Has the Catholic Church gone soft?

That seems to be the argument in this column from The Pilot, the Catholic paper for the Archdiocese of Boston. The piece was written by Kevin and Marilyn Ryan, editors of “Why I Am Still A Catholic.”

They were dismayed at what they saw recently during vacation:

The church, one of the newer types, modeled on the theatre-in-the-round, was packed with families decked out in shorts and sandals. What was most striking about the liturgy, however, was that, with the exception of the celebrant, the event was dominated by women and girls. The reader was a young woman. There were two altar girls. All five eucharistic ministers were women. The happy-clappy, Barry Manilow music, played on one of those plinky-plink portable pianos, was led by a woman with back-up of five teen-age girls. Even that last bastion of non-clerical male prerogative, the corps assigned to pass the collection basket, was composed mainly of the fairer sex. If anyone needed an existence proof of the feminization of the Catholic Church, it was on display that Sunday.

In the years following WWII, Catholics were led by a legion of strong and often rigid priests. Authoritarian pastors ruled their parishes, throwing out a crumb of responsibility here to the parochial school’s nuns and a crumb there to the Ladies Altar and Rosary Society. At the same time, the Church loudly proclaimed the importance of the family and the centrality of the man as the head of the family. Words were backed up by real outreach to men, an outreach not lost on their sons. Strong men served proudly in the Knights of Columbus, and promised themselves to serve and support any widows of Knights who had died. Then there were monthly men’s club meetings, a staple of parish life. So, too, was the Communion Breakfast where after Sunday Mass, fathers and their sons feasted on pancakes and sausages and were enthralled by talks from the winning coach of the area’s winning football team or an inspiring address by a former Navy chaplain who in WWII had won the Silver Star.

Two events during the 1960s diminished both the role of men in our Church and the Church’s impact on them. First, Vatican II seemed to soften the Church’s clear position on many things and to focus more on process and issues such as liturgy and women in the Church. While these issues are important, they don’t have the capacity to hold the male attention like a tight, fourth-quarter, game-winning spiral pass in the end zone, or a moving tale of battle, sacrifice and saving souls on a sinking air craft carrier.

The other event was the sexual revolution. In a brief few years, the young Catholic male’s primary question, “Actually, how far can you go?” was replaced by “Be real with me Tiffany. Are you, like, ya know, protected?” Catholic fathers, too, were swept up in the new erotica. Defying Woody Allen’s recommendations that people should marry for life–like pigeons and Catholics, we began divorcing and leaving our children to the care of their mothers in the same high numbers as the rest of our countrymen.

The American Church lost sight of its men, leaving Catholic young men with one of two options: 1) to take seriously their increasingly feminized Church with its “gender sensitive language” and vague, smarmy ecumenicalism or 2) kick back, join the guys, chug a few brews and spend their weekends channel surfing for sports and hunting for compliant Tiffanies and Jasmines.

Historically, the Church’s major investment in education was built to form Catholic gentlemen who would be soldiers for Christ. Sadly, though, our Catholic schools and particularly our colleges became [and regrettably most still are] breeding grounds for “liberated men,” undisciplined over-age adolescents, respected for the number and grandeur of their sexual conquests and their ability to tap a keg.

The column goes on to note that “change is again blowin’ in the wind.” The Ryans see a silver lining in the new breed of priests pouring through the doors of the seminaries, many evidently inspired by the more manly model of John Paul II. Read on and see what you think.

I suspect that what the Ryans dislike isn’t so much the “feminization” of the Church, but the modernization that followed Vatican II. And they have a lot of nostalgia for a bygone era when men were men and women were women.

I’m not sure life was necessarily better back then. But they make an interesting case that it was.

Photo: Lucian Perkins, Washington Post