The collective remembrance of what the council and its aftermath felt like has faded… Today’s young Catholics are not ungrateful for the council’s great gifts, but unable to proceed with their grandparents’ mindsets, uninclined to flog dead horses, unenthused by fossilised projects of aggiornamento when the sun has set on the giorno by which they were defined.
This passage was also quoted by Massimo Faggioli -- I wrote about that just over a year ago.
Kevin Tierney is one of the third generation after the Council -- go to the link above to see Bishop Varden's description of generations after an event. Tierney writes that the passage of time is one of the reasons his generation is apathetic about the council -- to them, Vatican II is in the rear view window, just like all the other councils:
I have been told that my attitude towards Vatican II “undermines” a council that had been over for 17 years before I was born. The antipathy towards Vatican II comes from those whose grandparents have no real memory before Vatican II. (Your memories at age 10 or 15 don’t count.)
The conclusion from this point of view:
I do not offer this as a way to harm Vatican II. I offer this as a way to allow it to take its proper place among the ecumenical councils of the Church. Until we are willing to treat it as a past event that is one of twenty-one (as opposed to an ongoing process), it cannot be embedded within the hearts of men. If we continue to treat it as the prism through which all must be understood, that continued apathy is not a prediction. It is a spoiler.
Or as Bishop Varden writes about the "third" generation, the Catholics whose grandparents don't even have a living memory of the time before the Council -- that would include all my children and grandchildren, because I was a newborn at the date of the convocation:
What they long for is to awaken the dawn, to know the saving power of Christ, the same today, yesterday, and always, yet making all things new, often enough by exploding time-bound dichotomies.
Bishop Varden was born in 1970, and so was Massimo Faggioli, who I mentioned earlier. This presumably puts them in the second generation that Bishop Varden describes:
The second generation positions itself in relation to the founders. Some will adulate them, some will be more critical; but the founders’ experience, direction, and vision remain, for better or for worse, a criterion of collective discernment. This dynamic changes at the next generational juncture, by which time the founders will be dead, or quite ancient. All of a sudden the second generation’s search for particular identity seems like much ado about not very much. The truly pressing issues are more fundamental... (What Now?)
I would count myself in this second generation as well. We grew up in the post-conciliar world, embedded in the conflicts of a previous generation.
I just happened to be recently reading a lecture by Dr Faggioli, titled in this publication as A Crisis in the Meaning of Catholic Tradition: The Fundamentalist Temptation of Canceling the Past. It's a rather odd paper --- I found it when I was reading about the new term "Catholic fundamentalism" and its origin. I hope to write more notes on it sometime, but this is not the moment.
The basic point here is that Faggioli's life work is, in a certain respect, deeply conservative -- conservative of an essentially progressive view of Vatican II. It is for this reason that he critiques Bishop Varden's contribution to the Napa panel, albeit civilly. Bishop Varden spoke very briefly of the hermeneutic of continuity. Faggioli's critique, in part:
An absolute, literal continuity with the past tradition without reform is a betrayal of the council, as is a vague appeal to “the spirit of the council” that ignores the documents and their intent.
Additionally, the debate on the hermeneutics of Vatican II might look like “a teacup storm” only if one does not consider the connections between the interpretation of the council (its teachings and its reception) on issues that are far from purely academic, and that have direct effects on the Church and its role in public life. (Vatican II at Napa)
His critique doesn't wholly address the points Bishop Varden was making. But it is a fair descriptive of what a second generation progressive -- influenced by the first generation, but more in a preservative note -- thinks is important. In the following passage he agrees with Varden's take on the newer generation:
The major problem isn’t outright opposition to the council. The major problem is that when Vatican II is downgraded to the memorialization of a generational event, it is no longer generative. In different ways, every pope since 1965 has articulated his fidelity to the task of interpreting and applying Vatican II. But the council today occupies a rather different place in the minds of young people compared to the 1980s or 1990s, or compared to someone like me, a second-generation Vatican II Catholic.
This "generative" motif is important, and he alludes to it again in the Paluch Lecture that I linked to.
The third generation will ultimately determine what the legacy means to them. In the second generation -- mine and more properly the people the age of my younger siblings -- the efforts will go towards "generativity" and "continuity" but in different forms. I do think this is, as Bishop Varden mentions, a very natural progression -- organic as well as supernatural -- and perhaps even our conflicts and limits are teaching the younger folk what needs to be worked out and what can be discarded.
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