…I said, “how do you explain how bad things are now compared to the way things were before the Council?”. And she had a ready reply that I didn’t expect – she said that Protestants were much better before the Council too, at least as measured by divorce rates and crime and other indicators.
It appears that it was the culture that swamped the Church and I’ve suspected that one way to have avoided the culture’s devasting influence was not to blame the Council but to have avoided affluence. Affluence brought us the suburbs, which brought us out of our Catholic ghetto and into the larger culture. When JFK became president and Catholics were perceived as acceptable, we seemed to lose our way. We became influenced by the culture instead of influencing the culture. And the cost has been enormous.
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Yes.
Perhaps affluence also brought us the Council.
Mary Ann Glendon had a column in First Things, reprinted in our local Catholic paper, about the assimilation of the American Catholics. I tried to paraphrase it, but I can’t hope to do her justice, so I’ll just be glad I found it on line. It is called The Hour of the Laity, and can be found at
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0211/articles/glendon.html
–Amanda