Youth and Heroism
I was reading an interesting thread on Why Men Hate Church, and it reminded me of a passage from a book I’m currently reading called Letters to a Doubter by Paul Claudel:
Don’t listen to those who tell you that youth is the time for enjoyment. Youth is not formed for pleasure, but for heroism. The word is not too strong. A young man must be a hero today to resist the temptations that surround him, to be the lonely believer in a despised doctrine, to face the arguments, the blasphemy, the scurrility which fill our books, our newspapers, and our streets, without giving way a finger’s breadth – to resist his family and his friends, to be one against many, to be faithful against all.
I don’t recall ever hearing Catholicism presented this way before, and I found it incredibly appealing. By watering the Faith down and trying to make it "easy" and "convenient", you might actually be driving the young men away. We respond to a challenge, we aspire to courage and to heroism. Why do you think we are drawn to Star Wars and James Bond movies, why do we watch the National Football League? Why do so many young men aspire to be soldiers, quarterbacks, or astronauts when they grow up?
Why don’t we ever hear about St. Michael the Archangel casting Satan down from Heaven or St. George slaying the dragon any more? What about the Christian knights, or the martyrs who bravely faced brutal deaths for their Faith? We need to find a way to tap into this yearning for heroism to attract and retain young men in the Church today.
Greatest. Commercial. Ever.
I know, old news, it came out in 2003, but something reminded me of it today and I wanted to see it again. Sure enough, I found it online here (I love the Internet), as well as info about the making of it.
I first saw this spot when it ran before a movie at the Metreon. Usually commercials before movies just annoy me, but seeing this on the big screen was deeply moving. It is a truly spectacular piece of short film. It is technically and artistically impressive, but more importantly it captures perfectly the feeling of ennui, of mindless routine, and of desperate loneliness that sometimes pervades the life of a single 20-something man in his first office job out of college.
It says something very interesting about our culture that such a seemingly counter cultural message can be embedded in a car commercial. Is it subversive, did the Volkswagon corporation not fully understand what they subsidized here? Or rather, does it subtly redirect our instinct to rebel against the soulless corporations that run our lives with the seductive message that the only feasible escape is through consumerism? "Is your life empty and meaningless? Then you need a new Volkswagon convertible!"
Also, I always wondered which city this was filmed in. After studying this still, I’m pretty sure this shot was filmed here in downtown San Francisco, not far from where I work. I think it was filmed right about here. Note the angled red roof in the lower left and the Transbay Bus Terminal in the upper right are both visible in the shot, and you can see the Bay Bridge in the background.
The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America
I finished a fascinating book recently: The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America by David Carlin. Unlike many liberal or progressive Catholic authors he recognizes that the U.S. Church has been in a steep decline in the post-Vatican II era, and he does not prescribe married and women priests or the election of bishops by the laity as the solution. On the other hand he is no traditionalist either, he calls Vatican II an historically necessary event and does not call for a return to the Tridentine Mass and a retreat into the “Catholic ghetto.” So what does he believe?
Well, his basic thesis is that three forces came together at the same time to knock our Church on its heels: Vatican II, the acceptance of Catholics into mainstream American culture, and the rise of secularism as the dominant force in that culture. Carlin makes the case that from the founding of our nation until the 1960's America had a Protestant culture, and Catholics were an excluded and sometimes persecuted minority within that culture. While this position had many drawbacks, one benefit to living in the “Catholic ghetto” was that it tended to preserve the solidarity and cultural identity of Catholics while shielding them from the influence of the broader culture.
This isolation was not just an American phenomenon, rather Carlin asserts that is was in part a deliberate strategy put in place by the council of Trent and the counter-Reformation. In response to the threat of the Reformation, the Church defined Protestantism as enemy number one and created a “fortress” mentality to protect the Church. By the time of Vatican II however, the Church fathers judged (in Carlin’s view correctly) that Protestantism was no longer a major threat and thus the “fortress” was no longer needed; in fact it now served as a barrier preventing the Church from effectively evangelizing to the world, hence the need for “aggiornamento.”
When the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended, many Americans during the 1990's falsely assumed that there were no more enemies left in the world and that foreign policy was no longer relevant. In a similar way American bishops blindly assumed after Vatican II that the Church had no enemies left worth fighting and were caught completely unprepared when the cultural revolution of the Sixties overthrew American’s “Judeo-Christian” culture and replaced it with the rampant secularism that predominates today. Vatican II may have been necessary (though Carlin never fully explains why) but it came at the worst possible time; the Church threw open the gates of its fortress just as a brand new enemy arrived on the scene to storm the walls. And all this at the very time that socioeconomic forces were bringing more and more Catholic families out of the old ghettos and into mainstream American suburban middle-class life.
So what do we do now? Carlin admits he doesn’t have all the answers, but proposes that the first order of business is to officially declare that “secularism” (for lack of a better term) is the new enemy number one. He points out that people often define themselves as much by what they are against as by what they are for, consider for instance the recent elections. For the past 500 years many Catholics defined themselves as not Protestant, and now we can forge a similar unity by aggressively defining ourselves as not secularist.
Carlin was a Rhode Island state senator for over a decade and clearly he understand party politics. He draws a second analogy from politics and suggests that the Church needs to “tend to its base.” Politicians who spend all their time courting “middle of the road” voters while ignoring their hardcore supporters tend to lose elections; Carlin suggests that the Church has spent too much time and effort trying to make itself appealing to lukewarm and largely secularized Catholics while ignoring the needs and demands of the most orthodox and loyal Catholics who make up its base.
None of these ideas were entirely new to me but Carlin brings them all together in a compelling and readable book. I highly recommend it.
Rootless Americans
The rootlessness of modern American society perturbs me deeply. Throughout history, most people lived their entire lives in the same village as their ancestors. All their relatives lived nearby, and they knew all their neighbors. Walking down the street, they could address everyone they met my name. I recently read the trenchant observation that Americans are the first people in history who expect that their children will live thousands of miles away from them, as though this were perfectly natural (I forget where I read this or I’d cite my source). It may be true that today we have airlines, cell phones, email, and other such technologies that allow us to remain “connected” with friends and relatives around the globe, but there’s something so coldly impersonal and inhuman about this as a substitute for being surrounded by kith and kin you’ve known all your life. It also makes it so much easier to “drift apart” and stop calling or writing over time.
I’m feeling very lonely and isolated right now. Two dear friends of mine, a couple who just recently married after many, many years of dating, are moving to the East Coast in a few months. I just found out today that one of my close coworkers is moving back East as well, which triggered this current funk. It got me thinking of the number of other coworkers who have drifted away over the past few years. People cycle through jobs fairly quickly in the software industry, especially at a small company like mine. A lot of brilliant, passionate people, many just recently out of college, were attracted there in the heyday of the dot com boom and there was a spirit, an energy, a Zeitgeist if you will that is difficult to put into words unless you’ve experienced something of the sort. That energy has largely dissipated and many of those folks have dispersed to other jobs around the country, and while it is still a fun place to work and I cherish many of my coworkers who remain, there is a lingering sense of fragility, of impermanence, that everyone still there may be gone in a few more years.
I’m single, I live alone, I don’t have any roommates. I’ve lived in the same apartment for years but I don’t know any of my neighbors. I’ve never much thought of this as “home” because I’ve always toyed with the idea of moving somewhere to shorten my commute.
I don’t doubt that much of this is of my own making. I could make more effort to keep in touch with those who have moved away, I could introduce myself to my neighbors, I could get involved in my local parish, etc. And I probably should. And maybe I will. But right now it’s 2:00 AM and I’m having trouble falling asleep, and it is so much easier to blame my heartache on the rootlessness of modern society...
