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Sour Grapes and Other Bitter Fruits

To hear some people talk, you could get the impression that there were two Second Vatican Councils — the real one, the one that actually happened and is recorded for us in black and white, and a mythical one — a sort of “feeling in the air,” an aroma, an excitement that hovered around the Church in the early sixties. Really mythical — like Atlantis, which sank, or Camelot (again evoking the early sixties), a brief shining moment quickly overrun by sinister forces before it could get off the ground. This version is often spoken of as the “Spirit of Vatican II.” 

Those who speak of this myth, strangely, often speak of Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger disparagingly, accusing them with expressions such as “trying to turn back the clock” — as if they were out to overturn the work of the Council — as if they were the “enemies” of the Council. Actually, they were two of the key intellectual architects of the Council — young Bishop Wojtyla and Father Ratzinger were two of the progressive minds participating. Why, then, the bitter reproach? 

Evidently, in the conciliar euphoria, unbridled rockets of unfounded expectations shot off in all directions, unencumbered by concern with facts. When I was a boy, my mother worked at a monastery which functioned as a Latin school for young men entering the seminary. My mother recalled that when Pope John XXIII announced the calling of the Council, several of the Latin students exclaimed with great glee, “Oh, boy! Now we can get married!” My mother was quite taken aback by this, because the obvious question was, “If you really wish to get married, why on earth are you in the seminary?” 

While it is normal and healthy to feel torn between the two goods of marriage and priesthood, and while the seminary is charged with helping this discernment, the wisdom of the Church was and is that both vocations require a certain single-heartedness. In any case, there was no tangible evidence that priestly marriage was a reasonable expectation. Alas, many forged on as if it were, and produced a generation that became extremely bitter when ungrounded hopes didn’t pan out. 

There were large numbers of defections from the priesthood and religious life as the next two decades unfolded, and today we see the phenomenon of the middle-aged religious liberal steeped in bitterness and rage demanding “change” in the Church — change in matters that the Council never intended and no reasonable person would expect. 

Ironically, now, thirty years later, one of the true fruits of renewal stemming from the Council is an influx of converts and returnees to the Church with a vibrant, excited faith and a deep love for the Church, demonstrated by an enthusiastic embracing of her teachings — especially the ones most despised by bitter progressives. 

Orthodoxy, for the constituents of this new movement, is a term synonymous with joy. But sadly, the aging progressive views this not as a movement of grace in our midst, and the true fruit of the Council, but as sour grapes. The bitter progressives of that bygone age assess this new generation of excited Catholics as “throwbacks” to a period in the Church which apparently holds very bitter memories for them. A Church which they recall as a “guilt-trip Church”-full of arbitrary sternness, full of knuckle rapping, petty disciplinarianism, is projected onto this new excited generation of Catholics as though their joy in orthodoxy were a return to a grim Jansenism still alive in the collective memories of these angry folk. 

They fail to see this newfound joy in the faith as the authentic renewal promised by the Council — a recovery of the joy of the faith in its myriad, manifold facets — it is the Second Spring prophesied by Cardinal Newman. Its authenticity becomes increasingly apparent by the spiritual fruit of joy evident in love for the pope and bishops, an embracing of prayer, and — the aspect that leaves the preceding generation most incredulous — an explosion of love for, and fascination with, authentic Catholic doctrine and Tradition. The young, who have often suffered under the bitter fruits of their elders’ dissent and disobedience, see authentic doctrine not as strictures on their thought and action, but as the very blueprint for freedom. Their elders, baffled that the young are not grateful for the so-called “liberation!” that has been bequeathed to them, find this utterly incomprehensible. As a result the young are smugly dismissed and even insulted. They must be “rigid” and “unbalanced.” Anyone who witnesses the wild abandon and joy with which youth greet the pope and can still dismiss them as “rigid” can only be viewed with pity. 

The “Spirit of Vatican II” generation has been passed over due to its bitterness. Their once-idealistic cries for “social justice” so enthusiastic, during the heady days of the civil rights and peace movements, now seem to be reduced to calls for priestesses and reinstatement of defector priests. They continue, incredibly, to cast the Church in the role of “oppressor” — or the “establishment” in sixties parlance. They confused “renewal” with unexamined and reckless “change,” and they demand changes that the Church is constitutionally unable to make. You cannot renew something that wasn’t there in the first place. Now, instead they sneer at the true renewal as it unfolds before their eyes unable to recognize it for what it is. Strangest of all, those who believe and defend what the Church actually believes — and what the Council never intended to change — are reviled as “divisive” for speaking out for their beliefs and “obstructing” this imaginary “change.”

One wonders what higher authority they appeal to when attacking legitimate Church authority. The pope and bishops are not the Johnson administration bombing Hanoi, nor are they Pharisees heaping heavy loads on people. They are, however, according to Catholic belief, the ones to whom Jesus says, “He who hears you hears me.” 

Oddly, even the priest shortage is being blamed on the new orthodox young, when they are the very solution to the problem. Young people excited enough about the faith to give themselves gladly to the Church and embrace sacrifice, is deemed — again (yawn) — “too rigid,” “pietistic but not truly spiritual,” “unhealthy in their allegiance to Church authority,” and so on. 

This new generation, an answer to decades of prayer, fails to pass the Sour Grapes Litmus Test because they agree with their beloved Holy Father John Paul II on priestesses, celibacy, and calling sin sin. (Indeed, the priestess issue has become the poodle skirt of theological fashion in their mothers’ closets, seen by these young women as quaint and silly. In fact, after spending ten years on Catholic campuses — both heterodox and faithful Catholic campuses — studying theology, I cannot recall meeting a single woman under forty for whom this was a real issue. 

What is this younger generation coming to! They must not be real young people because real young people reject authority. Precisely. These young people do reject authority. They reject the authority of the dissenting establishment who run most Catholic universities, many seminaries, and many middle-management bureaucracies in the Church. These faithful young people have seen this crowd attempt to destroy anyone who gets in their way who doesn’t accept their groundless agenda for the Church. 

The Sour Grapes crowd, in fact, is now trying to exaggerate and exploit the priest shortage to push their agenda for “change” in the Church one last time, and are actually blaming this younger, excited generation of Catholics for the problem. Yet it was not the orthodox who defected from the priesthood in the sixties and seventies, and the bitter aging progressives are certainly not spawning new vocations — how could they? Opposition to Humanae Vitae, which launched the whole movement for dissent, has caused contraceptive mentality to take hold even in religious life — ecclesiastical contraception! (Seriously, large supportive Catholic families were always the primary seedbed of vocations.) Furthermore, for so long bitter progressives at Catholic universities and seminaries actually attempted to weed out devout young people not of their own ilk. 

Despite the old-line progressives’ recent attempts to incite panic that unless women and non-celibate men are ordained or married defector priests readmitted or that we will soon be deprived of the Eucharist, they would actually prefer no priests to the new young breed who do not share their cynicism toward the goodness of the Church-and are not female or disdainful of celibacy. This is cynicism in the plain theological use of the term. These people did not get their way, and they continue to blame everybody but themselves for their unhappiness, including the young, who were not even born when this groundless and impossible agenda was being imposed. 

This new generation in love with God and the Church will not go away, and when they refuse to be dismissed by the characteristically smug magisterial tone of dissent, they are then ridiculed with groundless insults of being rigid and unbalanced. The “Xavier Rynne” generation that cynically saw little more than back-room political maneuverings in the workings of the Council, while expecting impossible changes cannot be trusted to recognize the Holy Spirit at work in the Church today. But still, must they blame the young

Despite such injustice, the good news is that most of these young people don’t even notice the insult. They are too busy looking at Christ. 

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