Good post. But I want to focus in on this paragraph.
As a young man I retained my parents conservative principles, but the religion I belonged to ***appeared *** not to be doing that. I saw, for example, very few of my fellow Catholics becoming active in the pro-life movement. But Jerry Falwell was. Thus began my 20 year journey across the Tiber.
This is where we need to listen to those evangelicals who speak of a ‘personal relationship’. I know there are problems with that philosophy, but it resonated with a young man who refused to be nominal.
We need a living, vibrant Catholicsm.
It’s not just a philosophy and I agree with you. What does God say about being lukewarm in the Bible? He would rather that we were hot or cold. Father Ricardo was speaking to a Catholic men’s group and he told them: “Do something.”
Starting in the late 1960s, the media culture around us morphed, very gradually, from “those words you can’t say on TV” to gradually getting around to saying some of them by the late 1990s and all of them today.
You see, Catholics like myself did not mind the occasional risque or off color joke or situation, especially on TV in the 1970s. We thought at least part of the media had retained some of its values. But we went from the Wonderful World of Disney, Ozzie & Harriet and I Love Lucy to what? Two and a Half Men?
You also should know that during all those decades, the academics and lawyers were arguing for “freedom of speech” and “freedom of expression.” After all, they argued, a stripper was just expressing herself. The same with pornography. Freedom of the press. Any kind of self-control, even for individuals, was argued against. It’s bad, it’s wrong, to tell anybody what to do. Even your own kids. How many parents today, just feed, diaper, clothe, put through school and at 18, eject them from the home? While providing only nominal guidance during the process?
This happened gradually over a 40 year period. TV became a mild addiction. The thing you automatically turned on and watched in a trance-like state after work. What was once a common, shared community experience of cohesive neighborhoods and good neighbors gradually turned into radical individualism. “Leave me alone! Nobody can tell me what to do.” Fine. But people, and communities, generally do badly without shared values, even if they all don’t go to the same Church. The radical abortionists made it a point to let people see a pro-abortion protestor yelling: “Keep your beliefs off my body!”
You see? Anyone who firmly believed something was wrong was trying to impose their values. You know what? In the absence of “those values,” no values have taken their place. Or as one divorced performer said of his current situation: “I do my thing and she does her thing and sometimes we do our thing together.”
Foundational truth.
Actual committment.
And knowing that faith without works is dead. There’s more than putting in your hour in Church every Sunday, especially if you actually live like an agnostic the rest of the time.
Look at some of the posts here. God? What God? And what’s up with that holy book of yours? We’ve got some ancient mythology to compare it to.
The immersive media environment, as it exists today, is a bad influence in general for people who are uneducated and unsophisticated, and especially for those Catholics who do not truly understand what our faith teaches. Too many think that the media is not out to hurt me, when in fact, there are production meetings for the next season of Dexter, that lovable serial killer. I mean, you would think that people would… uh… notice when a Serial Killer is the ‘hero’ of the show. But, after all, he only kills ‘bad’ people – whatever the word ‘bad’ might mean.
Pray to God to guide you. There’s plenty to do.
Peace,
Ed
I think these are quotes tell us what we are seeing. As the Church activist and liberals told us we had to have the Priest turn away from the Alter and Tabernacle and face the people. They told us we had to do away with all the traditions so we could be more inviting to the modern world and have a big & open tent.