principles that he had also employed in the implementation of the Second Vatican Council in his home diocese of Krakow. In his numerous encyclicals and apostolic exhortations, dozens of apostolic pilgrimages throughout the world, and cardinalitial and episcopal appointments, he patiently promulgated an authentic interpretation of the decrees of the Council—of which he himself was an influential father. He had laid down through his teachings on almost every conceivable area a program of evangelization and true renewal, which would take at least a century to implement fully.
The Catholic consolidation
In retrospect it is hard to imagine that there were actually people who thought that the “next pope” would somehow undo the powerful work of construction done by John Paul the Great. After all, what reason—even in a human sense—could there be for a conclave, made up almost completely of cardinals appointed by St. John Paul II, to elect someone who had a drastically different approach to the work of evangelization and governance of the Church? The subsequent Pontificates of Pope Leo XIV (the African) and the current reigning Pope John XXIV (the Brazilian) have continued to draw on the vision of John Paul while adding their own insights and prudential judgments, guided as always by the Holy Spirit, to address the current situation in the Church and the world.
As you may have learned, there were approximately 60 million nominal Catholics in our country at the beginning of the Great Jubilee at the turn of the century. You might ask how we went from that number down to our current 40 million. I guess the answer could be—to put it delicately—consolidation. It is not as bad as it looks. In retrospect it can be seen that only about 10 percent of that 60 million were “with the program.” (Please excuse that anachronism; remember that I am 77 years old, and sometimes slip back into the jargon of my generation.) I mean to say only 10 percent of that base assented wholeheartedly to the teaching of the Church and practiced the sacraments in the minimal sense, through regular attendance at Sunday Mass and at least yearly confession. The rest, as was inevitable, either left the Church, defected to the culture of death, passed away, or in some cases, at least for a couple of decades, went over to the various Christian sects that still remained in the mainstream of Protestantism or Bible Christianity. Since the Catholic birthrate continued to decline among these nominal Catholics, and immigration from the Hispanic countries greatly diminished due to stricter governmental policies and better social conditions south of the border, inevitably the number of Catholics decreased.
At the same time, as you have noticed—and will now experience in all its pastoral splendor—that the Catholics we do have with us today are better formed, practice their faith in the traditional sense at a much higher level than ever, and are increasingly eager to share that faith with their neighbors. The notion of dissent has all but disappeared from the theological vocabulary. You will also notice that as a group the Catholics of this generation are averaging four to five children per family, which means that over the next few decades we will see an increasing natural growth within our parishes. Given that modern pagan society has achieved its goal of zero population growth and more, the demographic trends are on our side. Ironically, in this year 2030 we are only 10 percent of the population, but we have a rock-solid fulcrum of which Archimedes would be proud. Upon that fulcrum we can transform the world.
I should also mention the influx into our Church of hundreds of thousands of Evangelical Protestants, who have greatly enriched and strengthened Catholicism with their personal love for the Lord and their enthusiasm in communicating him to the society. The great societal upheavals of the last 30 years have enabled them to see the beauty of our tradition, the wisdom of Church authority, and above all the great gifts of the liturgy and sacraments. We are indeed on our way to reaching an answer to that prayer of our Lord: “Ut omnes unum sint.” Now if we could only help our Orthodox brethren understand the necessity of unity! So while today we are half the size of the post-conciliar Church in terms of raw numbers, still we are strongly allied together. Cor unum et anima una, to continue that new evangelization which John Paul II called for on his final trip to Mexico and the US in l999.
The great battles
In retrospect, the great battles over the last 30 years—over such fundamental cultural issues as the sanctity of marriage, the rights of parents, and the sacredness of human life—have been of enormous help in renewing the Church and to some extent, society. We finally received as a gift from God what had been missing from our ecclesial experience these 250 years in North America: a strong persecution that was a true purification for our “sick society.” The tens of thousands of martyrs and confessors for the faith in North America were indeed the “seed of the Church” as they were for Christianity before the Edict of Milan.
Then came that final short and relatively bloodless conflict that produced our Regional States of North America. The outcome was by no means an ideal solution, but it does allow Christians to live in states that—unlike many of their neighbors—recognize the natural law and divine revelation; the right to free practice of religion; and laws on marriage, family, and life that reflect the primacy of our faith. With time and the reality of the ever-decreasing population of the states that worship at the altar of “the culture of death,” perhaps we will be able to reunite and fulfill the dream, cherished by the men who first founded what would become the old United States, to be “a shining city on a hill.”
One of the factors that has played a terribly important role in this century in the real growth in piety, apostolic zeal, and doctrinal solidity of the Church has been the growing realization that if the Church is to evangelize the culture, the laity will be the ones who are going to do it. In that blueprint apostolic exhortation for the new evangelization, Ecclesia in America, which we still use as aguide to this day in so many areas, it was put perfectly:
Secularity is the true and distinctive mark of the layman and of lay spirituality, which means that the laity strive to evangelize the various sectors of family, social, professional, and cultural life. . . . America needs lay Christians able to assume roles of leadership in society. It is urgent to train men and women who, in keeping with their vocation, can influence public life and direct it to the common good.
I remember that you took an elective course in the seminary on “the role of the lay Catholic in the world”—a course based on the documents of the Second Vatican Council and the writings of John Paul II. So you have been well equipped to communicate this vital clear message to the faithful who are entrusted to your pastoral care.
It has been fascinating to me throughout my priesthood to watch the development and eventual disappearance or the institutionalization of the many lay movements that sprang up in such profusion, beginning right after the Second World War and continuing right up to the end of the first decade of this century. Some evolved into lay associations of religious congregations, others became personal prelatures, but by now all that have survived are settled and contributing greatly to this “springtime of the Church.” Some members of the hierarchy and the laity were at first hesitant about these groups—a phenomenon that is not unusual in the history of the Church. After all, it can take some time to get accustomed to the “new kids on the block.” By the early years of the millennium, however, these lay movements were recognized by the Church as providing a spiritual “jump start” (I can explain that expression to you later) for the laity who sought holiness in the middle of the world—as encouraged by the key message of the Second Vatican Council. They reintroduced to many lay people the concept that personal prayer and self-denial were the “soul of the apostolate.” No one who was there will ever forget their great meeting in St. Peter’s Square on Pentecost Sunday in the spring of 1998. It was a snapshot of the future that we are now living. As a priest, you will soon be celebrating Mass on the feast days of some of the founders of these movements, and even some of their followers, who have now been raised to the altars.
States of life
You see, Joseph, the problem was really a question of proper ecclesiology, and that problem has now been resolved. There is nary a layman left today who thinks that his role in the Church is simply to “pray, pay, and obey” or that his presence is required at church simply to be “hatched, matched, and dispatched.” Catholic laymen today realize that their primary mission is to bring Christ into the world where they find themselves, and not a question of participating in the “power” of the hierarchy. From the top down and the bottom up, the Church is concerned with service leading to holiness and evangelization. The societal struggles, global catastrophes, and persecutions of the last years have compelled people to make uncomfortable choices. As the years have passed, the laity now know that they are “empowered” not by the hierarchy or their pastors, but rather by the Holy Trinity, through the sacraments—initiated by baptism and confirmation, fed by the Eucharist, forgiven by Penance, anointed when seriously ill. The vast majority find their vocations in life in marriage; a lesser number take sacred orders or dedicate themselves to God through apostolic celibacy. In short, the age of the laity has finally arrived and no longer do people think that the more they are involved in their parish, the more they are truly involved in the Church. You know from your Church History what damage was wrought in the last several centuries because of the schizophrenia that developed among the laity who compartmentalized their spiritual lives, divorcing the practice of their faith from the daily schedule which found them immersed in the world of work, family, politics, and culture.
I should mention the state of the religious orders, whose development has been somewhat analogous to that of the laity. Simply put, there are many fewer religious congregations of men and women today than there were at the turn of the century. The great majority of the old religious communities have either merged with others (realizing their missions to be similar if not identical) or simply have passed out of existence with the death of their last members. What is also noticeable is that there are far fewer new foundations, after that flurry in the latter part of the last century and the beginning of our own. With the renewal or reform of the traditional religious orders, many young men and women have flocked to them, attracted by their history of sanctity and their particular charisms and spiritualities. Happily—at least to my mind—the great growth has been in those congregations dedicated to the cloistered life of contemplative prayer and Eucharistic adoration, poverty, and penance. Their example has been a tremendous help in encouraging the laity to put the contemplative life first in their lives, even though lay people live in the middle of the world and not in the convent or monastery. In short, the identity crisis has been long over for those who are called to the religious life, and today the religious communities are flourishing. They wear their habits and embrace their vows with joy. The suffering that was offered up by so many faithful religious during the post-conciliar period has finally borne fruit. The fact that Pope John XXIV is a Cistercian has not hurt the recruitment of vocations to the religious life, either.
I hardly need to tell you about the diocesan priesthood. It is there where the most beautiful growth and transformation have taken place. That small initial upturn in vocations to the priesthood that happened at the beginning of the great Jubilee turned into an avalanche, which is now finally having its full effect in the repopulation of our parish rectories. After all, given the deaths and defections, and the sharp drop in priestly vocations late in the last century, we had a lot of ground to make up just to bring ourselves even with the numbers of l965. Now there are far fewer seminaries, but they are jam-packed. (Economies of scale are not just useful in the business world.) Each year the great regional seminaries are producing hundreds of priests, and by mingling with young men from other cities and towns these young men become aware of the life of the Church outside their own small dioceses. The average age of the entering students is once again somewhere in the mid-20s, and their educational level is higher than it was just a few decades ago. Vocations directors once again can afford to be selective about the type of young men who enter the seminaries.
Becoming a priest has become a first choice generally, not second or a third. Your education was demanding intellectually and focused not simply on the important pastoral virtues but primarily on laying the foundation for a strong interior life. This approach has produced some energetic new initiatives in evangelization and catechesis. Happily you have entered a Church where virtually all the administrative work of the parish is taken care of by the deacon administrators, helped by competent professional laymen, thus allowing the priests to concentrate without distraction on the great loves of their life: the sacraments and preaching the word of God.
At the same time, the surplus of priests has allowed us to pay much more attention to educational institutions, where vocations of all sorts are most often found. It has enabled us to lend priests to other places in the world —most notably western Europe, where there are few young priests to be found today, outside of Rome. As you well know, the dramatic demographic implosion of the last 30 years has left Europe little better than a theme park for tourists from Asia and America. We pray that as Europe survived the barbarian invasions of the so-called Dark Ages, it will survive its own attempted suicide by contraception. Once again—as in that earlier era in history—I am confident that the revival of Europe will come through the slow steady growth of the contemplative religious orders and lay movements, which are the only source of Catholic life there in these days.
The growth of the priestly societies for diocesan priests has made an enormous positive difference in the morale, fraternity, and higher levels of spiritual life among the diocesan clergy. As you will learn, the greatest danger to the spiritual and even physical health of the priest is loneliness. No man is meant to be alone. I know you would like to get into vocations work some day, and I encourage you to pursue that goal. Remember, however, that every priest should consider himself a fisher of men and a vocation-getter even if he is not formally working as a vocations director.
True Catholic education
And now, Joe, let’s take a look at the development of Catholic education during your lifetime. The changes here have been so enormous and positive that a time traveler from the year 2000 would scarcely believe his eyes. It is the same old story: consolidation, sacrificing quantity for quality. On the university level, there are scarcely two dozen universities that are considered Catholic by the Congregation for Catholic Education in Rome. The surprising move by the Congregation to take away the Catholic status from all nominal Catholic universities in the US, and ask them to reapply for accreditation, was a success. It separated the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. The majority of the formerly Catholic colleges have closed down, been sold, or merged with other secular universities. Truth in advertising has been the result. The majority of the remaining truly Catholic colleges provide a strong core curriculum—a liberal arts curriculum that has prepared many of their graduates to go on to successful careers in the professions or to pursue graduate studies in the secular institutions, where they have been a great force for evangelization. There are relatively few Catholic law and medical schools, but their professional excellence, joined with total faithfulness to Catholic teaching in their respective fields, has produced some outstanding men and women, including a couple of Nobel Prize winners in medicine, and a good number of judges and lawmakers in the various of the Regional States.
Although Catholic grammar and high schools continue to exist, there have been many changes in that realm of education, too. Coeducation having shown itself to be a failure, thanks in part to research done earlier in the century; almost all schools are single-sex institutions, in which particular attention is paid to the formation of character, and the programs for religious and intellectual development take into account the particular needs of the complementary yet quite different sexes. Needless to say, these schools are soaked in Catholic culture, while at the same time they are preparing their students for the exciting challenges posed by the secular world. There are many new alternatives to what was considered a “traditional” education in the last century. Many millions are schooled at home through a combination of the use of interactive internet, cable and satellite television, and good old-fashioned reading in addition to the traditional one-on-one approach.
Indeed, one of the primary reasons for the disappearance of dissent is that today any Catholic can find the truth on virtually any matter in faith and morals without opening a book or consulting a teacher or priest. The right answer, fully in accordance with the teaching of the Church, is just a click away. No one can blame the parish—or what was known many years ago as the proverbial “12 years of Catholic education” for his lack of knowledge or his misunderstanding of Church teachings. No priest or teacher can afford to be fuzzy in transmitting the authentic teaching of the Church. Lay people can have “the real thing” very easily, and they have come to expect it. This has been a very positive development all around, I would say.
While good Catholic books, both new and old, continue to be printed, reprinted, sold, and read, Catholic journalism in the form of newspapers, magazines, and journals has virtually disappeared. This has been a direct result of economic realities: too much cost, and too little distribution. The handwriting on the wall was evident as early as the 1980s and 1990s, with a drastic drop in subscription figures, and the inability of fine magazines to increase their circulation. Some of these magazines and newspapers continue to exist in electronic form on the web.
There has been, as you well know, a renaissance in Catholic literature: the outcropping of new novels and poetry which mirror both the growth and vigor of the Church and the reality of our past hard times. Suffering often produces great literature, and we have had our share. Much of this is excellent literature, produced by serious Catholic authors; much of it, too, is not specifically classified as “Catholic” literature, but you can form your own opinion. I know that you have a literary bent, and continued to read deeply in world literature in your few spare moments in the seminary. That background will be a tremendous help in your preaching and in giving spiritual direction.
Aside from the tens of thousands of Catholic web sites of varied quality, there is available much Catholic programming both on television and on radio. The pioneering initiative efforts made by Mother Angelica of the old EWTN Network and the other broadcasting pioneers of the late 20th century have borne fruit in other similar enterprises with a different angle or slant. As you know, a generation or two ago, there were clear and sharp distinctions between film, television, radio, and the other media; now of course you can have them all, readily available to you on the same wall screen as you read this message. (All this electronic communication has cost us something in terms of gracious human interaction, but keep in mind that I did actually write a personal note on your holy card at your ordination—and I used an old fountain pen, which I hadn’t previously touched for almost 40 years!)
Liturgical revival
In this rather quirky personal summary of the developments in the Church during your lifetime—which, I confess, I have probably written as much for my own sake as for yours—I have saved the best for last. Arguably the worst aspect of the distortion of the teachings of the Second Vatican Council was the abuse of the liturgy. I will spare you the details because they are truly too painful to recount. The sacrileges, blasphemies, irreverence, and bad taste all gradually petered out during the years of your childhood. As it turns out, contrary to some opinions, the problem was not at all with rites but rather with reverence, obedience to the rubrics, and the interior lives of those celebrating the sacraments. Now that the priesthood and the religious life are generally healthy in belief and spirit, the Mass is being celebrated the way the Council intended, in order to give glory to God, fostering devotion in the laity through their active participation.
While the Tridentine rite in all its glory continues to be celebrated in some churches, every parish has a Latin Mass every Sunday morning, along with other vernacular Masses, celebrated with reverence, a well prepared homily, sung chant, incense, and beauty in appointments. One interesting effect of all these wonderful changes is that those of us who can remember the “old Mass” of the era before Vatican II are not at all nostalgic about it; that is an enormous change from the days immediately after the Council. Today the lay faithful realize when they walk into a church that it is not a meeting place but rather a place of worship and personal prayer, where adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, Benediction, and other devotions such as the Way of the Cross and liturgical Morning and Evening Prayer can almost always be found.
Church architecture has returned to classical forms, or used the old forms as the solid foundations from which to produce new architectural ideas. The work of early masters of Church architecture of the 21st century like Menzies, Stroik, and their disciples, and the work of master craftsmen in the field of liturgical interior art, have enabled a wholesale renovation of many churches that suffered a “stripping of the altars” in the last quarter of a century past. Church music has also improved, with long-awaited return of chant to the parish setting. As you have surmised, in many cases, it has not been a question of fashioning new forms, but rather of reclamation of hundreds of years of beauty in art, music, and liturgical art and architecture that had been cast away as useless or no longer “relevant.” At least the misguided zeal did purify away much of the bad taste that existed before the Council. Remember, however, that the Church continues to move ahead even as it works from the past. You may well see startling new developments in liturgical art, and these new trends will endure if they please the eye and the heart, and are done by men of both talent and of faith.
It is time for me to close. You may have found my survey too roseate, and you may be right. There are always problems in the Church, given the reliance on human nature that is yoked with her divine personality. However, there have been times of glory in the Church of previous centuries. Think of the age of the post-Nicean Fathers of the Church, or the high Middle Ages, or the Catholic Reformation. I believe we have entered into one of those periods in the mysterious designs of the Holy Spirit. John Paul the Great foresaw this and it has come to pass—not without tremendous suffering and pain both within and without the Church.
The “springtime of the Church” has arrived, but we still have a long way to go in building “the civilization of love and truth.” Who knows if it will continue and how it will all end? Grace is efficacious, but God still works through the secondary cause of men’s free will. How mysterious it all is! End it must, temporally in the ebb and flow of history, with the glorious Second Coming which we all await. The truth is that the real history is being written in heaven and the “bottom line” is how much glory is given to God and how many souls are saved. Now it is your chance to do some building. Be a good instrument. If you run into some problems—as you will—stay close to Mary. “Remember, never was it known . . .”
Proudly and fraternally in Christ the High Priest,
—Father Charles
Father C. John McCloskey is the director of the Catholic Information Center in Washington DC, and the US representative of the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. His web page is located on www.catholicity.com