What happened?

George Weigel analyzes the "why" and "how" of once staunchly Catholic countries transforming, in just a few decades, into hotbeds of anti-Catholic rhetoric and law:

 Ireland — where the constitution begins, “In the name of the Most Holy Trinity” —  has become the most stridently anti-Catholic country in the Western world. ...

Sixty years into the 20th century, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Quebec were among the most intensely Catholic nations on the planet. Fifty years later, Quebec is the most religiously arid space between Point Barrow and Tierra del Fuego; Portuguese Catholicism, outside the pilgrimage shrine of Fatima, is hardly robust; Spain has the most self-consciously secularist government in Europe; and Ireland has now become the epicenter of European anti-Catholicism. What happened?

Perhaps some comparative history and sociology suggest an answer. In each of these cases, the state, through the agency of an authoritarian government, deliberately delayed the nation’s confrontation with modernity. In each of these cases, the Catholic Church was closely allied to state power (or, in the case of Quebec, to the power of the dominant Liberal party). In each of these cases, Catholic intellectual life withered, largely untouched by the mid-20th-century Catholic renaissance in biblical, historical, philosophical, and theological studies that paved the way toward the Second Vatican Council. And in each of these cases, the local Catholicism was highly clerical, with ordination to the priesthood and the episcopate being understood by everyone, clergy and laity alike, as conferring membership in a higher caste.

Then came le déluge: the deluge of Vatican II, the deluge that Europeans refer to as “1968,” and the deluge of the “Quiet Revolution” in la Belle Province. Once breached, the fortifications of Counter-Reformation Catholicism in Spain, Portugal, Quebec, and Ireland quickly crumbled. And absent the intellectual resources to resist the flood-tides of secularism, these four once-hyper-Catholic nations flipped, undergoing an accelerated course of radical secularization that has now, in each case, given birth to a serious problem of Christophobia: not mere indifference to the Church, but active hostility to it, not infrequently manifested through coercive state power.

Read the entire essay, "Erin Go Bonkers". On a much smaller, more intimate level, I liken this process in some ways to what I witnessed with many "preacher's kids" ("PKs", they were often called) from my Fundamentalist youth: they were so tightly controlled and directed in every facet of life—even into their late teens—that they struggled to think critically and properly engage with the larger culture. They were often given pat answers that weren't, in many cases,  necessarily wrong, but which weren't so much taught as foisted upon them. There was, in other words, an approach to life that was quite reactionary and fearful, rather than confident and open to questions and debate—the sort of lacking approach that Dr. Mark Noll (who now teaches at the University of Notre Dame after many years at Wheaton College) criticized so insightfully and often harshly in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans, 1994). In a 2004 essay in First Things, Noll reflected on the book and its main premises:

What is true throughout the Christian world is true for American Christians: we who are in pietistic, generically evangelical, Baptist, fundamentalist, Restorationist, holiness, "Bible church," megachurch, or Pentecostal traditions face special difficulties when putting the mind to use. Taken together, American evangelicals display many virtues and do many things well, but built-in barriers to careful and constructive thinking remain substantial.

These barriers include an immediatism that insists on action, decision, and even perfection right now, a populism that confuses winning supporters with mastering actually existing situations, an anti-traditionalism that privileges one’s own current judgments on biblical, theological, and ethical issues (however hastily formed) over insight from the past (however hard won and carefully stated), and a nearly gnostic dualism that rushes to spiritualize all manner of bodily, terrestrial, physical, and material realities (despite the origin and providential maintenance of these realities in God). In addition, we evangelicals as a rule still prefer to put our money into programs offering immediate results, whether evangelistic or humanitarian, instead of into institutions promoting intellectual development over the long term.

Granted, there are significant differences between what Weigel describes and Noll explains. But the common element is the lack of "intellectual resources" and "intellectual development", especially for critically, thoughtfully, and firmly taking on the chaotic flood of falsehoods, half-truths, skewed perceptions, trendy "isms", and confused flailings of the dominant culture.

On a related note, see:

And:

Comments

[peter l]

It pain's me to say it but this is not the Catholic Ireland i grew up in.I remember there being no standing room for Mass on sunday,now,you could pick your weekly seat.So many unmarried mother's who do not seem to care if their children will do the same when they reach adulthood.All is not lost though,when i see there are people who will not only attend Mass but also Eucharistic Adoration without flinching.Parent's need to be example's for their children.

[LJ]

I think what we must never forget in seeking an explanation for Quebec, Ireland, etc. is that any society is always complex, Catholic or secular. And perhaps that is really what those societies in their Catholic heyday forgot as well.

Yes, there was clearly an insularity to robust thought, but I think we make a mistake if we presume that we are looking at an either/or situation. I studied philosophy at a Catholic college of the University of Toronto, not because it was Catholic but because it had the best philosophy program. At the time there was no lack of input from all manner of directions to the philosophical debate.

Yet over the years of life I have found something quite remarkable. Despite the availability of higher education and the great numbers of the populace that take advantage, in the end society tends to stratify, or at least perpetuate the existing strata. In other words, when Jesus said that the poor will always be with you, he might well have added that the peasants will always be with you.

That is not some arrogant statement of an elitist. I am far from it, coming from the lower class myself, and finding social barriers along the way because of it. I am a peasant, and I love peasants. My point is that the old social structures from England that America had tried so hard to do away with has perpetuated itself in America as well as in Canada, and I think will always find its way in any society.

What's the point? Yes, the intellectuals of any society tend to lead the movements within it, but the movements themselves are always populated by those peasants and the middle class. And the movements can go nowhere without popular support, even in a very coercive society.

From the perspective of the Catholic faith the same is true I think. As wide open as their eyes may be, the large numbers of the ordinary peasant faithful will not be moved and swayed by ideas per se as much as by experiences and straight up moral decisions necessitated by circumstances.

Those people are moved away from the Church more by the lack of conversion of heart than by ideas. The ideas are only grasped when it appears they are the way out of the confines of a morality they do not believe in their heart, because they do not know the Christ of that morality, even though they see him every week in the Eucharist.

All of this to point out that it is not just the head or just the heart, although I think that where the heart belongs to Christ, it is less likely to be swayed even by ideas the mind is not prepared for. And why is it conversely that Evangelicals have such success with removing Catholics from their faith? It is because they speak to the heart exclusively, and that is what moves people to act. I know that in my case I was intellectually Catholic before I made the move, before a conversion experience that spoke directly to my heart.

I would say, at the risk of sounding too much like those anti-intellectual Evangelicals, if we ignore the conversion of heart of the young whether in a wide open pluralistic society or in a closed Catholic dominated society, the end result will be similar in my opinion.

[Dan]

LJ, thank you. What you've written is 100%, unqualified truth. You've written a summary of the one truth I emphasize more than any other in teaching my parish-based apologetics and evangelization classes.

[Randy]

But why is conversion of the heart missing? Partly because shortcuts were taken in presenting the faith. People fall in love with the true faith. If we present something else then people will be less likely to embrace it with their heart. They may follow social pressure and look Catholic. But it won't have penetrated deeply. So they are easy prey for secularism.

How should the true faith be presented. Differently for peasants than for intellectuals for sure. But both need the real faith presented to them in a compelling way. The worst thing is when they think they have it and they don't. Then it is very hard for them to be evangelized. They might find something in a protestant church and not know Catholicism teaches all of that as well.

[nibit]

Just a few random thoughts.

Tell me where there is a popular government at the moment anywhere in the world. We have all become ungovernable, self-opinionated, world-savers with no respect for any authority or for the past.

God is therefore either a goody grandfather, if he agrees with us, or a despot, if he makes requirements of us without consultation (meaning if he doesn't allow us to do what we want to do at this moment).

We have no consciousness of human nature as being frail or fallen (aka original sin) and are therefore surprised that it is difficult to get ongoing agreement about peaceful sharing of this good world's riches. Do we need to wonder that we cannot even agree about human rights? Why do some people consider abortion a mercy and others a murder?

LJ, in a perspicacious note above, distinguishes between peasants and intellectuals. Well, peasants is a loaded word - but he/she is right, though I would argue a little differently. Most people do not belong to Christianity (or to any society) with their whole heart and mind. But neither heart, nor mind, alone provides true anchorage. Do we realise that people go for things more often with their hearts than their minds? Only the few know the why's and wherefore's. Intellectuals have always been few. With the media everywhere and most governments taking it out of believers, especially the Catholics, is it any wonder that the non-intellectuals, the half-boiled, should waver and totter?

Leaders do not appear when we're up but when we're down and need direction because we have lost the way. I think God has provided us a leader in Pope Benedict. I see him as "tremendous" in spirituality and intellect. He is a light for a world that has lost its way - temporarily, I hope.

To re-cap:
1. We must remember fallen human nature which requires pushing.

2. We live at a time when we've lost faith in all authority, police, justice, politicians, medical services, priests ..... they have all taken a shaking.

3. Every person is an island (and authority in everything) unto himself.

Just a few thoughts, presented with humility, fearing they will be misunderstood, but pray not.