An eerie 1968 NBC documentary VIDEO: “The New American Catholic”. Fr. Z comments and reminisces about many things.

I spotted a video on Twitter/X.

But first…  let me help you get into the mood.

Now that that’s in your head….

The video I spotted is a 1968 documentary from NBC “The New American Catholic”. The Masses you see are being perpetrated with the transitional 1964 Missal, not the Novus Ordo 1969/70 Missal. You can see what the “spirit” of Vatican II has already done in a few short years. Also, you see that NBC is not just reporting… this is also propaganda. It was engineered by the infamous then-bishop, soon to be ex-bishop, the hyper-ambitious ultra-liberal James Patrick Shannon, who was a rising star in the US Church and who fought against Humanae vitae.

At 4:40, you see a shot of St. Helena Church in S. Minneapolis. I was stationed there for a while. When this documentary was made, Shannon, auxiliary of St. Paul and Minneapolis was pastor there. In the film you see a shot of one of the truly beautiful series of windows and then a shot of him saying Mass. The background artwork is still there in the sanctuary. Later he is in the office area of the rectory off of the living room. I had a bit of a shiver seeing it, because, despite the beauty of that church and the wonderful people, it was a year of sheer hell because of how the pastor treated me and the trap that was set by the then VG. But I digress. May God have mercy on his soul. I pray for him at every Mass at the Memento of the living.

I knew of this documentary, but I had never seen it. Msgr. Schuler, my old pastor at my home parish of St. Agnes in St. Paul spoke of it, and of Shannon, whom he knew well. Schuler was a year ahead of Roach and Shannon.

This documentary provoked the wrath of the powerful Card. McIntyre who effectively shut down Shannon’s meteoric climb. When he realized that his ride was over, and that he was doomed to be an auxiliary, he married in secret (his favorable biographers say he married after he quit not before, but older priests of the diocese who had known him from seminary told me otherwise), continued for a while to function as a bishop, and then causing a tsunami of scandal, very publicly renounced being a bishop. He was suspended a divinis. He wound up being a big shot of General Mills. Every year the local paper would interview him around Easter and there he was in his lay clothes still wearing his episcopal ring and talking heresy. Eventually when he was dying the Holy See reconciled with him (somehow) even though Shannon never had to renounce anything he had said or done, including abandon his episcopal vocation.

When I first was working in Curia in Rome I met the late great then-Msgr. and later – way too late! – Cardinal Luigi De Magistris. When he ask me where I was from and I said St. Paul and Minneapolis, he stopped in his tracks and looked at me saying, “Ahhhh… Shannon. And that Archbishop who was in jail.” He meant the late Archbishop Roach who in 1985 when he was president of the NCCB (now USCCB) was arrested for drunk driving after driving his car into the wall of a convenience store. The local sheriffs could no longer turn a blind eye. He wound up spending a short, very short if I remember, in jail. Roach was the one who, ultimately, handed me my hat put my feet on my road away from the St. Paul Seminary toward Rome, away from my home and family and friends, because I had a calling to answer. The reason I was given for being “deselected” – yes, that’s the exact word the spineless rector used – was “You have a driving need to know the truth.”  Verbatim.   No kidding.

I left the Twin Cities with a one-way ticket and $200. Within two weeks in Rome, I had a job in a Vatican Office, a new bishop and a new seminary.  After Roach was out, I would be back in Twin Cities as a priest for while, to which I refer above when I was at St. Helena.

Roach and Shannon were classmates, ordained the same year from the St. Paul Seminary.

Shannon’s blather about how Vatican II calls for a reexamination of the needs of mankind “in the real situation” is eerily familiar right now! There is, right now, a massive push at various paradigm shifts, through praxis as well as through certain ambiguous and downright strange doctrinal expressions.

At about 8:40 you see a Monsignor seated, Msgr. Rudolph Bandas who was, at that time, the pastor of St. Agnes, Msgr. Schuler’s predecessor. Bandas was a peritus at all of the sessions of Vatican II, as an expert on catechesis. When liturgical changes were issued from Rome, he implemented them at St. Agnes as they were written.  Therefore, since nothing in any of the documents said abandon Latin and chant, they were preserved, nothing said tear out altars and say Mass versus populum, they preserved the main altar and used it.  As a matter of fact, there was never a Cranmer table in the sanctuary except one, I think, when Roach came and insisted on a table.  But that was never repeated when either he or any other bishop of cardinal came.    In the documentary, Bandas is seated in the living room – then pastor’s office – of St. Agnes rectory.  That bookshelf was still there when I was staying at the parish over summers back from Rome.  Then Fr. Schuler – the weekend fireman, as it were, while he was teaching at St. Thomas College, was present at St. Agnes’ rectory when NBC showed up to film Bandas for this documentary.    Bandas died in 1969 and Msgr. Schuler because pastor on the cusp of the Novus Ordo.  He maintained strict adherence to the black and white and added the splendor of great sacred music, including 3o Sundays of the year orchestral Masses with a large chorale and members of the Minnesota Orchestra.  That remains today, the Twin Cities Catholic Chorale.  Amazing.   Schuler was friends with Pope Benedict’s brother, also a church musician in Regensburg, Georg Ratzinger and Benedict knew what Schuler was doing at St. Agnes (cause I told him).  He was always interested to see the schedule of the Masses and, when he saw the list he’d comment on them knowledgably.  When Schuler died, I sent a note to Benedict’s secretary Msgr. Gänswein and Benedict sent a beautiful letter to the parish for reading during Schuler’s funeral.

I digress.   This is getting to autobiographical.

Bandas was dead set against Shannon’s agenda.

There is a layman who says “we are adults in the Church”, which is the attitude that lead to standing for Communion and sticking out the hand.  That layman, at about 9:20, is Donald Horman, then publisher of the National Catholic Reporter, aka Fishwrap.  It was already nuts then. in 1968, the same year as the documentary, Bishop Charles H. Helmsing of Kansas City, Missouri, the Fishwrap was located, issued a condemnation of the paper and demanded that it remove the word Catholic from its name. Bishop Helmsing said that it had a “policy of crusading against the Church’s teachings,” a “poisonous character” and “disregard and denial of the most sacred values of our Catholic faith.” Because the publication “does not reflect the teaching of the Church, but on the contrary, has openly and deliberately opposed this teaching,” he asked the editors to “drop the term ‘Catholic’ from their masthead” because “they deceive their Catholic readers and do a great disservice to ecumenism by […] watering down Catholic teachings.” They refused and are so heterodox now that it should be called the National Schismatic Reporter – if one is forced to think of it at all. Best that it be relegated to the cat box. Please see my long-poster Prayer for the Fishwrap.

Around 14:00 they get to the “experimental Community of John XXIII” in Oklahoma City, where they “think for themselves”.   Eventually, I think about 1975, they split from the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City.  They were doing all sorts of things, including giving Communion to non-Catholics.  At about 21:00 enjoy them teaching children to sing Kumbaya with a guitar that I think had never been tuned.  In the Mass clip that follows there is still a three-fold, “Lord, I am not worthy” because it was still in the 1964 Missal.   At 23:00 is Bp. Reed of Oklahoma (in 1972 Tulsa was cut off and OK City became an Archdiocese).

At 25:30 John McKenzie, SJ of Notre Dame comes on and talks in typical Jesuit style about modification of structures.  Then Shannon is right back with “new church” with a pretty clear justification of disobedience for the sake of novelties.

At 29:00 we get to Chicago’s Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) which is still around. … I think.  It looks like their site hasn’t been updated for a while.  It was a kind of “labor union” of priests, which could apply pressure for liberal ends.  At 30:30 we get then-Fr. James Groppi of Milwaukee, focused on civil rights.  He left the priesthood, in 1976, married and incurred an excommunication.  He attempted to become an Episcopalian priest but stopped short.  He wound up as a bus driver in Milwaukee.  At 32:30 a priest “on leave” “Robert Duggan former priest” in lay clothes make an appeal for an end to priestly celibacy.  He makes an interesting observation that, for the first time, the Catholic Directory showed decrease in the number of priest because priests were quitting.  Duggan headed up the National Association for Pastoral Renewal.  In 1971  there was a meeting in NYC of 6 dissident groups which were trying to merge: The Society of Priests for a Free Ministry, the National Federation of Priests Councils, the National Association of the Laity, the National Association for Pastoral Renewal, the National Association of Women Religious and Seminarians for Ministerial Renewal.  What a hellish soup.

At 36:30 Shannon introduces feminist Sr Anita Caspary Mother General of the IHMs, in Los Angeles, which I’m sure got McIntyre’s attention.  No habit.  She wound up on the cover on Time in 1970.  She calls the habit a “costume”.  She sounds like the LCWR types do now.  This was the beginning of that madness.  In 1969 Caspary’s crazy moves caused a split in the IHM’s.  50 sisters refused to start a new community with her.  By 1976 that group split into 3 groups.  By their fruits….

Bp. Reed of Oklahoma is back at 46:00 with an appeal for some experimentation.

At this point in the documentary the move has been from the changes among women religious, to their use of small groups, to other small groups with lay people.

Back comes Shannon, who then brings in one of the Protestant observers at the Second Vatican Council.  48:50.  Dr. Albert C. Outler of Southern Methodist University and expert on Wesleyan theology.  He bats clean up.  OF course it would be a PROTESTANT, right?  In 1971 he was made the president of the American Catholic Historical Society and in 1987 got ultra-liberal Collegeville Abbey’s Pax Christi Award.   In WaPo‘s obit for him we read: “In 1986, Outler told a gathering of Catholic priests that official ecumenism was dead. “As a grizzled ecumaniac with a wealth of golden memories, I have to say that, for the time being, official ecumenism seems to be dead in the water,” he said. He blamed the decline on the churches’ “preoccupations with the bewildering range of social, economic, political causes confronting us all,” as well as internal conflicts and membership losses suffered by denominations.” In this documentary, he is still optimistic. He says its all about “freedom” and the Church has finally opened its heart to the world. “The Church is going to make it or fail in the spirit of freedom, persuasion, love, brotherhood.”

At the end, we have various recaps of visuals, including art work that looks very much like the slop produced for the Walking Together on Walking Togetherity. Very much like, come to think of it. And we have plentiful guitars and sprightly singing full of hope at the new springtime of freedom and renewal sweeping through the church like a fresh breeze through the opening windows.   I chased down the final song, 50:00, wasting several precious minutes of my life, which I suspected was by Ray Repp.  Yep, Repp.  “Come, my brothers, and don’t be afraid” from the Hymnal for Young Christians 1966.  I couldn’t find the full lyrics online.  Maybe one of you has that book on a dusty shelf?

This time machine video holds up a mirror to our own time.

The same agendas are now being pushed by people with power who grew up in this stuff and were infected by it to the point that they never grew out of it.

It seems to me that the younger people in other countries and in these USA who are pushing the agenda in this 1968 documentary today are in effect Communists and homosexualists.  In these USA, at least, the older ones pushing this stuff grew up in the halcyon days of protests and Vatican II. Their own identity is fused with the mythic, iconic “spirit” of those times.  When they see something like a biretta or hear the suggest that Latin be used, or Gregorian chant, a switch flicks in their heads and they go into an anti-authority, anti-traditional mode.  Also, clergy and lay alike, if they know something about the older form of Mass, they realize that in the Vetus Ordo they can’t be the center of attention, as they can be in the Novus Ordo.  By now so many priests are conditioned to have to be the focus of attention, the driving energy of the “liturgy”, the main event, the ring master, the host of the party.  This may not even be conscious, at this point.  More could be written.  This is sufficient.

At last, here it is.  Buckle up.  1968.

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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31 Comments

  1. monstrance says:

    68’ was a tumultuous year. Except for my Tigers winning the World Series.
    The Church Hippies. – didn’t teach much or save many souls, but, give em a big piece of felt and a pair of scissors, and they could produce a magnificent banner.

  2. BeatifyStickler says:

    Thank you for sharing this. The 1960’s crowd was disastrous for the Church globally. You can still feel the claws of the sixties crowd hooked in to the Church all over in Canada. I knew of people referring to Francis as the Party Pope!! I suspect the same crowd to be deeply homosexual in their thinking. My wife and I were married in the Traditional rite, let’s just say some family were furious and angry at the idea of our wedding. The same family doesn’t show the same anger over contraception, fornication, or their “trans” children, but boy were they angry at biretta and palestrina. Maybe this is sinister, but renewal will come when many of these people are gone to their reward. Even Dr. Jordan Peterson gets it! When Dr. Peterson converts he will bring more young men into the Church than these hippies could ever dream of, and they will be traditionally minded no doubt.

  3. Aren’t the IHMs the nuns who were destroyed because they opened themselves up to the blandishments of Carl Rogers?

    The young people of 1968 are now the bitter old people still trying to force the rest of us to live in 1968. As Charles Coulombe aptly says, the boomers are the generation who grew old without ever growing up.

  4. redneckpride4ever says:

    Ah yes, I’ve had the misfortune of seeing this liberal Protestant propaganda piece. Basically a watered down Woodstock minus all the talent from that festival.

    Their attempt to appeal to the hippies failed badly. I think Jerry Garcia’s positive statement about the beauty of the old Latin Mass speaks volumes to that.

    Strangely enough, only 2 things have ever brought me to the town of Gilford, NH: surviving members of the Grateful Dead and the SSPX.

  5. Benedict Joseph says:

    You describe an epoch that was simply madness. The media’s hyper endorsement of everything “katholic” should have awakened every caution that could be imagined, but it didn’t. It fueled it. “Katholicism” was in the middle of a drunken doctrinal/liturgical orgy. The wink and the nod prevailed across every spectrum of the Church in America. I recall well the disorientation the practices in vogue were provoking in my parents and particularly my grandparents…and not least of all my high school peers. I know of none of them — graduates of Catholic high school, many of Catholic colleges, who have remained practicing Catholics. Catechesis was abandoned after my freshman year to be replaced with nothing but the term “religion class” — at best a study period or meaningless conversation.
    It was hell time.
    And we are right back to it. Whatever is left of that clerical cohort of the day — mostly the then newly ordained, mostly left, those who remained…some awakened from the stupor. Others, we know well, simply went underground to survive and inflict the terrors upon us once again.

  6. amenamen says:

    The melody to “Enter, Rejoice and Come In” should be recognizable to all Gene Autry fans. It is a slightly simplified version of “Back in the Saddle Again, ” almost note for note. Once you realize this, it will never sound quite the same again.

    I’m back in the saddle again
    Out where a friend is a friend
    Where the longhorn cattle feed
    On the lowly jimsonweed
    Back in the saddle again.

  7. Thank you for sharing something of your autobiography, Father.

    It strikes me that you were cancelled already back in Seminary before being cancelled was even a thing!

    Nevertheless, he persists!

    Thank you for your persistence, Father, and all you do to help us get to heaven.

  8. Tony Pistilli says:

    My family moved from Minneapolis to Madison 3 years ago. I am frequently amazed at the extent of the fruits of one great bishop… and yet how much more is needed.

  9. JPaulZ says:

    This was painful to watch. I was a young elementary student at a Catholic Parish and School in the Arch Diocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, when all this was coming down. I remember my religion was invaded by very bad music and art. I thought that at the time and my view on that has not changed. Exemplified by the “artwork” by the IHMs sister, who was touted as an “artist” and the music in this documentary which speaks for itself. My Religion class evolved from reading the Catechism to a form of art class drawing pictures. The class was easier, so I may have liked that. It had a profound effect on me. I was a tepid Catholic for many years until one day I met you, Fr. Z., at my new parish in Minnesota. You awoke in me the love for the Catholic church and its traditional rites that were lost to me. Thank you! I have a copy of the F.E.L Song Book “Hymnal for Young Christians”, but it is volume 1 and doesn’t contain “Come, my brothers, and don’t be afraid”. Sorry. It does however have several of the other songs in this documentary including several by Ray Repp and let’s not forget Sister Germaine, another Catholic stalwart who left the convent and got married. I hold onto that song book for its sort of sick entertainment value. This is a profound documentary on failure. Thank you for sharing. History, if not studied will repeat itself. God bless you.

  10. summorumpontificum777 says:

    In many ways, this feels like one of those films of happy, contented people in the minutes or hours before a massive disaster in which they lost their loves (e.g., space shuttle crew before explosion, JFK speaking at the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce 11/22/63, etc.). The revolutionaries of 1968 played a huge role in wrecking the Catholic Chuch, but on some level I have a lot more respect for them and the current generation of “progressive Catholics” that’s assumed near total control of the Church in period following the resignation of Benedict XVI. In 1968, many sincere liberals really thought they were “singing a new Church into being.”
    It was the Age of Aquarius and all that, and they thought that the Church could pivot to the left and not only stay relevant but become even more relevant. They were wrong, but only a small minority of Catholics (Lefebvre, Ottaviani, Evelyn Waugh, Dietrich Von Hildebrand, to name a few) were able to recognize and articulate that the revolution was a disaster and spelled doom for the Church. Today’s progressives don’t have the excuse of naive optimism. No honest, sane observer in 2024 thinks that doubling down on liberalism will boost vocations, spur mass attendance, Catholic family life etc. Every protestant denomination that has adopted a progressive platform has imploded. Thus, the 2024 progressive has the benefit of hindsight, and as such is more culplable than his antecedent of 1968

  11. hwriggles4 says:

    Fr. Z:

    I will have to watch this documentary and thanks for mentioning Bishop Victor Reed. Reed was the Bishop of Oklahoma in those days and was there for many years (Reed died circa 1974). A story from my dad about him was at the urging of my great uncle (who was a lawyer and had met Reed on a professional basis) gave permission over the phone for my grandmother to be buried in a Catholic cemetery. This was 1960 and my understanding in those days was this kind of permission was difficult for a non-Catholic. However I think it worked out because when my Catholic grandfather passed away in 1977 he was buried next to his beloved wife of 33 years. My grandfather visited her grave nearly every Sunday after Mass.

    Anyway several years ago I found a book about Bishop Reed (it looks like it was written for a thesis at CUA) and while it tells some history of Oklahoma Catholicism, it does cover much of the social justice programs that Reed supported. One thing I found interesting (I wasn’t born until the latter part of the 1960s) was the vocational aspect during the time Vatican II began in 1962 and the aftermath through the early 1970s. There were priests who thought they were going to be able to marry and some were even dating. In Oklahoma there were some ordination classes of 4 priests but during those particular years 6 or 7 priests would leave the priesthood. This made it difficult to staff parishes and vocations were literally in the red.

    I don’t know if other dioceses during this time period had similar experiences but I do recall reading that 800 priests left the priesthood between 1962 and 1975. I don’t know if this was worldwide or just the United States and Canada.

  12. cpt-tom says:

    Oh my…this dredges up early memories of the bad times. I was born in 1963, and I am the youngest of 7. the middle 4 went all in on this, and those 4 are not Catholic anymore. My oldest brother, who was out of College by 1967 is a devout Catholic still, my next oldest sister is Catholic, but, “church of nice” and then there is me the “black” sheep who is mostly a trad Catholic. My oldest brother and I are united in prayer for our family and do what we can in our parishes.

    This pattern of the destruction of the faith of the large families born during the boom repeated over and over again…sometimes whole families apostatizing, I see this as the so-called “Springtime of Vatican II”(tm) turned into the Nuclear Winter of demographics that the bishop’s ignore at their peril today. What makes it even more painful is the former hippie clerics and laity who are still in power, will not admit that it failed, and even are still trying to make it happen. They also do not see that not only did they lose the initial generation (boomers) they also lost their children and the generations after. Such a waste. St Peter pray for us, St Charels Borromeo, pray for us!

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  14. Sue in soCal says:

    To add to the history, I knew Corita Kent’s sister, Sister Mary Ruth, IHM. Sister Ruth,
    stayed with the group that had the modernized habit. She confided to me, after Corita left the order, her distress that, not only that Corita left the order, but that she no longer believed in God.

    When Corita died, I sent Sister Ruth a condolence card stating the hope that Corita was experiencing the joy that her art expressed. I kept in touch with Sister Ruth until she died.

    Sister Ruth, as testament to her strong fidelity to the teachings of the Church, was relieved of her position as librarian at St. John’s Seminary by Cardinal Mahoney as soon as he took over the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

    The seminary became a haven for heterodoxy and homosexuality. I personally witnessed this having to attend catechist classes at the seminary.

    Not only did he gut the treasures of the faith, he gutted the treasures of the seminary, selling off the Doheny collection and half of the property which included the dorms. Why? Maybe to fund his amphitheater known as the biggest cathedral (a whole foot longer!) than any others in the US, built after he tried to take a wrecking ball to the old St. Vibiana’s Catherdral. The wrecking crew showed up on a Saturday without permits. Alert local residents called proper authorities to stop the destruction. Unfortunately, no one could stop the real wrecking ball that was Cardinal Mahoney.

    I also know the last remaining IHM sister in full habit who is now spending her remaining years with another traditional habit order. God bless her for her faithfulness!

  15. T.R says:

    I highly recommend dr. E. Michael Jones’ article on the IHS nuns in LA and the psychological warfare waged on them (and on Catholics in general). Both Sr Anita Caspary and Crd. McIntyre, which fr. Z mentions in this post, is also discussed in Jones’ article and it’s really eye opening how psychoanalyzis was used as psychological warfare against nuns in the US.
    Here: https://archive.org/details/carl_rogers_ihm_nuns/page/n1/mode/2up

    (I see now Anita Moore posted a comment saying ‘Aren’t the IHMs the nuns who were destroyed because they opened themselves up to the blandishments of Carl Rogers’. YES, exactly, read the article!)

  16. tgarcia2 says:

    Here’s what I find fascinating about the whole V2 era, and when I first saw that video a few years ago it made me wonder a lot of things.

    As a poor analogy (sorry), I think of that lame plot in Picard where through the transporters the borg were able to modify Starfleet cadets dna to assimilate when activated. What’s my point?

    What was going on in the seminaries at the time for what is in the video?
    What made Fr. Hilderbrand on twitter (later deleted) recount a story told that after V2, a priest tore up a rosary and said it was no longer needed.
    What was going on with the catechism teaching that would make that man believe because he’s and adult, he should stand?

    It’s as if things were “triggered” that had all of this flood into the church. One could say “it’s the devil!” Yes, but, what was being taught, that allowed these attitudes to appear almost overnight. From doing the ‘62 missal to tossing it all out 6-8 years later as of nothing.

  17. Danteewoo says:

    Father Z — such memories. I played Ray Repp’s “To Be Alive” on the banjo at my high school seminary graduation for Mass celebrant Cardinal Cody in 1968. Mea culpa — now I am a Latin Mass guy who sings in the nearby Ukrainian Catholic parish choir. I have recovered from Vatican II.

    And I looked at the link to the Association of Chicago priests, and found the names of two friends who are on its masthead. One of us has “Friends in Low Places,” it appears.

  18. Servant says:

    I’ve seen this before, and having now watched it a 2nd time I have done two Lents worth of penances.

  19. Vir Qui Timet Dominum says:

    I know that some here are blasting NBC for even making this, but I can’t help but disagree. This is what real insightful journalism and documentary making is. There was no commentator, putting in his two cents. The documentary filmmaker allowed Catholics and their leaders to speak for themselves. It may be ugly and horrendous, but it’s also very important piece for the time.

    Remember that the old liberal curmudgeon of a priest that is somewhere in your diocese lived through this. This was the future of the Church. Despite his views and his terrible ars celebrandi, he remained a Catholic priesf well after many of his brother priests left for wives, or left Catholicism all together.

  20. BW says:

    I will watch this later, but found your comments and article insightful.

    So I was born in 1986 and lived through the Church in the 90s… when those priests who were ordained in the 1960s and 70s were plying their trade. The rot is deep and multi-generational. Not a suprise that Catholic millennials like me are now mostly either atheist, flavour of Protestant or “Trads”.

    Why do the bishops, priests and yes, even Cardinals and the Pope insist on doubling down on this stuff?

  21. Imrahil says:

    Yes, but, what was being taught, that allowed these attitudes to appear almost overnight.

    Dear tgarcia,

    it is an interesting question, but I think I can imagine something like the answer. Or at least something in the direction of the answer. Which raises further questions.

    What happened is, I guess, what happened around here when bars were finally-finally allowed not to enforce a mask-mandate from their patrons. They put ut a note “the use of the mask when not sitting at one’s table is, while no longer required, still very much recommended”, and the rest is history. Within two days the mask was history, and a couple of weeks later the waitress in an apologetic tone explained to me why she was wearing one (it was a valid and exceptional medicinal reason). I had not asked her.

    The difference is, of course, that we were right in wishing to see the end of the covid mask, and they were not right in seeing the end of traditional Catholic practices. There is no replacement for the question of right and wrong, as I always say.

    And I’ll even grant them that being a pious Catholic was, in the years and perhaps decades before, rather too much associated with having-less-fun, and an atmosphere where you’d imagine Chesterton’s figure Innocent Smith to be thundered at with dressing-downs. (I also grant that the Church probably did have to ally herself with the Respectable Folk, and those “conservative” in a phlegmatic sense of the term, in the face of the common, pun not int., enemy called Communism. But that was a heavy price to pay, not least because those people actually dared to consider interracial marriages sinful.)

    What I still don’t understand, though, is the opposition to precisely the fun side of religion: to the Rosary, to incense and all that. I can get that people would delight in seeing the sixth commandment (at least the before-marriage part) abolished; only it’s not possible. I could even perhaps understand (though of course heavily condemn) if they had replaced “pray for us sinners” by “pray for us thy children” or something.

    But why* give up the Rosary, and not just by doing less religious practice or none any-more at all (which was the somewhat logical conclusion of quite a few people), but actually replacing it with – even setting aside the heresies – dreary laborous practices that might befit the Passiontide we’re now in but not any other season?

    [* I am assuming that the story is true about someone actually giving it up as “no longer needed” in explicit terms, rather than just having less and less of it without conscious decision.]

  22. PostCatholic says:

    It’s ok not to enjoy “Enter, Rejoice and Come In.” Louise Ruspini didn’t write it for Catholic services, she wrote it for Unitarian Universalist services. You’ll find it in our hymnal “Singing the Living Tradition.” She definitely didn’t crib “Back in the Saddle Again” for it, though the metrical similarity is fun to think about. It’s interesting to me that Catholic liturgiess are borrowing it from us

  23. TonyO says:

    What cpt-tom describes is almost the same as my background, though I was born 2 years earlier. My parents told my very goody-two-shoes older sister she could bring a pillow to sleep during “religion” class (as a senior in high school), because it was (drearily) taught by a heretic priest of the parish, who should have been canned. She didn’t, but should have, given the outcome.

    To add to what Imrahill says, I will note Fr. Z’s closing comments, particularly

    It seems to me that the younger people in other countries and in these USA who are pushing the agenda in this 1968 documentary today are in effect Communists and homosexualist

    The communists pushed “revolution” as an idea, not as merely “let’s revolt from THIS particular regime”, but permanent revolution from all rules, even from all rationality. The current group in power fed on that pap, and their thinking is permanently twisted into insanity. I assume that Satan pushed this to make them witless tools: as they are unable to think themselves out of a paper bag, they cannot interfere when Satan pushes new idiocies from their mouths.

    As to tgarcia’s question, what was being taught at that time, that allowed them to go down this road? I believe that the real answer is that in spite of Leo XIII’s demand that seminaries teach Thomas Aquinas, and in spite of Pius X’s explicit condemnation of modernism, neither the bishops nor the seminaries took these to heart, rather they rejected them wholesale and allowed in the modernists into the seminaries. Well before 1960, apparently, the damage was quite far along, producing whole crops of uneducated “Catholic” priests, and seemingly early enough that scads of bishops at VII were unable to pierce through the clouds of obfuscation to insist on truth clearly stated. The “opening” of the windows in the 1960s, I suggest, merely told all these whited sepulchers that they were now free to speak their empty minds in the open. They had to have been made that way long before.

    And let’s not fail to note that this all happened under the earlier bishops’ watch, which means that they were either not educated well (i.e. not under the mantle of Aquinas and the Scholastics), or they were not awake to the calls of Leo and Pius to guard the seminaries. Either way, they failed their job, and the popes of the times kept on appointing new bishops who weren’t any better. Why? It looks like the formula for finding good bishops has been broken for over 100 years. (Yes, we have had some good bishops, but no more than by pure random chance. With Francis, he HAS been successful in appointing the kind of bishop that HE wants.)

  24. Patrick508 says:

    I’m not sure this production can totally be pinned on just Catholic or Protestant liberals. The closing credits list Stuart Schulberg as the producer & writer.

  25. PostCatholic says:

    I was telling a friend about the use of our UU hymn in this video, and how readers here are still familiar. The lyrics are changed — the original definitely doesn’t ask a congregation to “open your hearts to the Lord.” She reminded me of parody lyrics that I thought you might enjoy:

    Exit, go out, go away
    Exit, go out, go away
    Go enjoy the rest
    of your day
    Exit, go out, go away.

  26. Not says:

    Sorry I am late to the party. So many excellent comments. My wife and I watched it last night. We have similar stories. Turning point for my wife who has done Prolife work from the begining was when a Priest in the confessional told her there was nothing wrong with abortion, his mother had one. She exited the confessional crying. That Priest left the Priesthood and died a homosexual, God help him. I work in people’s houses over many years. When I see a Crucifix and comment on it it usually opens a conversation. One man started saying how we “need” married Priest. The Holy Ghost inspired me to ask him what that had to do with his salvation? He stopped, started to chuckle and said, absolutlely nothing. For the rest of the day we had a great conversation.

  27. campello says:

    @Vir Qui Timet Dominum

    You make an insightful point for my 1980+ generation. I had a major conversion from Lukewarmness in large part because of Summorum Pontificum and the journey that led me on (credit to my parents for having the foundation in place).

    For a few years after it was quite easy, and lazy of me to cast stones at that generation, rather than be grateful for the many priests I’ve had along the way who survived that mess. I’ve also come to learn that the ball had been rolling down the hill long before the 60s.

    To quote Fr. Ripperger- “we get the leaders we deserve”. I no doubt played my part in deserving the current state of affairs as well.

  28. The Masked Chicken says:

    Sorry that this will be a long post. I didn’t intend to respond, but the comment about priest numbers made me think I should say something, since I have the data available. The graphics have been sent to Fr. Z., who will add them when he gets time. This is kickin’ it old school academic journal style. I hope everything formats properly. I don’t see any line breaks in preview mode. Feel free to ignore the comments on priest abuse, since this is not the topic of this post.

    In the discussion about the movie, New American Catholic, hwriggles4 wrote:

    “I don’t know if other dioceses during this time period had similar experiences but I do recall reading that 800 priests left the priesthood between 1962 and 1975. I don’t know if this was worldwide or just the United States and Canada.”

    Since I have been doing a lot of demographics digging for the paper on the mathematical model of priest abuse I created [Infection in the Body of Christ: a model of priest abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States based on the observations of Pope Benedict XVI], I thought I would set the record straight about the priests decline. This is the only complete graph I know of that gives the data for priest numbers in the U. S. from 1900 to 2022. It took me a while to compile this data.

    [Insert First graph]

    As you can see, the rise in priest numbers is almost exactly linear until 1967 (the increase is in spite of the normal number of priests who retired or died the previous year and in spite of everything going on in society during 1920 – 1950). In 1968, there was an inflection point and the slope of the graph changed overnight to negative. The rising slope is 1.4 times faster than the falling slope (726 vs. -501 per year), so as of 2022 (the last year I collected data), we were back at the same number of priests as in 1942. I have provided below a table of priest numbers from 1960 to 1975 for anyone who might be interested (the full table is available upon request). In fact, the Church in the U. S. lost 2260 priests from 1968 to 1975. One can argue as to the cause, but something happened in 1967/1968 that started this trend. There is only one realistic possibility that influenced both society as a whole and priests, specifically: the issuance of the document, Sacerdotalis Caelibatus, by Pope Paul VI in 1967 that provided a path for priests to become laicized. This is the only cultural shift in 1967 that affected priests qua priests.

    1960 53796 Difference
    1961 54682 +686
    1962 55581 +899
    1963 56540 +959
    1964 57328 +788
    1965 58432 +94
    1966 59193 +759
    1967 59892 +701
    1968 59803 -89
    1969 59620 -183
    1970 59192 -408
    1971 58161 -131
    1972 57421 -740
    1973 56969 -452
    1974 56712 -257
    1975 58909 +197

    One might think that a lot of priests left to get married in the initial rush, but that number would have slowed down, eventually, as men simply didn’t enter the priesthood to begin with, choosing to get married, instead. The decline would then revert to the number of priests retiring or dying, which accounts for the linear downward trend after 1968. Actually, the analysis is a little more complicated because there are two slopes in the downward section: a more gentle slope from 1968 – 1975, when some priests left, but as life expectancy increased, fewer priests retired and the homosexual population of priests rose, then from 1975 – 2022, when the decline is steeper because of priest retirements and death and a more caution attitude about accepting homosexual applications to seminaries. 1985 was the first alert year about homosexuality that was taken seriously by the bishops – there were warnings as far back as 1960 or so, however – and there is a corresponding dip in the chart at that point.

    [Insert third graph]

    One can speculate that if Sacerdotalis Caelibatus had not been issued, the number of priests would have continued to rise, as the model shows. There was a radical re-conception of the what the priesthood was all about after Vatican II and this led to changes in seminary formation, with the first U. S. Bishop’s Conference Guide being issued in 1971.

    Sadly, there were priests entering the priesthood during the 1960’s decline – a larger than normal homosexual cohort, which would wreak havoc a decade later. Otherwise, there is no way to explain the rise in the percentage of homosexual priests from 4% in 1950 to 15% by 1980.

    As to the idea that it was society’s growing sexual liberalization that caused the priest shortage (which the New American Church might lead one to believe), this can be effectively argued against. To quote from the Infection paper:

    “No clear explanation for the rise and especially the fall of the nationwide abuse curve in the John Jay Causes and Scope report was provided beyond an appeal to the rise in abuse being caused by the general overall (sexual) liberalization of the culture during the period and yet, this does nothing to explain why the abuse substantially ended in 1990. The sexual landscape got, if anything, even more liberal after 1990 with greater acceptance of LBGTQ+ issues and, yet the abuse numbers still fell.”

    “ The John Jay hypothesis may be tested historically, however, because there was a similar pattern of societal and sexual liberalization after WW I. Divorce rates among Protestants sky-rocketed, much as they did during the 1970’s. among Catholics , Homosexual behavior became more pronounced in both Europe and America in the 1920’s leading to such things as the Harlem Drag Balls in New York, which attracted more than 7,000 people at its height. The first of what would come to be known as an X-rated movie, Purity, was released in 1921. The Free Love movement of the 1920’s, with its promotion of open sexual relationships outside of marriage resembled the Sexual Revolution in the 1960’s. The 1930 Lambeth conference in England permitted birth control for the first time in the Anglican Church, mirroring the debates which would occur in the 1960’s Catholic Church. The Lost Generation of the 1920’s mirrored the Beat Generation thirty years later. Drug addiction to alcohol and opiates were rampant in the 1920’s even as Prohibition played out. Both the 1920’s and the 1960’s were times of experimentation in art, cinema, and music. The combat horrors of both WWI and WWII along with servicemen from differing countries and cultures being forced to work side-by-side, resulted in a more laisse-faire attitude towards life after each of the Wars as well as a rising youth movement which challenged the old ways. It is a plausible argument, then, that similar historical phenomena should give rise to similar effects, mutatis mutandis, in the two periods.”

    “There is, however, a striking difference in how the Catholic Church responded during these two periods. Unlike in the 1960’s, the Church in the 1920’s held to her sexual morality. Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical, Casti Connubii, in 1930, in direct response to the permission for contraception allowed by the Lambeth conference. The same document re-affirmed traditional gender roles for men and women and decried feminism. The Legion of Decency was founded in 1934 to combat the rise of movies which would, “offend decency and Christian morality.” Liberalism in the Church, while it did exist, was largely an underground movement, with the Oath Against Modernism, promulgated in 1910, still in effect. The encyclical, Studiorum ducem, of 1923 by Pope Pius XI reaffirmed the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas as being central to Catholic theology and in the encyclical, Mortalium animos, he denounced the ecumenical movement.”

    “With all of the similarities in cultural changes occurring between the 1920’s and 1960’s one would expect to see a corresponding rise in sexual abuse by priests in the 1920’s if the John Jay hypothesis is correct, human nature being remarkably consistent across the centuries. If there had been any such explosion of abuse, it would have been reported, but there are no such news reports. Just as in the 1960’s, the 1920’s was a time of societal experimentation, but the Church came through the period relatively quietly. It was, specifically, the generation of priests after WW II that showed an explosion of abuse. Indeed, there was no fall-off of vocations after WWI similar to what happened after WWII. Despite the moral decadence in society in the 1920’s the Church’s vocation rate (taken from the Official Catholic Directory) was both steady and calm (figure 10). Between 1900 and 1968 it shows an almost linear growth.”

    “It was not just society that changed in the 1960’s as it had in the 1920’s. Unlike in the 1920’s, the Church was also affected. There was no Council corresponding to Vatican II after WW I. Popes Pius X and XI kept a lid on any theological and cultural responses within the Church to the changing cultural tides in the 1920’s. Such was not the case in the 1960’s. To be clear, it wasn’t Vatican II, in itself, that fueled the priest abuse crisis starting in the 1960’s, but it is the only realistic variable that does not have a corresponding analogue after WWI. The unfortunate environment of experimentalism within the Church (not actually called for in the Council documents) fostered by the “Spirit of Vatican II,” and the actual dissent against prior moral teachings (for example, from the teachings on contraception in the encyclical, Humanae Vitae, of 1968), released the restraints on moral conduct among priests that had been in place prior to the opening of the Council in 1962.”

    “Sexual liberation in the 1920’s was, primarily, a phenomenon confined to the upper-class. The middle-class, restrained by Comstock laws in the legal realm and the class’s relative lack of influence in the societal realm, held to the notions of sexual restraint common to the Christian religion. After WWII, the notions of free love filtered into the new, rapidly growing, and influential middle class (many of whom were children of the 1920’s and the parents of the Baby Boom generation) and the push for a relaxation on sexual morality was felt not only in society, which repealed the Comstock laws, in principle, in 1971, but also by the parish priest to whom the middle-class Catholics made their voices known. It was in this liberalized environment in society, coupled with the idea of Aggiornamento, updating, within the Church as a cause for Vatican II, that provided a warrant in the mind of the perpetrators (both heterosexuals and homosexuals) to go rogue. “

    “One result was that priest growth, which had been remarkably stable despite wars and societal revolutions in the Twentieth Century, started to change (and in the negative) in 1968 (figure 2). This is because of two developments coming directly from the new interaction between the Church and the “Modern World” called for at Vatican II. In 1967, Pope Paul VI released a document, Sacerdotalis Caelibatus, that re-examined the idea of priestly celibacy. He gave priests the right to leave if they found celibacy too difficult. This led to a massive exit of priests between 1968 and 1975. Most of these were heterosexual priests, hoping to get married. The decrease in the fraction of heterosexual priests (as well as a possible actual rise in the number of homosexual men applying for the priesthood during the period) allowed for the homosexual percentage to rise very quickly from 4% to 15 % by the 1980’s. This is one factor in the shift to mostly boy abuse. Another argument against the idea that it was the sexual revolution, in itself, that caused the increase in abuse is that while the numbers of abused boys was going up, the numbers of abused girls was actually going down during the 1980’s indicating that the abuse phenomenon was largely a homosexual problem.”

    “In 1968, the even more controversial document, Humanae Vitae, was released, which firmly re-stated the Church’s ban, since the writing of Casti Connubii by Pope Pius XI in 1930, on any type of artificial birth control. It is interesting to note the different reception, however, between Casti Connubii in 1930 and Humane Vitae in 1968. There was no dissention when Casti Connubii was released. It simply summarized the perennial teachings of the Church with regards to sexual matters. The continual demand for contraception among the thriving upper-class (largely Protestant) Free Love youth over the course of the early to middle twentieth century, however, would filter down to the growing middle-class after WWII (whose outlook was becoming less concerned with eternal salvation than with the uncertainties of life post-atomic bomb) resulting in increasing pressure for the Church to buckle under to the movement, regardless of its moral teachings. That it did not, resulted in many priests, in an attempt to placate modern sensibilities among the laity, quietly telling their parishioners in the confessional to trust their own consciences with regards to the sinfulness of using birth control. Clearly, the constancy of the prior generations was being challenged.”

    “The hypothesis that the loosening of prior moral sexual restraints within society, but more importantly the experimentalism run rampant within the Church after Vatican II (insofar as this, more than the changes in society itself directly affected priests) led to the abuse explosion is strengthened by the appearance of many other types of abuses that manifested themselves in this period in the Church. The priest abuse was only one of many such abuses against established norms that occurred during this time, even if it led to the greatest human misery. Indeed, if one found classical Church music such as Gregorian chant to be the norm prior to 1960, one might, correspondingly, speak of an abuse of Church music, say, after the experimentations (done in the “Spirit of Vatican II”) in music were performed leading to such things as Hootenanny Masses. We suspect that the rise and fall of these litergical abuses more or less match the same period as the rise and fall of priest abuse in the United States. A study of the radical changes in the other cultural aspects of the Church is beyond this study, but it would be interesting to see if this multi-pronged abuse hypothesis is justified by time-dependent data. This was a unique moment in history, a perfect storm for the development of abuse of all different kinds.”

    TonyO wrote

    “As to tgarcia’s question, what was being taught at that time, that allowed them to go down this road? I believe that the real answer is that in spite of Leo XIII’s demand that seminaries teach Thomas Aquinas, and in spite of Pius X’s explicit condemnation of modernism, neither the bishops nor the seminaries took these to heart, rather they rejected them wholesale and allowed in the modernists into the seminaries. Well before 1960, apparently, the damage was quite far along, producing whole crops of uneducated “Catholic” priests, and seemingly early enough that scads of bishops at VII were unable to pierce through the clouds of obfuscation to insist on truth clearly stated. The “opening” of the windows in the 1960s, I suggest, merely told all these whited sepulchers that they were now free to speak their empty minds in the open. They had to have been made that way long before.”

    This was not a priest education problem per se. There was a substantial underground liberal movement in the Church that started in the later 1910’s and gained momentum in the 1920 and early 1930’s only to slow down with the onset of the Depression and WWII. The Church kept the movement mostly in check during the period. It wasn’t until after WWII when the second-wave youth movement (the first being after WWI) and the simultaneous rise of a true middle class in America along with the economic boom of the post-WWII allies that allowed the liberal movement to move into the mainstream (this was the era of Garrigou-Lagrange’s famous essay on La Nouvelle Theologie). Before that, it was largely a cause taken up by the rich. In Catholic theology, it was the influence of the Protestant circles, with their, “scientific” studies of scripture as well as the growing interest in sociology and anthropology (especially among the Jesuits) that created the Catholic counter-culture, that, as I say came to prominence after WWII (Pope Pius XII issued a famous warning to the Jesuits in a 1948 audience about this issue). Priests were not uneducated. The priestly formation was, on the whole, pretty much Aquinas-based until Vatican II, but there were novelties introduced in the 1950’s as study topics, such as the works of de Chardin and others, who were, very rapidly, removed from university positions of influence only to be rehabilitated by Pope John XXIII at the end of the 1950’s. It was the combination of the shift to a liberally-influenced theology and the growth in the homosexual cohort of priests starting about 1960 that would lead to the abuse crisis a decade later.

  29. pbnelson says:

    Many thanks to Fr. Z. and the follow-on commentators who related such fascinating Twin-Cities Catholic history. Good stuff.

  30. I got this from The Chicken:

    Dear Fr. Z.,

    I am sending the graphs, but I am attaching a more comprehensive analysis, which you might find interesting.  I have a lot more data than this about priest abuse, but this post was not about that.

    The Chicken

    1960 53796
    1961 54682 +686
    1962 55581 +899
    1963 56540 +959
    1964 57328 +788
    1965 58432 +94
    1966 59193 +759
    1967 59892 +701
    1968 59803 -89
    1969 59620 -183
    1970 59192 -408
    1971 58161 -131
    1972 57421 -740
    1973 56969 -452
    1974 56712 -257
    1975 58909 +197

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