Overcoming an early '70's Seminary Education

I was a part-time hippie and a fashionable socialist. I actually owned a Mao jacket and The Little Red Book of the sayings of Chairman Mao. I marched in protest. I sat in protest and I played guitar in protest. I slept on the floor. I tried to be a vegetarian. I was partial to Trotsky, but I think that was really about the cool glasses he wore. I actually leafletted for feminism. I was an idiot. I snapped out of it when the peace committee at my college had a huge fight between the violently non-violent and the non-violently non-violent. (I took the side of the non-violently nonviolent.) 

I was also dallying with interesting religions at the time and ended up in a Pentecostal prayer group at the same time that I was giving up on political activism. I found out that prayer works a whole lot better than community organizing. It seems inevitable that today’s liberators are tomorrow’s tyrants. You can’t have a just society without just citizens. The conversion of the citizen is the only way to change a nation. We, the clergy of the sixties, blew it. We failed utterly.

I spent my early ministry pre- and post-ordination on the Puerto Rican west side. We had a huge youth prayer group, four or five hundred teenagers. They weren’t all saints, by any means. It was a great place to meet girls. The gangs would wait to kill people coming out of the prayer group. There were prayer meetings that exited to gunfire. I was too dumb to know how dangerous it was, and what was really going on in the back pews.

Now it’s 40 years later. I don’t hear much about Puerto Rican gangs on the west side anymore. I hear about Puerto Rican accountants, attorneys, electricians, mechanics and secretaries. What happened? A lot of things, but one thing that I know happened for many was conversion. There were so many different groups all pushing for conversion to Christ. We used to hold youth rallies that would attract a thousand kids. We would work out truces with the gangs so kids could pass over gang boundaries for the weekend. We had no budgets, and not much organization, but we fed and entertained a thousand kids for whole weekends. The highlight of the rally always came when a thousand kids surged forward to accept Jesus as their personal Lord and savior. 

It was hokey, tears and slobber and people walking around with Kleenex boxes. It was about as theologically deep as a puddle. It had all the decorum and dignity of a clown car. The Saul Alinsky, Carl Rogers-trained clergy of the neighborhood were appalled and did their best to put an end to it. This unbalanced and overly emotional sort of thing was dangerous and certainly not Catholic as far as they were concerned. So, a lot of these kids went un-pastored after their conversion and a lot of them joined protestant Pentecostal churches that were happy to shepherd them. Some drifted back into old ways, but they could never quite forget their encounter with Christ and now, 40 years later as I look back at that time that has absorbed so much of my life and energy, it occurs to me that, on a certain level, it worked. To find out that God was real and that Jesus loved them broke the cycle of poverty and violence for many of them. 

We never told them that society had messed them up. We told them that sin had messed them up and that they could repent and Christ would accept them. The Latin community that I knew was torn by marital instability, violence, alcohol, substance abuse, gambling and prostitution. When someone experienced a conversion, especially in a fundamentalist church, it was the end of gambling, the end of wasting money on the botanicas (voodoo stores) the end of smoking, drinking, gambling, etc.

Automatically, a person who underwent a conversion and was socialized into one of the strict storefront churches was suddenly richer, safer and more involved with their families. I won’t say that they were all happily-ever-after-stories, but they certainly were not sad-and-hopeless-ever-after stories.

The local Catholic pastors, and their fundraising efforts never seemed to mind drinking, smoking and bingo in the basement. That sort of thing kept the schools open. I have no objection to a dance or a Las Vegas night or any of that stuff when its purpose is to bring people together as a family, especially in a community that isn’t enslaved by all that, but when slowly, quietly become the main focus of the institution; it ceases to be a religious institution.

Well, guess what? We have to close a lot of things, and my suspicion is that back in the grand old sixties if we the clergy had been what the Lord had wanted and not so much a community organizing group, we would not be facing this kind of current mess. 

To be continued

And where did that get us?

We moan about the lack of vocations, and as I mentioned last time I wrote, why would we expect children to choose religious vocations when there are no children, and the few whom have managed to beget are convinced, conspicuous consumers who think that God is Santa Claus and every day should be Christmas? (By this I mean the children’s feast of getting, not the Catholic feast of giving.) We are increasingly a society of old people, except in the case of my generation. We are, as the poet wrote, “forever young.” We are old people who still wear pony tails and backward baseball caps. When I was a lad, the film “Easy Rider” was very popular. It is about the deep spirituality of a motorcycle riding drug dealer.

Everybody who wasn’t able to play the acoustic guitar in coffee houses seemed to be avid motorcyclists. I never know whether to laugh or cry when I see someone about my age riding a motorcycle who has squeezed his 300 pounds into yesterday’s leather clothing, bandana or leather cap crowning the whole ensemble. In my generation, one did not have a “girlfriend.” She was your “old lady.”  And she rode behind you on your “hog” (motorcycle). Now there she is still clinging to your love handles, a look of terror on her sun wrinkled face. She is now quite literally “your old lady.”  Quite a sight, these 70-year-old young rebels, these knights of the open road who haven’t a clue that they are older than dirt and prone to hip fractures. 

That’s pretty much my generation, born to be wild. Imagine the wrecks that our children are! My point is this: My generation thought that we were the pinnacle of human evolution, we, the Age of Aquarius, the generation that by its frank honesty and good will would end the oppression of the past! Free love, free drugs, free booze and, now, early liver failure. How has that all worked out, fellow baby boomer?  We take to the open road with the wind blowing through what’s left of our hair, the bugs splattering our dentures. As we ride off into the sunset to visit our 1.8 grandchildren, does it ever occur to us that maybe we were wrong. 

If you think the whole revolution of the sixties was a fine thing, maybe you should look at the kids, or the lack of them. Our 1.8 grandchildren have their faces glued to a screen. They seem frightened by everything, especially by their hippy grandparents. They are not capable of communicating except by text. Maybe we should admit the truth, sell the bike and find a nice nursing home with rockers on the front porch (By rockers I mean a kind of chair, not musicians). Our one-point-eight grandchildren are going to resent the whopping tax burden that we will impose on them to pay for the long-term health care that will be need when we fall off our motorcycles. There are fewer and fewer providing more and more. We old folks don’t want to give up our way of life. We’ve worked hard for this glorious retirement. Someone has got to pay for our Viagra! We are the ME generation, parents of the ME generation, grandparents of the ME and my portable TV generation. We are narcissists who have spawned two more generations of narcissists.  We are consumers. We consume high end products, smart phones, computers, big cars mini mansions, luxury vacations, tickets to the big game, preferably sky box. If we don’t have all the stuff we see on TV we feel cheated. We have been raised to believe that stuff is our right! You are what you own! 

We’ve had 1.8 children, because the average cost of raising a child born in 2013 up until age 18 in the U.S. is about $245,340, or $304,480 if you account for inflation, according to the latest annual “Cost of Raising a Child” report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. We have no children out a great sense of nobility. It wouldn’t be fair to raise children on hand me downs. It would cost millions to have ten kids. We couldn’t give each of them his or her own bedroom in our suburban mini mansion, each with his own computer, I-Pad and designer dreck. If the meaning of life is smart phones, computers, big cars, mini mansions, luxury vacations and tickets to the big game, preferably sky box, why bring them into this world anyway?  

Who is to blame for this mess? I am. I, the young hippy priest, I who believed what I was taught in the glorious 60’s, I am to blame.  I was happy to encourage penitents in the confessional, “Oh, don’t worry, that’s not really a sin.”  I had to be “self- actualized” according to Dr. Abraham Maslow. Dr. Maslow invented a hierarchy of human needs that had to be fulfilled before self-actualization could occur. Once all my needs had been fulfilled, I could be fully human. It sounds a little like the emperor Nero who said upon seeing the palace he had built for himself in the middle of Rome “Now at last I can begin to live like a human being.” The great Dr. Carl Rogers told us to strive for Optimal Development. That meant I had to have a growing openness to experience and to move away from defensiveness. (I am not making this up).

We were required to spend some time in what was called C.P.E., Clinical Pastoral Experience. We were farmed out to various hospital, and charitable institutions to spend a semester or so in a kind of apprenticeship directed by a kind of mentor. They were not necessarily Catholic, or even Christian. My mentor was a liberal Methodist pastor who advised me in my final evaluation to move in with some young woman in Sandburg Village, a very trendy apartment complex in the area. I found out later that this advice was given to most of the young Catholic seminarians. Pastor **** believed deeply in marriage, he himself had married several times. Another young seminarian in our group was told by Pastor **** that he would make a fine priest if he could (insert indecent activity here). 

Maybe I should not be talking about these things, but I’m old and tired someone has got to tell the truth about these things at some point. This man, Pastor **** had the right to weigh in on my fitness for priestly ordination. He had the sexual morals of a ferret, but was fit to judge me and my Catholic Faith. I personally never studied canon law or St. Thomas Aquinas, but I did study Dr. Abraham Maslow, Dr. Carl Rogers, Saul Alinsky, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. In short I learned that it was all about me and my needs.

The Gospel was just one way to self-actualize, to develop optimally. And of course, I dished out this hogwash to the faithful. They, like I, were happy to substitute pop-psychology and folk music for the timeless morality and liturgical beauty of Catholicism. And so, who has time or money enough to be self-actualized with 10 kids?  Better have 1.8 so I can afford that consciousness raising seminar at the Christian Yoga ashram at Big Sur. (Big Sur is a rather pricey bit of the Central Coast of California. It combines vast wildernesses and breathtaking views for those who want to get back to nature along with Starbucks availability, and Wi-Fi access.)  I am not making this up either. Back in ’69 much of seminary faculty went on a retreat at Big Sur. I remember when Fr. Borisewicz, the math teacher, came back sporting love beads. I should have realized then that the train had jumped the track.

My point in all this whining? We are about to run out of the people whose generosity has filled the seminaries, the convents and the collection baskets of the Catholic Church for as long as anyone can remember. They are in their 80’s and nineties. Following them are the narcissists like myself and the narcissists we have raised in the past 40 years. I have this overwhelming sense that the visible structure of Catholicism in the developed consumerist world is about to pop like an overextended soap bubble. 

Next week: a few suggestions

Blame Humanae Vitae

I am starting to sound like a broken record. The whole problem with the world and the Church is Humanae Vitae, the letter written by Pope Paul VI on July 25, 1968 in which he re-asserted the Catholic Church’s prohibition of artificial birth control, despite the contrary advice of A PANEL OF EXPERTS!!

In Humanae Vitae Paul VI made four prophecies:

1.   Wide spread use of artificial birth control would lead to conjugal infidelity in general lowering of morality.

2.   Man would lose respect for woman and no longer care for her physical and psychological equilibrium and will come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.

3.   Contraception would place a dangerous weapon in the hands of those public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies.

4.   Artificial contraception would lead man to think that he had unlimited dominion over his own body.

Ya’ think?!?  Nobody is faithful anymore and everybody gets divorced. We see an explosion of pornography, human trafficking, sex slavery, most of which is aimed at men’s enjoyment of women as things. There is widespread murder of unborn women in the largest countries of the world. Sex selective abortion has resulted in whole areas that are practically devoid of little girls because counties have aggressively pushed abortion and birth control, and in the drive to have a male heir, people forced to kill all but one of their children invariably kill the girl in the womb and not the boy. 

And as for the last prophecy, unlimited dominion over one’s own body - we don’t even know what bathroom to use in the Kmart because this afternoon I might decide I am a woman. Little children are encouraged to choose their own gender, no matter what physical equipment they happen to have. We reached the pinnacle of the absurdity when Bruce Jenner was named “Woman of the year by Glamour Magazine.” 

There are a couple more consequences he could have mentioned: the demographic, economic and religious collapse of the developed world. We are facing a few crises in the world and in the Church. There are a few countries that are already in permanent economic recession, like Japan where they sell more adult diapers than children’s diapers.  Germany and much of the rest of Europe are being overwhelmed by a tide of anti-western immigrants in a muddled attempt to revive the childless economies and the aging workforce. Rather than relieving the problem, the tide of immigrants has created a sense of insecurity along with a la growing population of unemployed dependents. The economic consequences of artificial birth control and abortion are staggering. To put it simply, if you’ve got no children, you’ve got no economy. 

On to religious collapse! People worry about the lack of vocations to the priesthood and the religious life. Selfless priests and selfless nuns have always been at the heart of the church. The John Paul’s, the Padre Pio's, the Mother Teresa’s and Francis Cabrini’s have made the church a blessing for the world. Where are the new priests and nuns that the world so needs?  Simple. They were never born because my generation was too self-absorbed to have large families. No children, no clergy. Some people might rejoice at that, but in the long run, no clergy, no Church. And if you rejoice at the death of a sacramental hierarchical Church, I would advise you to go away and do all of us who like sacramental Christianity a favor. There are lots of swell churches that have no sacraments or hierarchy, or churches that have sacraments after a fashion, but no hierarchy. Go join one. It’s a free country, so far.

By far the biggest thunder cloud on the horizon is the economic one, both in the Church and in the world.

Next week: How much religion can you afford?