Born in 1962 in Pittsburgh, I have a vague memory of first communion at an open-plan church. Confirmed at age 12 in Maryland and received the denim-bound “Good News for Modern Man” New Testament as a gift. Moving to Palo Alto at 14, my parents took one look at my coloring-pages CCD materials and decided to teach their Irish triplets (my twin bros are 363 days older) at home, using GK Chesterton’s Everlasting Man and Orthodoxy. Thanks be to God & our folks, we are all professing the faith now.
This is just one memory. I was in second grade at a Catholic school in 1964. I was very excited to be learning to sing the Creed in Latin. The music teacher came to our classroom to teach us. We weren’t even halfway through when the lessons stopped. Later that year my first communion missal was half in English and half in Latin. I felt left out of something big and ancient that I didn’t really understand. From hearing other people talk about the sixties I think our diocese enacted the changes very rapidly. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Amy, you’re the best. I’ve been following your writings for years and love your stuff. Born in 1950, I had the benefit of a pretty solid Catholic education, albeit with the usual “slings and arrows” of those days. By the time I graduated from high school in 1968, it was beginning to wear a little thin. Thus began a 10 year hiatus from any kind of regular Catholic practice. However, the foundation was still there. And when Our Lord “spoke to me” as I danced on the edge of disaster, I learned two things: that the way I was living my life was the reason I felt as badly as I did. Not all the other people I was blaming. And, more importantly, I recognized the voice of the one who spoke to me. Like I was hearing from a friend after a long, long time. All of this was happening in the context of pre-cum-and post Vatican II. And now my adult Catholic life was beginning coincidentally with the papacy of John Paul II. Good timing!
True facts: The future Pope Pius XII Made a visit to my parish during his whirlwind tour of the US circa 1938. Also, the estimable Bishop Fulton Sheen was a regular visitor there during the 1950s and 1960s. I remember hearing an entire series of Latin homilies by Bishop Sheen preached at our church, the Church of the Holy Child in North Philadelphia. Of note, in 2009, our parish celebrated its 100th Anniversary with the newly appointed archbishop Chaput of Philadelphia in attendance His first words were these: “I heard that Bishop Sheen once preached from this pulpit… (long pause)… “Maybe I should just sit down!”
I’m just a year older than you, Amy. I started out in public schools, and had three years of wonderful parish catechesis: lessons on salvation history and doctrine, plus memorization of prayers, the 10 commandments, and a moderate amount of Baltimore-type Q&A. We made our first confessions and first holy communion at the end of grade 1. (This was 1966.) That 1st grade year was the beginning of a lifelong faith that rarely wavered. I even published an essay about it titled “How I Got Saved” in Catholic Digest. https://www.catholicdigest.com/faith/prayer/how-i-got-saved/
My parents, meanwhile, had a conversion to a more deeply lived faith in 1968 after they heard a presentation on Padre Pio, Fatima, and some more recent alleged apparitions. They had us praying the daily family rosary, wearing brown scapulars, and reading all sorts of Catholic literature. This put our family on a collision course with what happened in 1969, when I brought home a brand new, grade 4 religious ed textbook which looked nothing like my previous ones. Gone were the realistic drawings of Jesus, Mary, and biblical figures—replaced by endless photos of children in various school and playtime settings. The occasional biblical pictures were stylized, blobby watercolors in a sort of homage to Chagall. The content didn’t go beyond endless iterations of “God loves you. We should love others.” So my parents pulled me out of CCD ordered Baltimore catechisms, lives of saints, and a children’s Bible for me and my sister to study at home. At the same time, our younger priests began to preach on Love-n- Peace, to denigrate Marian devotion, and to push other assorted revisionist themes, all in the name of Vatican II. My mom bought a copy of the Vatican II documents (same edition as in your photo) read them, then began writing letters our pastor and to the diocesan paper demonstrating that contrary to what we were being told locally, Vatican II said nothing about ditching the rosary, traditional devotions, or gutting catechesis of doctrine and morality. It was an interesting time, for sure. Ironically, I think it was my mom’s constant reactionary battle against the errors of the day that kept our family so engaged with the faith. If Vatican II hadn’t happened, and the 60s, 70s and 80s were more or less like the 50s, I wonder: would we have cared about our faith as much, or would we have just lived a routine, cultural, Sunday mass Catholicism that was a quiet background to our lives, rather than a lively front and center?
So, we did the "Trust Walk" in 7th grade (I was born in 1975), but it wasn't pitched as a religious thing, though in retrospect, it was probably part of our Confirmation prep (also 7th grade). My 7th grade teacher pitched it to us as learning how it felt to be a blind person who had to trust a guide to lead them. In that context, I found it super fun and intriguing, but if it had been pitched as some half-baked version of catechesis, I would probably have had my back up about it.
Compared to your religious ed, I feel like mine was intellectually hard-core, though heretically inclined - we used the "Come to the Father" series put out by the Canadian bishops' conference. We were taught a vague, second-hand version of historical-critical, anti-miracle exegesis: i.e., the feeding of the 5000 was the "miracle of sharing," and the apostles were only able to walk on water because of the high salt content of the Dead Sea (in retrospect, I wonder how that made sense even to the authors of the text - why would the apostles be fishing in the Dead Sea, even if it were plausible that even the saltiest water would let a person walk around upright on the surface?)
I remember being given a chart at some point, showing us the tiny handful of sentences of the Gospels that came from Jesus' own words, while the rest were all fake interpolations by the evil apostle Paul and his minions who wanted to corrupt Jesus' beautiful lovey-dovey teaching - I don't remember being taught the "Q" terminology but it was obviously some version of that.
Did you Americans not enjoy these delights? I've seen a lot of Americans so mystified when Pope Francis has sounded off about the "miracle of sharing," etc., that they're convinced someone is trying to trick them because obviously the "Holy Father" could never say such a thing - but these things are exactly what Jesuits of his vintage have been pushing for upwards of 50 years now. It's probably so second-nature to him that it would seem weird to him to even entertain the thought that the feeding of the 5000 could have been an honest-to-goodness miracle.
I'm older, and remember the old Mass where I read the Latin side of the Missal instead of the English side and played race the priest in Latin every day. I also was taught the Baltimore Catechism which we had to memorize, a few questions a day. It called one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit benignity, which I never figured out what it was and I doubt anybody else did either. My brother who was a year younger than me also had to memorize the Catechism. My sister two grades behind him got at least eight years of Jesus loves you. I had substantive religion classes until 9th grade, when all freshmen were required to take sex education classes. We also spent a certain amount of time that year in religion class talking about The Sounds of Silence. My senior year, 70-71, my social justice class went to hear Dick Gregory in Saint Louis. Vista volunteers working one county over talked to our class a number of times about helping black people gain their civil rights and getting their house shot up. My favorite diocesan priest was put on suspension for a year for integrating a parish, met a woman while he was not allowed to serve, and never returned. Soon after that most of the local priests and brothers left ministry to get married, along with a fewer number of the sisters.
As Vatican II changes were occurring, my favorite priest would explain what was going to be happening and when in the bulletin. I have heard he was unusual in that respect. It was a strange time in many ways.
". . . forming them in adult faith by treating them like children who need to be taught a lesson and, like good children, accept what they’ve been told. I was younger, born in 1960. . . ."
Yup!
I'm younger, too, born in 1964, and I didn't grow up Catholic. But I too suffered in my youth from this dynamic: in daily chapel at my Episcopal girls' school in Memphis, Tennessee, we had less & less Morning Prayer from the Prayer Book and traditional hymns from the 1940 hymnal, & more & more songs from Godspell & the Beatles & a string of associate pastors straight out of seminary reading us "The Velveteen Rabbit."
No doubt "clericalism" had something to do with what happened in the Catholic Church specifically, which has been driving me crazy since I started moving toward conversion at the beginning of the eighties.
But there's a larger cultural context for that thing of watering down the content & treating everyone like babies.
You know how when some missionary religious order priest comes to raise money at your parish, he looks very unimpressive, like an aging hippie, but the photo of the 19th-c founder of his order in the materials he hands out inevitably looks like a grownup?
In the sixties a whole generation of young people deliberately rejected all things adult in preference for something much less mature, in fact for a kind of pursuit of immaturity for its own sake.
I saw a Youtube of a Peter Paul & Mary concert from the early sixties that seems to me to capture the moment at which it all unraveled.
The young people in the audience are still in grownup clothes--skirts, coats & those narrow ties--but when Peter (or Paul, I can't tell the difference) sings a kind of spoof of a love song of the sort you might hear in dinner theater at a resort in the Catskills, to show that he can do it, and to make fun of what the grownups care about (on a theme that has had universal appeal for all of human history), they laugh.
Then he switches to the deeply authentic "folk music" that they've come to hear, the stuff that's too profound for their parents to understand, so it makes them oh so special to "get" it, and they sit there gooey-eyed and wowed by: "Puff the Magic Dragon."
From there is seems a very short jump to "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" in religious ed.
That is a really fascinating take, the infantilization or "pursuit of immaturity for its own sake."
It really does seem like a lot of the problems in the world and the Church stem from the idea of delayed gratification, being told No, having to do not-fun things because they're necessary. All of those are components of adulthood, right?
In the cultural context, when was the "Me Generation"? I was born in 1971. When did divorce become acceptable? And wasn't the prevailing philosophy that "We're unhappy together, we'll be happier apart and thus better parents because we're happier"? I'm pretty sure in most cases, that's not true as far as the kids are concerned, but isn't that about the adults' happiness and not their obligations to their kids?
I think your insight on immaturity is really profound.
Where I was, in Memphis, Tennessee, divorce became acceptable in the seventies. It spread thru the suburbs like the bubonic plague--I went from knowing one girl whose parents were divorced to approximately half of everybody's parents (including my own) having split up in a few years.
Vatican II kept me out of the Catholic Church for many years. Let me explain.
I was baptized as an infant at Trinity United Methodist Church in Buchanan Virginia in 1950. However, I didn’t have a living faith in Christ until 1977, after having been in the Navy for 8 years, when I joined Rock Church in Roanoke Virginia where my soon to be wife, MaryAlice, attended. The next year we moved to Blackburg where I started college at Virginia Tech and we became members of Dayspring Christian Community there.
My only church experience, for many years, was evangelical/charismatic (Botetourt county where I grew up didn’t have its first Catholic Mass until 1981) and my only knowledge of historic Christianity came from reading and that came slowly.
As I read, piecemeal and undirected, the impression I got third hand was that Vatican II meant that there was no longer any need to become Catholic. When I finally entered the Catholic Church in 2007, my conversion had little to do with Vatican II. Certainly the delay was mostly my fault; however I'm just reporting my impression and don't see any need to go into more detail about that impression.
I’m currently a member of St George Melkite Greek Catholic parish near Sacramento.
Born in 1962 in Pittsburgh, I have a vague memory of first communion at an open-plan church. Confirmed at age 12 in Maryland and received the denim-bound “Good News for Modern Man” New Testament as a gift. Moving to Palo Alto at 14, my parents took one look at my coloring-pages CCD materials and decided to teach their Irish triplets (my twin bros are 363 days older) at home, using GK Chesterton’s Everlasting Man and Orthodoxy. Thanks be to God & our folks, we are all professing the faith now.
This is just one memory. I was in second grade at a Catholic school in 1964. I was very excited to be learning to sing the Creed in Latin. The music teacher came to our classroom to teach us. We weren’t even halfway through when the lessons stopped. Later that year my first communion missal was half in English and half in Latin. I felt left out of something big and ancient that I didn’t really understand. From hearing other people talk about the sixties I think our diocese enacted the changes very rapidly. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Amy, you’re the best. I’ve been following your writings for years and love your stuff. Born in 1950, I had the benefit of a pretty solid Catholic education, albeit with the usual “slings and arrows” of those days. By the time I graduated from high school in 1968, it was beginning to wear a little thin. Thus began a 10 year hiatus from any kind of regular Catholic practice. However, the foundation was still there. And when Our Lord “spoke to me” as I danced on the edge of disaster, I learned two things: that the way I was living my life was the reason I felt as badly as I did. Not all the other people I was blaming. And, more importantly, I recognized the voice of the one who spoke to me. Like I was hearing from a friend after a long, long time. All of this was happening in the context of pre-cum-and post Vatican II. And now my adult Catholic life was beginning coincidentally with the papacy of John Paul II. Good timing!
True facts: The future Pope Pius XII Made a visit to my parish during his whirlwind tour of the US circa 1938. Also, the estimable Bishop Fulton Sheen was a regular visitor there during the 1950s and 1960s. I remember hearing an entire series of Latin homilies by Bishop Sheen preached at our church, the Church of the Holy Child in North Philadelphia. Of note, in 2009, our parish celebrated its 100th Anniversary with the newly appointed archbishop Chaput of Philadelphia in attendance His first words were these: “I heard that Bishop Sheen once preached from this pulpit… (long pause)… “Maybe I should just sit down!”
You are saying Bishop Fulton Sheen preached homilies in the latin language?
Oops! not "Latin" homilies, but rather "Lenten" homilies.
Voice recognition typo.
However, I'd bet that he was fluent in Latin and could probably have done so!
Hahaha...I'd wondered about that, too!!
I’m just a year older than you, Amy. I started out in public schools, and had three years of wonderful parish catechesis: lessons on salvation history and doctrine, plus memorization of prayers, the 10 commandments, and a moderate amount of Baltimore-type Q&A. We made our first confessions and first holy communion at the end of grade 1. (This was 1966.) That 1st grade year was the beginning of a lifelong faith that rarely wavered. I even published an essay about it titled “How I Got Saved” in Catholic Digest. https://www.catholicdigest.com/faith/prayer/how-i-got-saved/
My parents, meanwhile, had a conversion to a more deeply lived faith in 1968 after they heard a presentation on Padre Pio, Fatima, and some more recent alleged apparitions. They had us praying the daily family rosary, wearing brown scapulars, and reading all sorts of Catholic literature. This put our family on a collision course with what happened in 1969, when I brought home a brand new, grade 4 religious ed textbook which looked nothing like my previous ones. Gone were the realistic drawings of Jesus, Mary, and biblical figures—replaced by endless photos of children in various school and playtime settings. The occasional biblical pictures were stylized, blobby watercolors in a sort of homage to Chagall. The content didn’t go beyond endless iterations of “God loves you. We should love others.” So my parents pulled me out of CCD ordered Baltimore catechisms, lives of saints, and a children’s Bible for me and my sister to study at home. At the same time, our younger priests began to preach on Love-n- Peace, to denigrate Marian devotion, and to push other assorted revisionist themes, all in the name of Vatican II. My mom bought a copy of the Vatican II documents (same edition as in your photo) read them, then began writing letters our pastor and to the diocesan paper demonstrating that contrary to what we were being told locally, Vatican II said nothing about ditching the rosary, traditional devotions, or gutting catechesis of doctrine and morality. It was an interesting time, for sure. Ironically, I think it was my mom’s constant reactionary battle against the errors of the day that kept our family so engaged with the faith. If Vatican II hadn’t happened, and the 60s, 70s and 80s were more or less like the 50s, I wonder: would we have cared about our faith as much, or would we have just lived a routine, cultural, Sunday mass Catholicism that was a quiet background to our lives, rather than a lively front and center?
So, we did the "Trust Walk" in 7th grade (I was born in 1975), but it wasn't pitched as a religious thing, though in retrospect, it was probably part of our Confirmation prep (also 7th grade). My 7th grade teacher pitched it to us as learning how it felt to be a blind person who had to trust a guide to lead them. In that context, I found it super fun and intriguing, but if it had been pitched as some half-baked version of catechesis, I would probably have had my back up about it.
Compared to your religious ed, I feel like mine was intellectually hard-core, though heretically inclined - we used the "Come to the Father" series put out by the Canadian bishops' conference. We were taught a vague, second-hand version of historical-critical, anti-miracle exegesis: i.e., the feeding of the 5000 was the "miracle of sharing," and the apostles were only able to walk on water because of the high salt content of the Dead Sea (in retrospect, I wonder how that made sense even to the authors of the text - why would the apostles be fishing in the Dead Sea, even if it were plausible that even the saltiest water would let a person walk around upright on the surface?)
I remember being given a chart at some point, showing us the tiny handful of sentences of the Gospels that came from Jesus' own words, while the rest were all fake interpolations by the evil apostle Paul and his minions who wanted to corrupt Jesus' beautiful lovey-dovey teaching - I don't remember being taught the "Q" terminology but it was obviously some version of that.
Did you Americans not enjoy these delights? I've seen a lot of Americans so mystified when Pope Francis has sounded off about the "miracle of sharing," etc., that they're convinced someone is trying to trick them because obviously the "Holy Father" could never say such a thing - but these things are exactly what Jesuits of his vintage have been pushing for upwards of 50 years now. It's probably so second-nature to him that it would seem weird to him to even entertain the thought that the feeding of the 5000 could have been an honest-to-goodness miracle.
I'm older, and remember the old Mass where I read the Latin side of the Missal instead of the English side and played race the priest in Latin every day. I also was taught the Baltimore Catechism which we had to memorize, a few questions a day. It called one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit benignity, which I never figured out what it was and I doubt anybody else did either. My brother who was a year younger than me also had to memorize the Catechism. My sister two grades behind him got at least eight years of Jesus loves you. I had substantive religion classes until 9th grade, when all freshmen were required to take sex education classes. We also spent a certain amount of time that year in religion class talking about The Sounds of Silence. My senior year, 70-71, my social justice class went to hear Dick Gregory in Saint Louis. Vista volunteers working one county over talked to our class a number of times about helping black people gain their civil rights and getting their house shot up. My favorite diocesan priest was put on suspension for a year for integrating a parish, met a woman while he was not allowed to serve, and never returned. Soon after that most of the local priests and brothers left ministry to get married, along with a fewer number of the sisters.
As Vatican II changes were occurring, my favorite priest would explain what was going to be happening and when in the bulletin. I have heard he was unusual in that respect. It was a strange time in many ways.
". . . forming them in adult faith by treating them like children who need to be taught a lesson and, like good children, accept what they’ve been told. I was younger, born in 1960. . . ."
Yup!
I'm younger, too, born in 1964, and I didn't grow up Catholic. But I too suffered in my youth from this dynamic: in daily chapel at my Episcopal girls' school in Memphis, Tennessee, we had less & less Morning Prayer from the Prayer Book and traditional hymns from the 1940 hymnal, & more & more songs from Godspell & the Beatles & a string of associate pastors straight out of seminary reading us "The Velveteen Rabbit."
No doubt "clericalism" had something to do with what happened in the Catholic Church specifically, which has been driving me crazy since I started moving toward conversion at the beginning of the eighties.
But there's a larger cultural context for that thing of watering down the content & treating everyone like babies.
You know how when some missionary religious order priest comes to raise money at your parish, he looks very unimpressive, like an aging hippie, but the photo of the 19th-c founder of his order in the materials he hands out inevitably looks like a grownup?
In the sixties a whole generation of young people deliberately rejected all things adult in preference for something much less mature, in fact for a kind of pursuit of immaturity for its own sake.
I saw a Youtube of a Peter Paul & Mary concert from the early sixties that seems to me to capture the moment at which it all unraveled.
The young people in the audience are still in grownup clothes--skirts, coats & those narrow ties--but when Peter (or Paul, I can't tell the difference) sings a kind of spoof of a love song of the sort you might hear in dinner theater at a resort in the Catskills, to show that he can do it, and to make fun of what the grownups care about (on a theme that has had universal appeal for all of human history), they laugh.
Then he switches to the deeply authentic "folk music" that they've come to hear, the stuff that's too profound for their parents to understand, so it makes them oh so special to "get" it, and they sit there gooey-eyed and wowed by: "Puff the Magic Dragon."
From there is seems a very short jump to "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" in religious ed.
That is a really fascinating take, the infantilization or "pursuit of immaturity for its own sake."
It really does seem like a lot of the problems in the world and the Church stem from the idea of delayed gratification, being told No, having to do not-fun things because they're necessary. All of those are components of adulthood, right?
In the cultural context, when was the "Me Generation"? I was born in 1971. When did divorce become acceptable? And wasn't the prevailing philosophy that "We're unhappy together, we'll be happier apart and thus better parents because we're happier"? I'm pretty sure in most cases, that's not true as far as the kids are concerned, but isn't that about the adults' happiness and not their obligations to their kids?
I think your insight on immaturity is really profound.
Where I was, in Memphis, Tennessee, divorce became acceptable in the seventies. It spread thru the suburbs like the bubonic plague--I went from knowing one girl whose parents were divorced to approximately half of everybody's parents (including my own) having split up in a few years.
Vatican II kept me out of the Catholic Church for many years. Let me explain.
I was baptized as an infant at Trinity United Methodist Church in Buchanan Virginia in 1950. However, I didn’t have a living faith in Christ until 1977, after having been in the Navy for 8 years, when I joined Rock Church in Roanoke Virginia where my soon to be wife, MaryAlice, attended. The next year we moved to Blackburg where I started college at Virginia Tech and we became members of Dayspring Christian Community there.
My only church experience, for many years, was evangelical/charismatic (Botetourt county where I grew up didn’t have its first Catholic Mass until 1981) and my only knowledge of historic Christianity came from reading and that came slowly.
As I read, piecemeal and undirected, the impression I got third hand was that Vatican II meant that there was no longer any need to become Catholic. When I finally entered the Catholic Church in 2007, my conversion had little to do with Vatican II. Certainly the delay was mostly my fault; however I'm just reporting my impression and don't see any need to go into more detail about that impression.
I’m currently a member of St George Melkite Greek Catholic parish near Sacramento.