Father Joe
I've just finished reading Tony Hendra's Father Joe. I wasn't quite as ecstatic about the book as some have been, but I liked its reconsideration of history and tradition, especially from someone who had been all too willing to throw those concepts on the garbage heap to make way for the new, or what comes next -- which is always, however amorphous and ill-defined, assumed to be better than what came before.
Here's Hendra on the reforms of Vatican II:
The mighty chain of events and people stretching back over almost two thousand years, which even a pimply teenager like me had once thrilled to, had been not just shattered but thrown on the garbage heap. As if only certain links in it matttered -- the Church's official lapses and sins -- not the hundreds of millions of other links: kind and generous people, clergy and laity, hard-striving souls full of faith and good works and humor -- and of failure and frustration and sin and tribulation. These had been the Church also -- for two thousand years. But they appeared to be without merit for our doughty reformers, nothing but a millenium-long death dance of superstition and gullibility.
As far as I could tell, the reformers who had taken charge after Vatican II -- mostly my contemporaries or slightly older -- had indulged enthusiastically in one of our generation's most deadly flaws, nurtured, no doubt, by growing up in the rubble of World War II -- a willful lack of any sense of history.
I'd been doing no reforming, but I was not without blame. Like my contemporaries, I'd bought into an attitude that went well beyond Henry Ford's reprehensible "history is bunk." In our version, history was far worse than bunk: it was suspect, the enemy, invariably evil, a repository of constant failure and deadly delusions and appalling role models. History was when all the mistakes were made, all the atrocities committed, that time before we knew better. History was before we were born again into the One True Faith: only change, with its benison of the new and the now, can lead to salvation.
Here's Hendra on the reforms of Vatican II:
The mighty chain of events and people stretching back over almost two thousand years, which even a pimply teenager like me had once thrilled to, had been not just shattered but thrown on the garbage heap. As if only certain links in it matttered -- the Church's official lapses and sins -- not the hundreds of millions of other links: kind and generous people, clergy and laity, hard-striving souls full of faith and good works and humor -- and of failure and frustration and sin and tribulation. These had been the Church also -- for two thousand years. But they appeared to be without merit for our doughty reformers, nothing but a millenium-long death dance of superstition and gullibility.
As far as I could tell, the reformers who had taken charge after Vatican II -- mostly my contemporaries or slightly older -- had indulged enthusiastically in one of our generation's most deadly flaws, nurtured, no doubt, by growing up in the rubble of World War II -- a willful lack of any sense of history.
I'd been doing no reforming, but I was not without blame. Like my contemporaries, I'd bought into an attitude that went well beyond Henry Ford's reprehensible "history is bunk." In our version, history was far worse than bunk: it was suspect, the enemy, invariably evil, a repository of constant failure and deadly delusions and appalling role models. History was when all the mistakes were made, all the atrocities committed, that time before we knew better. History was before we were born again into the One True Faith: only change, with its benison of the new and the now, can lead to salvation.
posted by Kate Marie | 1:37 PM | Permalink
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4 comments
4 Comments:
Funny, but my father. . Joe. . is reading that book too.
That's great, Stewdog. I'd be interested to hear what he thinks of it.
Or were you just pulling my leg?
I'm serious. . for a change.
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