I missed this Amy Welborn post from a month ago, observing the 60th anniversary of the failed Second Vatican Council. Amy, a well-known Catholic writer and blogger, was a small child when the Council took place. She says that its failure had a lot to do with how the swiftness and radicalism of the changes it mandated (or, more accurately, were believed to mandate by the liberals who implemented it), ended up delegitimizing the Church's authority in the minds of many. Amy tells a story about how, in her Catholic high school, the religion class was assigned to read the 1970s proto-New Age bestseller Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The idea seems to have been that the hippie seagull was a Christ figure. She recently re-read the book after decades, and concluded:

For decades I have thought, “Wow, I can’t believe that was my sophomore religion text in a Catholic high school, crazytimes, right?” but last night I transitioned fully to: I CANNOT BELIEVE THEY USED THIS AS A TEXT IN A CATHOLIC HIGH SCHOOL. WHAT THE HELL WAS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE.

Who were, I don’t hesitate to say, very nice, well-meaning people. Most of them.

So let’s circle back. This was 1975. Ten years after the end of the Council. In just ten years, high school kids had gone from having substantive, challenging religious education in a Catholic high school, to spending weeks comparing a stupid anthropomorphized self-actualizing bird who just wants to fly, man, to Jesus of Nazareth.

(One of our big Senior projects was to compile a folder with reflections and artwork comparing the Beatitudes to the lyrics of The Impossible Dream from Man of La Mancha.)

Don’t tell me that didn’t have an impact, both in terms of most obviously, the collapse of religious knowledge, but also our generation’s sense of how serious this whole business is. Narrator: not very serious at all.

I do remember what the teacher wrote in my progress report that year: Amy makes good grades although she sits in the back of my class reading novels all period.

Oh come on…just breaking those chains and learning to fly, okay?

These are the same kind of people pushing the Catholic Church today to change itself in the name of "synodality," "inclusivity," "accompaniment," and the other newspeak buzzwords. But this time, it'll be different, they must think. Mustn't they? Or do they think at all?

The future belongs to those who tell the stories that fill the moral imaginations of the young. I was an adult convert to Catholicism (in 1993), and only spent 13 years in the Catholic Church. I remember griping one day in the year 2000 about how everything was falling down around us, and the bishops weren't doing a thing about it, when a slightly older conservative Catholic -- someone Amy's age -- said to me, "I grew up Catholic in the Seventies, and by the end of the decade, we really thought we were going to be the ones to turn the lights out. Then John Paul II happened."

Point taken. But today? The Catholic story is not mine anymore, but I wonder how the Catholics are going to hold anything resembling what the Church has been when the power of Western pop culture, strongly anti-Christian, is met by marshmallowy sloganeering and loads of empathizing and sensitivity? Though the issue has played out, and continues to play out, in specific ways within Catholicism, the question faces all churches in the West today. All those young Evangelicals who know almost nothing substantive about the faith because they've been catechized by the Youth Group Feels. (I've heard many anecdotes by Evangelicals over the years about JLS-type stunts in their youth groups.) I don't know enough about how the Orthodox do it, because though I've been Orthodox for 16 years, the Orthodox Church is so small in the US that I don't know enough to make generalizations.

Is it possibly too late? Are the churches-as-societies in a decline that can't be arrested? The Orthodox Christian writer Philip Sherrard wrote:

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And this is but another way of saying that such a decline is inescapable when once the thoughts and actions of the members of a particular society are no longer determined above all by their allegiance and adherence to the norms of a sacred tradition. When these norms cease to be effective for the majority of its member, society simply disintegrates. In other words, the integrity of a society and the communal effectiveness of a sacred tradition are inseparable.

Why is this the case? Sacred tradition in the highest sense consists in the preservation and handing down of a method of contemplation. A method of contemplation, in its turn, is what makes it possible for us to transcend our bodily, psychic and merely ratiocinative life, to go beyond our sensations, feelings and argumentative logic, in order to attain through intellectual vision a knowledge of and communion with the Divine, the source of all things. A corollary of this is that it permits us to perceive physical things as symbols of what lies beyond them. It permits us to perceive the hidden workings of reality, the spiritual essences that all things enshrine and of which they are the visible and tangible manifestations.

We are not going to win any of those damaged young people back through moralism and didacticism. You can't give hard food to people who have been fed nothing but a diet of mush for all their spiritual lives, and expect them not to choke on it. So then, what? How are we going to do this? I suppose the first question is, How do we convince them that Christianity is so much more than moralism and emotionalism, but not just intellectualizing either?

When I was in London this week, I heard three different people say, at various points, "Christianity needs to be strange again." Well, that's what I'm working on with my forthcoming book. Please tell me what you're thinking. If you can't comment below, then email me at rod -- at -- amconmag -- dot -- com, and don't forget to put FAITH in the subject line.