On Being Replaced by a More Faithful Generation

Exactly right!

From Renewal: How a New Generation of Faithful Priests and Bishops is Revitalizing the Catholic Church. . .

The infighting continues as the aging generations of progressive Catholics continue to lobby the Church’s leaders to change her teachings on reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, and women’s ordination. Yet they are being replaced with a new generation of young faithful Catholics who are attracted to the Church because of the very timelessness of these teachings. These younger Catholics are attracted to orthodoxy. But it is not a reactionary or backward-looking orthodoxy. Rather, it is an orthodoxy that longs for the noblest ideals and achievements of the Church—the philosophy, the art, the literature, and the theology that make Catholicism countercultural (9).

If this younger generation of faithful priests and bishops can maintain both their theological orthodoxy and their evangelical zeal, then we will see the Church revived in a big way. However, if theological orthodoxy is allowed to become little more than propositional repetition, then we will see something akin to the immediate post-VC2 period -- theological, moral, and liturgical chaos, a return to the Cultural Revolution (a la Maoist China) that left the Church empty, dispirited, and useless.  

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