When I think of the generation of Catholic churchmen, religious sisters, theologians, and songsters who were coming into their revolution when I was a boy, and who have never admitted a single error, not even in such non-doctrinal matters as what they did to works of art in their churches, I imagine elderly hippies returning to Woodstock with canes and walkers, shimmying to the piped-in blaring of Sly and the Family Stone.  “Bliss it was in those days to be alive!” says Wordsworth, looking back on the hopes he held in the French revolution.

But Wordsworth grew up.  He came to view those days with a critical and judicious eye.  With age, we hope, comes wisdom, and with that wisdom, regret for the sins and follies we all commit, most especially when we follow the spirit of the age and not the Holy Spirit, who does not change, and who is beyond all ages.

Yet I meet, all the time, stuck-in-the-mud progressives, fuddy-duddies of a revolution that has come and gone and left a lot of rubble behind, with very little institutional, intellectual, artistic, and cultural compensation.  The scandal surrounding the artist Marco Rupnik is a case in point.

The man was a monster.  If you invented his character for a novel, nobody would believe it; his filthy deeds seem to out of a bad rehash of The Exorcist.  But setting that aside, I am astonished that anybody still admires his dull old programmatic pseudo-primitive art.  What’s next, doing the Watusi as you come back from Communion?

I got the same feeling as I read the reactions to a commencement speech, at Benedictine College, given by Harrison Butker, the kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs.  Benedictine is an hour’s drive away from the stadium, so it was a natural choice for the event’s coordinators to make, as Butker is a devout Catholic, and Benedictine is a faithfully Catholic college.

In his speech, the young man said that the greatest of all titles for a woman is that of a wife and mother, and as he did so he praised his wife, and came to the point of tears.  For saying what was not controversial when I was young, but what is abominated now, he has been the target of abuse and hatred.

The Sisters of Saint Scholastica, whose forebears founded Benedictine College, sneered at the “limited” vision of homemaking that Butker admired, preferring an attitudinal homemaking which, it appears, obviates the need to have a home and to make something of it.  Spiritual diapers don’t get your hands dirty.

Of course, Butker suggested only what Chesterton suggested long ago, to the effect that modern women rose up and said they would no longer be dictated to, and promptly became stenographers.  How can it be “limiting,” Chesterton said, to bring the universe to a child you love, but a spree of liberty to do one or two things hour after hour for bosses and strangers?

I could say that the place-kicker was the truly countercultural player in this controversy, since every engine of mass media and mass entertainment, almost every school and college, every profession, and all the powers and principalities within the Church and without, are ranged against him and his wife, reveling in the delight of making him look like a knuckle-dragging brute or nitwit, and his wife like a poor oppressed patsy.

Surely, the billionaires might have had the good grace to pass by the kid with the lemonade stand, without having to kick him and tear up his sign.  But people with bad consciences cannot endure being reminded that there was something else they might have done, something that might, for example, have kept the Sisters of Saint Scholastica a vital force in the Church and the world.

Yet to use the word “countercultural” is to imply that there is a culture to run counter to.  If “culture” is defined as the habits of the masses, then the Butkers are countercultural.  But if culture denotes what is passed down in love and gratitude from one generation to the next, especially as regards art and craft and song, the raising of children, honoring your forebears and their wisdom, the celebration of feasts, and the worship of God, then Benedictine College is an outpost of possible revival, and the Butker household a cultural seedbed for man and the Church.

And what is the life-giving alternative?  Why do we shrug at an 80-hour work week shared between husband and wife, leaving the neighborhood a ghost town for most of the day, all through the year?  Where is the multitude of child-rich and happy households with no one at home to see to the needs of the body, let alone to make the freedom of childhood possible?  What do we gain from this evisceration of local life, and the institutionalization of small children?

I do not say, and Butker did not say, that all or even most women must be homemakers.  I do not say anything about how many of anybody should do this or that.  He was setting priorities and encouraging some of the young women at Benedictine – those engaged to be married, who do not generally share the priorities of the young women at the far larger University of Kansas – in a way of life they may choose against the sneers of the world and of the worldly within their own Church.

Finally, I’ll concede that the erstwhile revolutionaries did what they thought was best at the time. We should be as gracious as is consistent with justice, because we too will need to be forgiven our own errors. Their time was what it was. But their time is long past, and the results have been in.

Let them do what we all must do to prepare for the future that awaits us all, as the sun sets.

__________

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