Are we weaker than past generations?

[DL82]

I have been reflecting recently on the way some of the stricter or more ‘primitive observance’ congregations have so few vocations from the Western world. The Franciscan Nuns of the Immaculate in Cornwall, UK, for example, are almost entirely from the Philippines - they have had numerous British postulants, but no British nuns have actually been professed. The basic reason, I am told by a Traditionalist friend, is that British people just can’t cope with their level of discipline anymore.

It made me wonder, if people from those countries where life is harder, shorter, and less comfortable, countries we tend to describe as ‘developing’ or ‘less developed’, are able to sustain such lives of discipline and penance, which we in the West have become too soft to cope with, can we really set any value by our centuries of ‘progress’?

Although there are a good number of American Friars in the Friars of the Immaculate and the Friars of the Renewal, many of them also come from backgrounds where they have had a ‘hard’ life, either through the injustice of the world, or through the harsh discipline of strict Traditionalist Catholic schools.

I like to think of myself as a modern Catholic, but not a modernist. That is, I believe that the material progress of the world, while not an unqualified good, and particularly our increased understanding of human psychology and human nature, is a gift from God for the betterment of humanity. And yet something fundamental seems to have changed.

Here in Scotland, and over in Ireland, some of the Catholic religious orders of the past (which I will not name and shame) have become synonymous with cruelty. The real scandal of many of our schools and orphanages in the 1950s-1970s was that the ‘ordinary’ physical abuse to which the monks and nuns subjected pupils, in order to instil a strict sense of discipline and a resilience to the harshness of the world in which people then lived, many of them well-meaning but misguided, was so severe that it became almost impossible to distinguish the regular complaints and resentment of the children from the allegations of sadistic or sexual abuse perpetrated by a few truly vicious priests and religious. It can only be a blessing that the routine beating or humiliation of children by such orders is a thing of the past.

And yet I can’t avoid wondering whether this is the normal modus operandi of the Church. Through most of its history, ordinary people have been put through great trials by their faith, and only the few, the very holy, were able to function well within those trials. Those were the saints, the good priests and good religious, a minority perhaps among many religious, particularly women (I am thinking of St Therese, St Bernadette and St Margaret Mary Alocque for example) who were oppressed by their order, their will broken, their soul crushed. Only the strong spirit survived. The majority of the people, perhaps bearing inside them the same resentment that has surfaced from the victims of the physical abuse of the 1950’s-onwards, but silencing such resentment out of a sense of obedience to Holy Church, continued to go to Mass, out of a sense of piety and the fear of God - they may have been hurting, but “Lord, to whom shall we go, you alone have the words of eternal life” - so they came to Mass, not even to receive communion, except on the rare occasions they had been to confession, but just to be there, in the presence of a priest whom they held to be a saint, to beg the prayers of those strong ones who had made it through those trials, that they might somehow scrape into Purgatory. The Church has always exalted suffering, one only has to look at the bloody and disfigured corpus on medieval Spanish crucifixes to see that.

Has our modern psychology, and our modern ‘caring’ Church’s accommodation of the World’s discourse of avoiding unnecessary suffering, made us soft, made us scared of penance and discipline?

I realise I sound like a barbarian for even suggesting this. I can’t bear the thought that this line of reasoning returns us to the barbarism of the routine and systematic brutality toward children that was synonymous with some of those awful convents and schools. Can Catholicism only flourish when death is ever-present and life is ‘nasty, brutish and short?’ Can someone please show me the error of my reasoning?

Can we return to the discipline of the past without such barbarism? If the discipline of the early Franciscans or Carthusians is going to become a thing of the past, impossible for ‘modern’ humanity, can that ever be welcome in the Church?

 

[EmeraldWings]

well, i think the answer is, mainly to your question in the topic title “are we weaker than past generations?”
it’s not that we are “weaker” because the truth of it is, we are all weak in ourselves, even the “strongest” of the great saints were weak in themselves, it is God who gives us strength,
and to acquire that strength, we need trust in God, complete self surrender and dependence on Him, and of course the will to be good according to His laws and teachings.

going back to that “barbaric” way of discipline, in my opinion, won’t help much by itself, and quite frankly isn’t necessary, it wasn’t just the church’s way, but the social norm, and there were much more barbaric practices in the past than what was going on in certain Catholic orphanages and schools,

the idea behind discipline for children is to teach them that there are consequences for their bad behavior(among other things)
but the idea behind discipline for adults, which can be carried out by someone else or the person themselves, is to mortify their senses, to help them be in control of themselves rather then to be slaves to their feelings and passions and emotions,
of course discipline for an adult is far different from discipline for a child, but the results can be the same depending on how they take it in.

but i think the reason for this lack of strength in society today is not so much the lack of discipline, but the overwhelming amount of corruption being pushed on us at all sides,
when we are corrupt, we are not as likely to practice our virtues, or at least we’d have a much harder time doing it, and when we yield to sin the way it seems to be right now, we’re not going to see things the same,
sin has become the social norm, and virtue has become twisted in the eyes of many, so it is really no wonder that suffering is going to be very frowned upon, being that it is such a great means to holiness, and of course i don’t mean the severe barbaric discipline as you’ve described, but simply whatever we have to suffer in life against our will, and also what we can suffer without serious harm to ourselves, Jesus showed us that to suffer is not bad, otherwise He would not have gone through with it, but what is bad is to be the cause of anothers suffering for the purpose of making them suffer(out of hate or whatever else)

well, aside from all that, i think the best way to achieve holiness or saintliness, is by loving God, and surrendering yourself to Him without reserve, when you do that, the rest seems to follow, including mortification, which is the discipline i think we all need more then what anyone else can do, because it is a discipline we do willingly, and so we learn by that means to accept any suffering, along with whatever is Gods will for us.

well, just my thoughts anyways, i’ve actually thought about this particular subject quite often, about what you mentioned with the way people use to discipline others and themselves, but as i understand, the church has since condemned that form of discipline…for good reason,
if anything has brought on our “softness” i think it’s from the changes in the mass, which i personally came to the conclusion of after joining my current parish, the traditional Latin mass of the FSSP…the people there are so kind, so pious, even the children are very serious and pious about their alter serving, they are also very well behaved during mass and even afterwords, respectful, considerate…it’s like stepping into the past, or onto another planet it’s just a breath of fresh air, and i think it’s the key to the problem,
so i don’t think it’s so much the discipline, but the teachings and the environment, it’s a matter of making good impressions and being a good example,
of course discipline is a good thing, but all these things work together, it’s not just one thing we need, i think we need to get back to the way things were liturgically and traditionally, among other things, but as for discipline…i don’t think it should go back, we know alot more now medically with how things effect the body and all that…and i just don’t think it would be good for our health.

well, just my thoughts, so that’s all, take care.

 

[curlycool89]

Yes and no. No, we’re probably the same as past generations, but as a society we have been taught different so it is yes. We aren’t weaker, we’ve just been trained to not fight. Any temptation we are told to just give into because “there are no consequences”.

Just to point out an example: insurance. You can get insurance for anything these days. Drive fast on the highway? Who cares, insurance will cover it if I hit anything! Getting married? Better make sure you sign a prenup. Dangerous job? Who cares, my family will be find without me because I have life insurance.

Now just to be clear, I don’t have anything against insurance, it’s just a really good example of the infinite backstops of our culture. It’s rare that anyone truly looses anymore. In the middle ages, if you lost everything you pretty much became enslaved to a landowner. Society enjoyed more freedom, more backstops, and became less concerned with religion and more with the secular world all at the same time. It seems to have been a lethal immoral combination.