Gratitude and Glory Days

Children today may grow up thinking these are the good old days. And yet we're in a time of acute institutional entropy, an age of unravelling.

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Do you remember a time, not very long ago, when things seemed to be alright? Not perfect. But alright. Life wasn’t easier then, but it was more wholesome.

Kids played outside with other kids. We may have had less stuff, but we took better care of our things. When something broke, we fixed it. We had phones, sure, but our telephones were connected to the wall by a cord, not to the internet; they certainly didn’t live in our pockets. People went to church.

“Back then,” people trusted one another, mostly. More importantly, they looked out for one another. In the old days, grown-ups were expected to behave like adults and to be civil to one another. Men were men and women were ladies. Children were taught respect and manners.

Remember when politicians were trusted? Ok, maybe not trusted. But politicians at least acted as though decency and honesty were the bedrock of public service, and tried to keep the mask from slipping. Do you remember when the government was more or less respectable and seen as trustworthy?

Remember when the Church was a widely trusted institution, before the days of scandal and bankruptcy and parish closures and decades of slumping Mass attendance? Do you remember those days?

Here’s the part where I’m supposed to point out that the Good Old Days weren’t nearly so great as I’ve made them out to be. They weren’t.

Here’s where I note that nostalgia for the comparative freedom and innocence of youth is common to every generation. Most people with even reasonably happy childhoods probably grow up thinking of their own youth as the good old days.

No doubt, young children today are going to grow up thinking these are the good old days. All undoubtedly true.

And yet.

Today’s young Catholics — Catholics younger than me, anyway — have mostly grown up in an age of acute institutional entropy, an age of unravelling. Something about the changes of the last 30 or 40 or 50 years seems different in kind, not just in degree. And it seems to be accelerating. Everyone seems to know it, too, though there’s no consensus about the cause.

There’s even less consensus about what comes next.