An Angel of the Lord? The glory of the Lord? Tidings of great joy? I remember a time when most of us were pretty sure we knew what those words meant, or were at least sure enough not to spend a lot of time thinking about them. But that time seems to have faded away. Catholicism has had a great run for the past couple of thousand years. It’s defined the basic nature of the world, inspired great art and music, nurtured our understanding of the dignity of the individual, created the institution of the university, and generated the intellectual framework that bloomed into the Enlightenment. But now Catholicism and religion in general have hit a wall—the wall of reason. Many see religion as flat out crazy. They see it as a ridiculous undertaking fit only for the weak, the exploited or the unhinged. Others take a more benign view, valuing their faith tradition but typically not getting around to actually participating in its practice. A few others still view faith as an indispensable part of a life well lived. One thing’s for sure: pretty much everyone makes up their own minds. Thinking and Faith
But that’s not how it has worked for a good part of the past two thousand years. Most Catholics, at least through the mid-twentieth century, if they paid attention to their religion at all, didn’t first use reason and evidence to make up their minds about matters of faith. They simply accepted the nature and meaning of the world as defined by the faith (e.g., the natural and the supernatural, the reality of sin and grace, the importance of the sacraments, morality, worship, etc.). Evidence and reason functioned within the context of faith, or complementary to it. That certainly was the case in the world in which I grew up in the 1950s, in a Catholic parish on the South Side of Chicago. A Vast InversionThen, in one generation—mine—it all changed. Rather than receiving the map of the world as defined by faith, we used reason and evidence to build our own map; reason and evidence eclipsed faith as the essential means to define reality. Faith still functioned, but it functioned as an aspect of the reality we explored with reason and evidence, not it’s defining framework. The Enlightenment finally hit the neighborhoods. This has had an enormous impact on the way in which faith has since been experienced. In fact, the experience of the faith that I had as a child has so little in common with the experience of faith my children have had, that it is close to being a different thing entirely. My children know virtually nothing of the faith I knew, of its dogmas, of its sacred rituals, of the map of the world it handed down, and of the experience it provided of being somehow personally connected to the vast community of souls, living and dead, that the nuns used to call the Mystical Body of Christ. I grew up a little nut secure in a great tree which was part of a great forest that covered the planet and reached back to the beginnings of time. The rich, old fabric that wove me into all of that has now mostly evaporated. I understand the Church as it is today, especially its liturgical practices, since my generation pretty much shaped them. (I am for example, personally responsible for perpetrating more than one guitar Mass at Loyola University’s Madonna Della Strada chapel.) What is puzzling, and what I hope to explore in this book, is why the church is so different today and why my children are almost completely innocent of the tradition in which I grew up, its way to describe the world, its music, its stories, its connection to the past, and especially the sense it delivered of being in the awe-inducing presence of the divine. For the most part, my children have had little of the day-to-day experience of that world of the sacred, the mysterium tremendum, so much a part of the world I knew. The EnigmaHere’s the enigma. Why, especially for Catholics, whose rather significant tradition of philosophy and theology trumpets the cohesion of faith and reason, should the ascendency of reason and evidence have caused such a tremendous disconnect in the ways in which we experience faith? How did we go from “holy” to “welcoming?” How did we end up with guitar Masses instead of Gregorian chant? With churches in the round rather than old-world cathedrals? With full and friendly participation in liturgies rather than a permeating experience of the otherness of the sacred? Why was there such a dramatic change in attitude toward dogma and morals? Why all the polarization so evident in church matters today? And why all the confusion about the nature and meaning of our own intellectual, moral and liturgical traditions? If you don’t think there’s confusion in belief, ask anyone to explain the Trinity or the Incarnation or the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and see how many different answers you get (if you get any at all). If you don’t think there’s confusion in moral questions, think of the huge disconnect, especially in matters sexual, between what a huge majority of the bishops say and what a huge majority of the faithful do. If you don’t think there’s confusion regarding worship, ask yourself why is there such polarization between progressives and conservatives on what constitutes a proper liturgy. We don’t share much of a common understanding or even a common memory of our beliefs, morals and liturgies. How can we possibly function well in the present, never mind transform our shared traditions into the future? The events at the root of this enigma make quite a story. This is the story I want to tell as best as I can, having lived through it and having raised kids in its wake. The Pull of Faith
Today we don’t see a lot of Catholics praying to statues or holding processions through the streets. We don’t burn much incense (even though the Buddhists still do). We rarely chant, we don’t often anoint with holy oils, we hardly ever go in for Eucharistic adoration, we rarely do benediction or devotions to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and we don’t ring many bells. Prayer beads may be cool, but rosaries are not. If we want to learn about angels, we go to the spirituality section at Barnes and Noble because we probably won’t find out about them in church. Most all of the old traditions, rituals, and customs that I grew up with (in what we now call the “urban Catholic ghetto”) have just simply disappeared. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing except for the fact that the religious experiences I had as a child, whatever their other aspects, were orders of magnitude more potent and compelling than anything my children tell me about. If, like Flannery O’Connor said, the Eucharist is no more mysterious or transcendent than a meal shared by a faith community, well then the hell with it. A lot of people, especially young people, seem to be saying the same thing. So we have two puzzles to unwind: first, how reason and evidence eclipsing faith as the means to define reality caused the great obliteration of the religious tradition I once knew, and second, how this then caused us to end up with religious practices that are quite nice but rarely mighty and powerful—not much mysterium tremendum these days—and thus not particularly good at drawing people in. The point of unwinding these puzzles is not to create a nostalgic paean to the old days; I’m not suggesting that we all run out and buy rosaries and statues of Our Lady of Fatima. The “urban Catholic ghetto” of my childhood and the authority that legitimized it is gone and gone for good, and so is the ignorance that often surrounded it. Yet like other expressions of Catholicism that have flowered through the ages, that world enveloped me in a sense of the sacred, in a rich world of meaning, in visual and musical beauty, and in a connection to the past that we have yet to create for ourselves today. The BreakIn my generation, the chain of memory was broken. We have not passed on to our children, in all its fullness, that which we received. Therefore we did not give them the chance to recreate, on their own terms, what the traditional beliefs and practices might have meant to them. What would the Millennials make of bells and smells and the formal, highly ritualized ceremonies of the past? What would they make of ancient music, of ornament and gesture, of the experience of traditional sacred space and time? Of the praying of the Hours? Of the singing of Vespers? How would they absorb all that, play around with it, and remake it in a way that suited them? We don’t know. We’ve deprived them of the chance to find out. In the Catholic Church, beliefs and practices are passed down through the centuries. It’s an institution whose traditions make up the very fabric of its identity. Therefore the degree to which the Church functions bereft of these inherited traditions is the degree to which it flops as a church. Any Catholics, especially young ones, who have thought their way out of their faith and have even the slightest inclination to think themselves back in are not presented with a very appealing prospect. As French sociologist of religion Daniele Hervieu-Leger says in her book Religion as a Chain of Memory:
And Then WhatYet strong reasons remain for exploring the past for systems of meaning and for rituals which afford an explanation for the imperfections of the world and its mysteries; strong reasons remain for using the past to provide a scenario for the future. If we break free of the intellectual, moral and ritual moorings of the past, then what do we do? Be nice? Be logical? Is that it? How do we worship? What informs our morals and our sense of community? What of the sacred? The questions that faith has asked in the past and attempted to answer are ones that science is not particularly good at answering. What of the mysteries of the transcendent? What of the heart-transforming events of birth, adulthood, marriage, children and death? What of the ritual experience of sacred space and sacred time? What of the soul itself? What of personal and social morality? What of the need to connect with community across space and time? Faith is a crucial means by which we figure out human life and destiny, because faith paradoxically incorporates the idea of the divine in those concepts, and seeks to explain what they mean. We can easily reject as insufficient the answers that faith has so far provided but the questions that generated those answers remain. The Failure of My GenerationTo me, this comment posted on the blog at Commonweal Magazine sums up the heart of the issue. It was written as a part of a discussion about an old article by Garry Wills, noting the passing of the urban Catholic ghetto, what he termed Catholic “culture.”
Every time we strip religion of mystery and cut ourselves off from the rituals, beliefs and customs of the past, we effectively sell the birthright we should be passing on. Thus the accumulated traditions of a couple of thousand years are flushed from memory. The Millennials
Tradition in the Act of Recreating Itself
When is the last time your parish had a Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament? It’s a lovely service, short, useful for contemplation, rich in ancient song and blessings. Or a Tenebrae service, no longer a part of the Roman rite? In this Holy Week liturgy, readings and Psalms are chanted as candles are extinguished one by one. The lights in the church gradually dim and the service ends in complete darkness. Or when is the last time your parish has a Vespers service? You can read all about it on Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vespers Vespers (i.e., Evensong) is still a living part of the Anglican tradition. The Anglican hierarchy also approves the use of contraception. Anglicans have managed to maintain the tradition of Evensong as well as having a sensible attitude towards birth control. Catholics have neither. How did that happen? The UpheavalThe Enlightenment hitting the neighborhoods was a traumatic event with consequences we’re still fathoming. Using reason and evidence to determine the basic nature of reality undercut the authority upon which faith was legitimized for two thousand years—and that was just the beginning. Since the 1950s we’ve been transformed by events and inventions that are nothing short of astonishing: television, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, feminism, space flight (and that world-changing picture of Earth from space), the explosion of the digital world including computers, the Internet, the Web and cell phones, the booming of capitalism, and the world-flattening effects of globalization. It’s no wonder old-school authority doesn’t cut it anymore. But just because religious authority is dismissed doesn’t mean that the tradition itself has to be lost. The Spirit of the TimesOne of the great insights of the Enlightenment is the idea that history happens in a cultural context of a specific time and a place, which can explain to some significant degree the historical events themselves. The same thing is of course true of the past fifty years. It’s perfectly reasonable to interpret the meaning of events in Church history based on the times in which they occurred but this is a medicine we should also be willing to take ourselves. To understand our own cultural context and how it got us to where we are today, we need to look at the full narrative of the breakdown of authority that occurred in my generation and the impact it has had on our shared memory and on our ability to agree upon what it means to be Catholic. We need to understand what happened, why it happened, what was felt, what it meant, and the moral questions of guilt and responsibility. Why did thinking for ourselves destroy the old-world authority that legitimated belief? And why did this drastically shrink the agreed-upon understanding of our own intellectual, moral and liturgical traditions? Is this narrowing the reason why is the Church today is not very good at drawing people into the faith? More importantly, what are we going to do about it? If we can clearly understand what happened, see how curious it all was, and see how much it was driven by the events and moods of the time, we can better understand what we’ve lost and why. We can then better judge how to go about the work of restoring the riches of the dogmatic, moral and liturgical traditions that have been lost to common memory and build structures of authority to legitimize them, ones more suitable for the modern world. The Catholic religion that so many people thought their way out of in the past is not the one that will take us into the future. Neither is the one we’re muddling along with now. The whole thing needs to be excavated and rethought, thoroughly and entirely, top to bottom, the common memory, the structures of authority, the whole mess. The Enlightenment hitting the neighborhoods broke the chain of memory but the Catholic tradition is still there, sometimes in practice, sometimes in books and on the Web, sometimes in the institution, often simply in her people. Our children need the chance to explore its fullness in all of its distinctiveness, richness, and depth, to experience it and know it and taste it and try it, to see what sticks, and then to remake it and pass it on to their own children as the thing of great beauty that it is.
Here's a list of the book's chapters:
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This is of course the way it should be, as in the world today we
endeavor to use reason and evidence to determine the basic nature of reality
and try to think well and widely about what’s important and how we should act
as we go through our lives. This includes thinking about matters of faith. 
But it’s not the only story. The other story is the relationship
between the state of faith today and its ability to draw people into itself.
It’s summed up in this quote by the American author Flannery O’Connor, in
response to author Mary McCarthy, who described the Eucharist as a wonderful
symbol: 
For the most part, the young people of my children’s generation
are a marvelous group, bright and full of questions, at ease with the general
idea of spirituality, eager to find meaning in their lives and willing to work
to make the world a better place. They also have easy access to just about
every drug, alcohol, sexual and recreational experience ever invented. The
whole gamut of life is theirs for the taking: entertainment, achievement,
dissipation, social action, addiction, success, failure, drugs, alcohol,
spirituality, friendship, love, music, art, culture, and sex in all its
manifestations. What map do we give them to navigate it? How do we help them
make their meaning? For my generation, faith, even faith denied or fallen away
from, was the stake in the ground that changed everything, because the very
idea of faith created the context of what it meant to be human. The faith we’ve
passed on to our children is thin gruel compared to that.
Not that you’d know it from the news that the papacy and church
hierarchy have been making of late, but Catholicism has gotten a number of
things right over the past couple of thousand years, one of the benefits of
having a really long history. Catholics have a dogmatic, moral and liturgical
tradition filled with spiritual and intellectual riches just waiting to be
tapped. It’s mostly all there, in books, in articles, in scholarly papers, on
the Web, and in the living tradition. In fact we seem to be living in an
extremely rich era of religious intellectual ferment. According to Fr. David
Tracy, a Catholic theologian and professor at the University of Chicago, “More
has been written about Jesus in the last twenty years than in the previous two
thousand.” The Catholic tradition is well documented, if nothing else, and that
which has been dismissed or forgotten can be pulled off the shelf (or off the
Web) at any time by interested parties, and rediscovered, re-shaped and brought
back into common practice. 
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