I have made no secret, across the life of this Substack, of where I stand. My defenses of the Novus Ordo and of Traditionis Custodes are not the reflexive nostalgia of a man clinging to the furniture of his ordination year. They flow, I hope, from something more disciplined: a lifelong effort, now in its fifty-second year of priesthood, to think with the mind of the Church — to let lex orandi and lex credendi and lex vivendi answer to one another rather than to my own preference.
So I was not entirely prepared for what greeted some of these essays in the comments. Not disagreement — I welcome disagreement, and I have tried to answer it honestly, essay by essay, all summer. I mean something else. Younger readers, mostly millennials and Gen Z, dismissing the work outright as the “mindless rant of a boomer.” One correspondent informed me that my generation “got us into this mess.” Another, with a bluntness I still find hard to sit with, wrote that he could not wait until priests of my generation died off, so the Church could “get back to the orthodox faith.”
I will confess: my first reaction was simple hurt. My second was something closer to alarm — not for myself, but for what such sentiments reveal about the state of communion among us. And it was in that unsettled frame of mind that I read Greg Erlandson’s column in Angelus this week, (link above) and found in it a chord I recognized.
Erlandson’s piece is generous, and it is honest about the pettiness on both sides of this generational divide. He notes that younger priests often name boomers as their most frustrating parishioners — uneasy with kneeling, uneasy with Latin, unmoved by a young priest’s cassock. He is equally candid about the resentment running the other way: older priests who feel perpetually blamed for having ruined the Church, whether through the abuse crisis or, more diffusely, through the Council itself. And he is honest enough to name the real diagnosis plainly: “as is so often the case when two or three Catholics gather to complain, we are dealing with gross stereotypes.” He lands, rightly, on David Brooks: that the foundational human skill is the ability to understand what another person is going through, and that indifference to the other is the deeper failure.
I want to sit with that, because it is true, and because it names something I have believed since long before it was fashionable to call it a “big tent” — since, in fact, my student years at Louvain, where Canon Janssens taught us that the moral life is finally a matter of persons in relation, not principles in isolation. A Church capacious enough to hold the guitar Mass and the ad orientem posture, the veil and the open collar, the boomer’s warm handshake and the Gen-Zer’s incensed silence — that Church is, I think, still recognizably the Church of Vatican II, which never asked us to be identical, only to be communio.
But I want to press on Erlandson’s perspective a little further than his column does, because I think there is a real distinction his article, gentle as it is, does not quite draw. Not everything I am describing is a clash of taste. Guitars versus Latin, handshakes versus bows at the sign of peace — these are aesthetic and generational, and about these Erlandson’s charity is exactly right, and exactly what I have tried, however imperfectly, to practice for over half a century.
But “can’t wait until you boomer priests die” is not a comment about hymnody. It is not really about aesthetics at all. It is, whether the writer knows it or not, a comment about authority — about whose reception of the Council is legitimate and whose is a mistake to be waited out. I have spent much of this year, in these pages, tracing exactly this move within the SSPX’s public rhetoric since the Écône consecrations: the way a genuine grievance about liturgical form gets pressed into service as a wholesale rejection of the Council’s ecclesiology, and then dressed in the pathos of reverence so that anyone who names the doctrinal stakes sounds, by comparison, unspiritual — a scold standing between the young and their birthright. I do not think that move is confined to bishops and canonists litigating the Professio Fidei. I think it has trickled all the way down into a combox, into a sentence wishing a priest’s death would hasten a return to “orthodoxy.”
That is not generational impatience. It is, at its root, the same theological claim I have been answering all summer: that the reformed rite and the Council that gave rise to it were themselves an error to be waited out, corrected not by argument but by the mere passage of time and the dying-off of the men ordained to serve it.
So here is where I part gently from my brother columnist, not in his charity but in his diagnosis. Big tent, yes — I hold to that still, Woodstock instincts and all, and I do not think the young men who love the cassock and the eastward-facing altar are, by that love alone, my adversaries. Erlandson is right that this can be the great Catholic both-and, and that the healing, if it comes, will be led from the rectory rather than legislated from above. But charity toward taste is not the same discipline as charity toward a rejection of the Council’s authority, and I will not collapse the two for the sake of an easier peace. The tent can be big. It cannot be foundationless.
What I owe the young man who wishes me gone is not silence, and not anger either, but the same thing I have tried to give Bishop Schneider and Fr. Pagliarani these past months: a patient, unembarrassed account of why the mind of the Church he says he wants is, in fact, the Church that gathered at the Council he has been taught to distrust.
Monsignor Arthur Holquin, S.T.L.
No comments:
Post a Comment