I hesitate to post this, and probably shouldn't. I'm not a counselor of anything other than "the law" and I always think lawyers who use that term in their letterheads are being pretentious. Having said that, the only thing lawyers really do is deal with people's problems, sometimes by creating problems for other people, so we do know something about it.
I've been in litigation for decades, and I think what that's taught me is that fighting sucks. People who like to fight, including lawyers who like that, also suck. Most people, including most lawyers, don't fit in that category, however.
Anyhow, with that caveat, I'm going to just put out some observational comments on how not to help people, and by that I mean people who are seeking our help as they have a close relationship. Some people deserve help, some don't, and a lot deserve a lot better help than that they get.
Before I get into that, however, the first thing I'd note is that if you've sought help from a whole bunch of people, and they all give you the same advice, maybe you are the problem. I've seen people who are flat out wrong with a legal problem ask a whole series of professionals, and then go down to their dog and cat, and get the same advance and be upset. They don't want real help, they want verification that their wacky view or bad plan is right. Sometimes they want verification for going after somebody they shouldn't.
Don't be that person.
Well, in offering advice, here goes.
1. Ridden like a rented mule.
Years ago, I had a friend who started off in the same line of work I did, but who temperamentally wasn't very suited for it. He'd married right out of law school, and he and his wife had a couple of children pretty quickly.
At some point, he began to burn out pretty badly. It was obvious. But his wife had achieved a status that she'd always hoped for in the process. Indeed, frankly, we'd been friend with both of them when they started out, but because he became quite financially successful, briefly, she reached the point of viewing us as being of inferior status and quit associating with us. He didn't.
Anyhow, you could see what was coming. He was having trouble, then a close friend of his died and it was life altering. He wanted out. Financially, he started declining.
I don't know what the conversations between the two of them were, but I have a suspicion. It was probably "you'll get over it" which amounted to "get back to work and stop complaining".
Well, ultimately he took up going to the gym a lot, she took up eating a lot, he met a woman at the gym. . . fill in blanks here. The couple split.
Now, I’m a Catholic and I don't advocate for divorce, and I'm not justifying what happened here, but the "shut up and plow on" response is really common from spouse to spouse. I've seen it from female to male and male to female. Men work themselves to deaths as their wives can't conceive of them doing anything else or simply won't allow them to.
Death may be the mildest of results here, actually. The failing party gets the blame, but often they were pushed into it. If somebody is saying "I can't go on", they probably really can't go on, and they need the other person's help.
Indeed, to add to this, I've witnessed the odd phenomenon of a spouse who was there for all of her friends and her siblings, but nearly totally unsympathetic to her husband under the situation described above, and not even all that sympathetic to at least one of her children's problems. There as well, the husband was sending out pretty clear signals that he was worn out beyond repair. He started to get sick, and the wife didn't even really react much to that. Eventually he had a bad fatigue related accident. The "I told you I needed help" wasn't well received.
2. Looking for a solution.
Closely related to this is this one, and this is a male/female thing.
More particularly, this is a male/female couple thing.
Something about the psychological makeup of women causes them to present problems to their spouses, boyfriends, and close friends that they don't want solved. This is so common that there are some well known jokes about it. Men don't work this way, usually. Actually women don't either, with men they know in a professional sense, even if they become friends with them, but then often coworker problem discussions are also of the "venting" nature.
If a man just wants to vent about a problem, but not have it solved, he'll just relate the problem to a stranger or somebody he barely knows, hence the classic stories about bartenders. When he tells a friend, however, or a spouse, he's looking for a solution.
Probably due to simple familiarity, the longer a couple has been together, the more likely a real solution is just going to be brushed off.
I've read lots of stories in legal journals about successful lawyers who entered some sort of deep crisis and then something horrible happened. Often a spouse is interviewed and gives a "there were no signs" teary comment.
Maybe, but I'll bet more often than not there were. Probably Joe Big Law had gone to his wife repeatedly with "look, honey, I need to do something here as I can't keep on like this", and the reply was "oh, you'll feel better. . . " at best. He didn't. Wife is distraught.
Well, she wasn't much help, quite often.
Offering no solution isn't being helpful. Flat out stating there's no solution definitely isn't helpful.
This also applies, however, to a lot of professional colleague advice.
A running story in the television series M*A*S*H was that, at the end of the day, the object of a field hospital was to get you patched up, and back into combat. That's pretty much the way professional assistance programs work as well. They're going to address your problems and get you back into the game.
Maybe the game is the problem.
3. It's all about me.
I've seen this repeatedly.
Somebody has a real problem, they go to their spouse or close friend, and that person quickly turns it into a discussion about their own, probably trivial problem. It works like this. "Honey, I've been shot, and I'm bleeding out", to which is replied, "Oh I know just what that's like, I stubbed my toe on a piece of furniture at work the other day, why I had told the janitor a thousand times that that needed to be moved, and I hate that furniture, it's Ikea and ".
No help at all.
I've actually had couples come with a legal problem where I have to shut one of them up as that person won't let the other talk about the problem. "The semi tractor exploded and. . . . " followed by sudden interruption and; "Bob is always so dramatic, it wasn't a big explosion, why just the other day I was at Walmart looking at the low, low prices and Mrs. Sepansky cut in front of me at the notion's isle, well I said to her. . . "
4. Lacking empathy
Most people are at least somewhat empathetic to others, but not all. Some simply lack it entirely.
There's been some studies that suggest this is genetic, but I somewhat doubt that. If it fully were, the genetic driver would be towards empathy. Indeed, an opposite speculation on this is that the world became more empathetic with the spread of Christianity, as Christians survived crises because of their empathy towards others, and others empathy towards them.
My guess is that this is a more developmental thing. Something's gone wrong. And I suspect that lacking empathy is something stepped into. Otherwise, quite frankly, the anti empathy genes would be weeded out, as people who lack empathy are hard to be around, while those who show it are sought out.
None of which takes away from the fact that some people just lack empathy.
In the excellent podcast Catholic Stuff You Should Know Fr. Michael O'Loughlin once observed that he'd remarked to a friend that he had his spouse to go to for sympathy. The friend laughed. He couldn't go to his spouse for sympathy. I suspect that's a lot more common than people suspect, and has a lot to do with the first item noted here. It's not so much that familiarity breeds contempt as the people have assumed certain roles at some time, and there's a lack of sympathy for not fully measuring up to them.
An aspect of this, I'd note, is that some people are so lacking in empathy towards somebody seeking help from them that the asker just stops. Indeed, the person lacking empathy not only lacks it, but is resentful about being asked for help. That actually punishes the person who needs the help.
That can really have a lasting negative impact. At best, the asker just learns that asking is pointless. But if the people are in a close relationship, that insertion of distance is corrosive. A person asking somebody they love for help, and not receiving any, and even getting dissed for it, will struggle with disappointment at a bare minimum, and that disappointment can turn to hate.
You see that all the time with married couples who once obviously loved each other, but their love turned to hate. There's a lot of things that can cause that, but one is a person seeking help and receiving instead rejection. The same comes up in parent child relationships. Children seek out legitimate help, but don't get it, learning that they apparently really weren't that important in the first place.
5. The wrong help.
Some seeking help seem to get it, but the help they get isn't real. Instead they receive validation, things akin to offering an alcoholic a drink.
This plays out widely in our modern society where some behaviors clearly recognized at one time as mental illnesses are now celebrated instead. People are asking for help in their actions, but instead are simply being told they're okay.
It's easy to undestand this, as its easy. Tough to give help is hard to receive help, and this tends to involve that.
6. The blender
Finally, I'd note, that a lot of these things get all blended together.
A person seeks help from the person who is supposed to be the closest person to them in the world, only to find that person has acclimated themselves to the role the help seeker occupies and doesn't want it changed. At the same time, the person sought out is providing help to family and friends at an epic charitable level. Back at home, however, it's "all about me".
Maybe that offers a clue to all of this.
7. The Wreck
8 Final thoughts.
I'll go back to what I noted at the start. You read all the time, or hear it directly, that after something horrible happens "he showed no signs". Often its from a close family member, probably a spouse. A big law partner takes his own life, a busy business person drinks too much, too often, and dies young, a beloved mother falls apart, a desperate "transgendered" person ends their own life.
There were no signs.
Oh, sure there were. People simply chose to ignore them.
I should note, if you look at the items linked in on this site, over on the right, in the general interest category, there are things from the right and the left. If you only looked at some of my posts, you would assume that I'm a flaming liberal, maybe even a progressive. If you look at others, you'd assume I'm a conservative (you wouldn't assume I'm a populist, and I'm not). That probably means that I'm something else entirely, and indeed my views span right and left.
A full reader of this blog would know that I'm a Catholic, however.
One thing that I think is obvious to serious observant Catholics, and likely observant Orthodox, is that this is a Protestant Country. It really is. That's different from a "Christian Country". It's Protestant. Even people who like to spout off that this country doesn't have a religious founding of some sort are, actually, some sort of cultural Protestant, by and large. It's pretty obvious if you are a dedicated member of one of the minority religions, Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, etc. As Protestants live in a Protestant culture, they don't realize that the culture is Protestant. Indeed, one of the charming things about Americans in general is the belief that everyone all over the globe thinks just like we do.
To take it a step further, quite a few sort of adherent members of other faiths, or maybe just not really well-informed members of other faiths, are heavily Protestantized. So you'll find Catholics that have heavily Protestant views, for example.
The deeply Protestant culture of the country impacts almost everything about it, from our economics to our foreign policy. It may not be at all evident to average people, but an example of that can be found in the country's overall reaction to the two major ongoing wars being fought right now.
I've supported, as people here would note, the Israeli war against Hamas, which Hamas started. But to be brutally honest, a lot of American support for Israel comes from two sources. One is the country's Jewish population, which is actually quite small, but which has been historically influential since some point in the mid 20th Century. The other is due to Evangelical Christians who see the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 as a fulfillment of a promise in the book of Revelation, although they aren't the only Christian's, or perhaps individual Christians, to see that, that way. Evangelical Christians, however, tend to see Israel in absolutist terms and many see supporting Israel as a way to directly bring about the Second Coming. For its part, the Israeli government, which actually tends to be highly secular, has worked that pretty heavily over the years.
Catholics and the Orthodox have a much more nuanced view of this topic, however, as their relationship with the region goes all the way back. Apostolic Christians were present in the region since day one. Early on, Apostolic Christianity won many converts of the Jews in the region, but also of Arabs and other regional populations. Christianity, and by that we mean Apostolic Christianity, largely converted the entire region before the Arab conquests of the 5th and 6th Century brought in Islam, but even then huge populations of Christians, and again we mean Apostolic Christians, as that is all that there were, remained. What Protestants, not Apostolic Christians, termed the Crusade when they began to falsify history came about originally to try to protect the pilgrimage routes to the very region that is now being fought over. At least up until fairly recently, 10% of the Palestinian population remained Catholic, and to the north, Lebanon was, up until fairly recently, predominately so. Large populations of Orthodox Christians were also to be found. Israel, in its relationship with out of the region Christians, however, reaches out mostly to Evangelical Christians who are pretty much completely foreign to the region.
The English Colonies were of course colonized by residents of Great Britain, who were, at the time they began to do that, Protestants. They were not all members of the Church of England or the Church of Scotland, however, and that very much has its ongoing impact today. Dissenters from the Protestant state churches, such as the "Pilgrims", took refuge in North America from whichever Protestant church was in control at the time, which was usually the Anglican Church in England, and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland in Scotland. Immigrants from minority Protestant faiths didn't tend to have a concept of extending religious liberty in the New World, but rather escaping oppression for their minority views in the Old. Once in North America, they tended to be just as intolerant as the established churches they had escaped from. The one thing they could all agree on, however, is that they hated Catholics.
That was in large part because the English Protestant churches of all types had to rely on myths to justify their existence. The Church of England hadn't even really intended to separate long from the Catholic Church at first, but once things got rolling, it was hard to go back. This was for a variety of reasons, and to at least some degree the Church of England remains uncomfortable with its separation. It's made several attempts towards reversing it, and some significant sections of it basically pretend it didn't occur to a certain degree. But an early feature of it was an attempt to justify what it had done, which it never really came up with a good thesis for. Part of that simply devolved to creating a mythical history of Medieval Catholicism, a different approach than that taken by the norther European principalities that followed Luther, who also didn't mean to really separate at first.
Over time, the mythical history of the Medieval Church that the English created passed away in the UK itself. Brave Catholic remnants hung on, and the fact that Ireland was part of the United Kingdom always meant that the fables had objections to them. But in the English colonial experiments in North America, this was largely untrue. Immigrants to the colonies were overwhelmingly Protestant, if in some areas not overwhelmingly Anglican. Fables developed during the Reformation were carried over and instituted into the telling of American history and into American culture, which is why even now students at higher levels will hear stories of bloody Inquisitions and naked aggression in the Middle East that are simply untrue.
Part of the fable is that the country has always been supportive of "freedom of religion" and even that this is enshrined in the Constitution. It isn't, and it hasn't been.
At the time of the Revolution, almost all American colonist were Protestants. Certainly exceptions existed, but Catholics were a distinct minority and members of other religions, such as Judaism, were nearly non-existent. A significant exception had been Africans brought over as slaves prior to the 1700s, but during the 1700s they largely converted to Protestant faiths, reflecting the religion of where they were held, although often not the same varieties, exactly, of Protestantism of those who held them in bondage. Certainly slaves when first brought over, which was still occurring at the time of the Revolution irrespective of its illegality, were members of African animist religions by and large. About 1/3d were Muslim, however, and a few were Catholic. In terms of cultural myth, this is interesting in that it's commonly forgotten that most African slaves were animists at the time of their enslavement and also that the common excuse at the time that they would be introduced to Christianity actually wasn't true for all of them, some already being Christians. Be all of that as it may, the legacy of pre enslavement religions dissipated relatively rapidly, although some remnant of it remains even today in terms of folk beliefs.1
In 1776 when the nation rebelled against its Anglican monarch, King George III, most of the rebellious leaders in the Continental Congress were solidly Protestant. Indeed, one of the Intolerable Acts they passed as causi belli was the Quebec Act, which allowed the Québécois to remain Catholic, which says volumes about just how anti-Catholic the country was. A popular myth had developed that the founders of the republic and its constitution were largely non-Christian theists, but it's largely baloney. The article linked in above sort of adopts that view, without really fully expressing it, in order to avoid, most likely, that the Founders founded a Christian nation, or a Protestant one.
That aside, they certainly did found a theistic republic, and their early thoughts and documents are shot through with it. Nearly all of them, if not in fact all of them, believed in "natural law" which, as the article notes shows up in the Declaration of Independence, which states:
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
And it goes on from there.
Okay, well so what?
Part of this is just historical. It's important to be accurate about a nation's history, and frankly the country was founded as a Protestant republic in which everyone, almost, was a Protestant. That was its culture, and to an enormous degree, it remains its culture today. Countries always have a culture, and beyond that, they deserve one.
But (and there's always a but), this also raises some important cultural, let alone, religious topics.
As to Protestants, one thing to keep in mind that while various Protestant denominations made up the majority of practice for Americans, there was not one single Protestant church and as the nation grew, this very much became the case. At the time of the Revolution, it would have been highly likely that almost everyone in a community in which any one person lived was the same type of Protestant. In Appalachians regions, for example, most were some type of Protestant. In New England, most were (although not all0 were likely Anglicans. There were Quakers and other sects of course, but people largely lived in a community in which everyone was a member of that sect, unless you were of a distinct minority community like Catholics and Jews.
As the country expanded, however, this began to change, a fact aided by the separation from the United Kingdom which now meant that immigrants from Norther Europe in general, rather than Great Britain in particular, were widely accepted.. European Protestant faiths that had not been in the country in large numbers began to come in, with no real opposition to that. Lutherans became very common in areas with large communities of Germans. Various Anabaptist groups, always present, likewise expanded and became very influential in some regions of the country, particularly the American South.
And into this distinctly American brands of Protestantism developed, something that Americans seem particularly ignorant of today. The "village preacher" or the church that was only loosely affiliated with a denomination became common.
Gather at the River in eight different John Ford films. Ford was a devout Catholic, and obviously saw this song as emblematic of American, and Protestant, Christianity. I've heard it in a Catholic Mass exactly once, in Pennsylvania.
This in fact became a feature of American life. Well into the 1980s, of course, most American towns were heavily represented by a wide variety of American Protestant churches, but almost all of them had what is now called "non-denominational" church headed up by a pastor who likely also worked five days out of seven in something else. That figure became such an iconic American that such pastors are portrayed again and again in American films, such as those noted above, but even in much more recent ones.
The fact that American Christianity became sufficiently separate from European Christianity mean that a sort of do it yourself Christianity took particularly strong root in the US, and also in Canada, in a way that it didn't elsewhere. Those who separated, for example, from the Russian Orthodox Church in Imperial Russia tended to become Old Believers, or even Catholics, although populations of refugee Anabaptists came into the country as well. You don't find big populations of minority in Protestant religions anywhere else, however, in North America, save for areas that American Protestants have sought to proselytize in, some of which are areas that are already heavily Catholic or Orthodox. Unique nearly wholly American strains of Protestantism, or religions that came out of Christianity, developed.
As this occured, it had an impact on the culture noted above, and still very much does. Demographers have wondered about the rise of the "nones", but in fact they've always been there. Rank and file Protestants have often not worried much about pew hopping. People baptized in a Baptist Church will go to an Assemblies of God Church, and not think much about it. Beyond that, a fairly large group of Americans feels that they are really God-fearing Christians, even though they very rarely go to Church. I've heard people who never darken the door of a church save for a funeral or wedding discuss in earnest terms how the country needs to turn back to its Christian values, and in fairness, some do in fact practice Christian virtues fairly notably.
As the same time, however, people who claim this sort of loose ill-defined American Christianity often have completely jettisoned huge tenants of actual Christianity. People will live together without being married or otherwise engage in conduct that any conventional strain of Christianity regards as gravely sinful. Divorce, specifically prohibited by Christ, is widely practiced by American Protestants who don't give it a second thought. In some ways, the easy practice of the very loose American Protestantism ranges from religion made very, very easy, to those denominations which have very strict rules that never actually appear in the New Testament, or Old, at all.
The Pine Tree Flag, one of the flags used by American revolutionaries during the war for independence. People can say what they like, but a rebel army flying a flag like this is not battling for a secular republic. Currently, this flag is associated with a group of far right wing Evangelicals of the New Apostolic Reformation who are inaccurately defined as Christian Nationalist, but who do share significant amounts of their goals including the restoration or imposition of a Christian, by which they really mean Evangelical Protestant superstructure on the country.
Into this mix, however, we now have the New Apostolic Reformation, a Protestant movement that is confused by commentators with Christian Nationalism and even sometimes confused at to its American Protestant status.
The New Apostolic Reformation comes out of that branch of American Protestantism that has the concept that the United States itself has a particular Devine mission. This sort of thinking has roots in American Protestantism that go fairly far back in the 19th Century, and it still is particularly strong in some branches of non-mainline, if that is a word, Protestantism, and also in Great Awakening religions that came out of Protestantism. The followers of such thoughts tend to believe, for example, that certain figures (often George Washington) were charged by a Devine mission at the time of the Revolution, and also tend to believe that the U.S. Constitution was divinely inspired. You can find such thoughts today amongst various American Protestant religions outside of those which have retained strongly European roots, and also, as noted, as offshoots from Christianity. For example, you will sometimes hear the words common to the belief quoted by some Mormons, although it is not a tenant of the Mormon faith itself.
It was partially this line of thought that gave rise to the Manifest Destiny belief that many Americans held in the 19th Century, but it carried on until the 20th Century. Consider, for example, this 1900 statement after the US had taken the Philippines during the Spanish American War:
Mr. President, the times call for candor. The Philippines are ours forever, "territory belonging to the United States," as the Constitrltion calls them. And just beyond the Philippines are China's illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. We will not repudiate our duty in the archipelago. We will not abandon our opportunity in the Orient. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world. And we will move forward to our work, not howling out regrets like slaves whipped to their burdens, but with gratitude for a task worthy of our strength, and thanksgiving to Almighty God that He has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world.
* * *
Mr. President, this question is deeper than any question of party politics: deeper than any question of the isolated policy of our country even; deeper even than any question of constitutional power. It is elemental. It is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing hut vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given its the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are trustees of the world's progress, guardians of its righteous peace. The judgment of the Master is upon us: "Ye have been faithful over a few things; I will make you ruler over many thing."
From Congressional Record(56th Cong., 1st Session) Vol XXXIII, pp.705, 711.
The concept of the US as a New Testament "chosen people" remains surprisingly strong in some quarters of American Protestantism.
The New Apostolic Reformation, faced with a United States of the early 21st Century in which the openly strong Protestant connections are now highly muted in many places, have taken this one step further than most did in the past and openly seek to establish a new wing of Protestantism which advocates for the "restoration" of perceived "lost offices" of what they conceive to have been, inaccurately, in the early Church, such as prophet and apostle. There were indeed, of course, prophets in Judaism. And there were apostles during the Apostolic Age. Indeed, as a distinctly Protestant movement, it ironically fails to grasp that the Catholic and Orthodox Churches are true Apostolic Churches, and they were founded by the apostles. Restoring the "office" of apostle is not possible, as the Apostolic Age is over and Apostolic revelation fixed, something acknowledged not only by the Apostolic Churches, but also those churches of the Protestant Reformation which arose during the Reformation, the latter of which differ on that point from the Apostolic Churches only in regard to their relationship to the Apostles.
The NAR has been particularly associated with current strains of Trumpist populism, and in a vague sort of way helps to explain what is going on. As American Protestantism outside the mainline Protestant churches has always had sort of a "do it yourself" aspect to it, it's free to conceive of a mission like the NAR's while also free to ignore vast tracks of actual Christian doctrine. Looked at that way, the NAR doesn't, at least for the time being, need to worry itself about divorce and remarriage as antithetical to Christianity, or even the requirement that Christians be their brother's keeper. Rather, the thought is, that is, by some, that political success can be achieved, after which a society modeled in their view of Christianity can be imposed from the top down.
In this fashion, the life of a figure like Donald Trump can be flat out ignored in pursuit of what is imagined to be a greater goal, which is distinctly different from the view of some other Christians that they must vote for Trump as they have no other moral choice. Looked at this way, Trump becomes some sort of latter day Cyrus the Great, a non congregant being used by God to achieve a greater goal. It's a radical belief, but it is out there.
Speaker of the House Johnson flies the Pine Tree flag outside of his Congressional office.
The flag of Vatican City. This flag can occasionally be found in Catholic Churches. I can recall at one time a point at which American flags, which also occasionally could be found in Catholic Churches in the US, were removed.
An oddity in the US is that the largest single religion in the United States is a minority religion, that being Catholicism. Most Americans are Protestants, but the single biggest faith is the Catholic faith. And contrary to what some like to suggest, not only are Catholic numbers holding their own, but they're growing. At the same time this is occurring, moreover, the second "lung" of the Church, Orthodoxy, is expanding as well.
Because this is such a Protestant country in culture and outlook, one of the things about at least a lot of Catholics in the US is that they were heavily Protestantized, something that really took off once JFK told the country he could be a Catholic on Sundays, but the country didn't really need to worry about that for the rest of the week. A disaster for Catholics, Catholics rushed to acclimate and went from being seen as vaguely strange and threatening to the rest of the country to being just one denomination. At the same time that this occured, actual reforms in the Church, combined with the "Spirit of Vatican Two" in fact made Catholics seem that way to many "main line" Protestants and also to many rank and file Catholics. Many distinctly Catholic practices that had deeply inserted themselves into Catholic culture disappeared. Catholics Masses were now in English (most places) or Spanish in some. Catholics no longer were bound to eating fish as a penitential observance on Fridays outside of Lent. Distinctive female head coverings started to disappear (prior to Vatican II, we'd note). Unique accordance of respect in a formal way towards Priests ended. A fairly uniform Catholic education ended (one that I hadn't participated in, nor had my father). A weak 1970 Catechetical set of instruction came in, leading to an entire generation, of which I am part, hardly knowing the ins and outs of their Faith by the time they passed through it.
By the 80s and 90s, members of the Church who would never have thought of marrying in a Protestant Church or church shopping were doing so. Divorce and remarriage, something long common in the Protestant churches, also came in.
In some ways, it's now easy, retrospectively, to see how this came about. A lot of this was due to what might be regarded as cultural shell shock, or as one sociologist put it in a different context, "future shock". A generally disdained people for the most part, in much of the country Catholics kept to themselves and lived in "Catholic Ghettos" where their cultural uniqueness wasn't open to the rest of the world up through the middle of the 20th Century. This was never wholly the case, of course, and there were always notable converts to Catholics who were out in the world. In the West, which always tended to break down distinctions, this was much less the case once people were outside of big cities, like Denver and Salt Lake.
Still, in that time period, most Catholics were also blue collar workers and very few, save for some in certain professional occupations, had attended university. Those that did often tried to attend a Catholic university, which in those days were really Catholic. So, in much of the country they worked blue collar jobs, if they were professional their clientele was Catholic as a rule, and they tended to live in Catholic Communities. This was true for the Orthodox as well. And it was also true for Jews. Indeed, in some ways, the overall situation of these communities resembled that of African Americans, all of whom were disdained by the Ku Klux Klan and other nativists.
World War Two started to massively erode this. For the first time large numbers of Catholics attended university and after the war, for the same reason, this continued on due to the GI Bill. The walls of the Catholic (and Orthodox) Ghettos began to come down. Vatican II came along and made institutional changes in the church. Separately, the Vatican change the liturgy to its current form, a definite improvement, and provided that it could be said in the vernacular. Bishops and Priests who assumed a certain directly from this began to expand on it, and a Catholic President came in and told Americans that Catholics were just like everyone else, something a lot of Americans rapidly embraced. Similar developments happened north of the border where the Church itself started the process of dismantling institutional control of large areas of Quebec society, which in turn developed into the Quiet Revolution.
Looking back now, lots of younger Catholics wonder why their grandparents allowed so much to erode. Why did they allow the incidents of Catholic culture to fade? Why did they put up with taking out the altar rails? Why wasn't some Latin retained? Why did the parishioners not balk when the Bishops lift year around penitential meatless Fridays? The shock of it all seems like a likely answer. Having gone from heavily Irish, or German, or Italian communities and practicing a religion that practically had its own language, and that meaning that your future in the larger, Protestant, American society was at least partially laid out for you, and limited, to one in which they were told that they were fully part of the larger consumerist limitless American society where the rules only loosely applied, and then having part of the old culture simply destroyed, they were shell shocked.
Try as the American Church of hte 70s might, the fact of the matter is that CAtholic's remain stubbornly subject to the letter to Diogentus:
Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.
And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.
They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they, rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life. They are attacked by the Jews as aliens, they are persecuted by the Greeks, yet no one can explain the reason for this hatred.
To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body. As the soul is present in every part of the body, while remaining distinct from it, so Christians are found in all the cities of the world, but cannot be identified with the world. As the visible body contains the invisible soul, so Christians are seen living in the world, but their religious life remains unseen. The body hates the soul and wars against it, not because of any injury the soul has done it, but because of the restriction the soul places on its pleasures. Similarly, the world hates the Christians, not because they have done it any wrong, but because they are opposed to its enjoyments.
Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body's hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together. The soul, though immortal, has a mortal dwelling place; and Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things, while awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the Christian’s lofty and divinely appointed function, from which he is not permitted to excuse himself.
In other words, Catholics that came up after the 80s looked at what the World had given to accommodating Catholics of the late 60s, 70s, and 80s, and found it wholly wanting. Like topics, we're otherwise writing on in slow motion, tradition, which turns out to be grounded in something real, and there's an effort to take it back. As that's being done, it's the case that the reforms that came in are being rejected, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.
Trad girls in conservative skirts and wearing chapel veils, young men fairly conservatively dressed, parishioners attempting to secure Latin Masses, or going to Easter Rite Devine Liturgy, aren't seeking to reform the reform, which up until recently was the vanguard of a return to tradition. They're seeking to wholesale bring the incidents of Catholicism back in. In doing that, they're making it plain that they're not just another denomination, and they don't want to really be part of the American religious scene. Whether they're applying the Benedict Option or the Constantine one, they're not only not melting in, they're returning to wholesale different. And that different doesn't look back to 1776, it looks all the way back.
So why does any of this matter?
Cyrus the Great. Some far right Evangelicals tend to see Trump as a sort of Cyrus figure. Cyrus was not Jewish, but his proclimations favored the Jewish faith in an existential sense.
Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah might be accomplished, the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also in writing, saying: 'Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia: All the kingdoms of the earth hath the LORD, the God of heaven, given me; and He hath charged me to build Him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whosoever there is among you of all His people—his God be with him—let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the LORD, the God of Israel, He is the God who is in Jerusalem. And whosoever is left, in any place where he sojourneth, let the men of his place help him with silver, and with gold, and with goods, and with beasts, beside the freewill-offering for the house of God which is in Jerusalem.'
Ezra 1:1–4
Well, it does, for a variety of reasons, some mild, and some a bit scary.
One thing is this. It used to be particularly noted by some that the English-speaking world was particularly given to democracy, which it was. Those with a limited horizon tended to associate this solely with the United States, but that was in fact extremely inaccurate. The United Kingdom had a functioning parliament in 1776 when we abandoned the UK's overlordship, and in fact that is part of the reason that we did that. They had a Parliament, and they weren't letting us in.
A person can say what they want about that and try to disassociate it somehow from something particularly English, but it is there. France, in 1776, wasn't democratic. Spain wasn't either. You can't really find another major power that was. And all of England's progeny took this path for a long time. Canada never had a non-democratic moment. Nor did New Zealand, or Australia.
Now, English democracy was not perfect, and the franchise was not even particularly large. Major classes were completely excluded based on economic, and also in the case of Catholics, religion. But it was there and that heritage was conveyed. Moreover, when it took root in North America, it expanded beyond what it had been in the UK pretty rapidly.
Which leads us to a more radical proposition.
What was also conveyed early on was a certain culture, and part of that was a political culture. The overall culture, however, was Protestant. And it remains so. It's so Protestant that even the atheists are culturally Protestant.
An essential element of that American Protestantism is the concept of "I can make up my mind for myself and nobody can tell me what to do". Lots of religious "reformers" in the US have done that, but that's a Protestant thing. To Protestants, it's not strange to hop from one Protestant denomination to another, and to even include denominations that claim to have no denomination, even though the they do. Catholics and Jews, on the other hand, are part of one, big, global, faith. Moving from parish to parish, for Catholics, is no big deal, as Catholicism is the Church. But going to another denomination is an extraordinarily radical move and an act of rebellion.
Democracy, of course, as a movement has spread well beyond the English-speaking world and indeed, there were democracies that spring up in various places in the non Protestant world, as for in example Italian city states. Antiquarians will point out the example of ancient Athens, or even Germanic and Nordic raiding bands. On the last item, all people are democratic at the tribal level, pretty much. None of this really counters the point, however.
This brings us to the next reason this is important. The most recent movement, which is threading through American Evangelicalism, is radically exclusionary in a way, and this too is part of the North American religious heritage.
It wasn't until after the Civil War that American society really started to view Catholics as suitable citizens,a and then only reluctantly. The huge Irish and German immigrant populations that fought in the war made Catholics impossible to really ignore. Jewish Americans were really small in number, but they started to be accepted, very reluctantly, about the same time. As this occured the word "Judeo-Christian" was invented to include everyone then in the country in a singular larger American Christian sort of world. But the fact remains that hostility towards both religions, and more recently Islam, has been an ongoing feature of American life.
Catholics, and if there are any, Jews and Muslims (the latter two unlikely in any numbers) flirting with the new concepts of Christian Nationalism and National Conservatism really need to do so at their caution. The New Apostolic Reformation forces may have a similar view on moral matters as mainstream and conservative Catholics do, but the NAR is definitely not Catholic. And the history for Americans of general of politics and religion being welded together, and indeed coopting each other, is not a comfortable one at all. Put another way, Donald Trump is not a deeply religious, or even moral, man, and there's no real reason to believe that he's some sort of Cyrus the Great.
But some clearly see him that way, explaining their actions, and even some of the odd propoganda in the Trumpist camp.
None of this is to say that faith shouldn't inform a person's politics. It should. But they are not the same thing.
Footnotes:
1. Native Americans of course had their own religions, but what was different about their history, up until the early 20th Century, is that unless highly assimilated, they weren't "Americans" at all. It wasn't until 1924, a date which our 100 year retrospective posts haven't even yet reached, that all Native Americans were granted U.S. citizenship.
At any one time, I have a bunch of posts in the works, some of which are on concurrent themes. This is one, basically, as it touches on a larger topic.
Something is going on.
A couple of years ago I started to see some women, by which I mean, let's say, women 40 years or older, resuming the wearing of chapel veils (mantillas). They were clearly on the traditional end of things.
Recently, however, I'm seeing young women do this.
I shouldn't, probably, have used the term "girls" in the caption, but for whatever reason, culturally, we tend to use the term "girls" for young women well into their 20s. Maybe somewhat beyond. It seems to encompass women in their late teens on up to that point.
And that's what I'm referring to here.
I noticed it first the year before last, and at an early morning Mass on a Holy Day (All Saints Day, I think). Two young women, probably very late teens or very early twenties, sat right in front of me. One was dressed conservatively but contemporarily. She was wearing a leather skirt. . . and a chapel veil (mantilla).
Now, there was a young woman from a very trad family in the parish who dressed almost as if in a Medieval costume for young women every Mass. That's not what I'm talking about here. This young woman was wearing a nice wool sweater, and a leather skirt, and a chapel veil.
It caught me off guard.
I'm seeing stuff like that all the time now. Young women, often early twenties, dressed conservatively, but not in costume, who have adopted the mantilla. Indeed, just yesterday, at the early morning Mass Sunday, the Church did the Ritual for the Elect for those who were coming into the Church. They all have a sponsor. One young woman coming in had, as her sponsor, another young women.
Frankly, the sponsor was stunning. And she was wearing a chapel veil. Last Sunday across town there was another young woman dressed in that fashion who was eye catching as well, and the week before that there was another so dressed who was a head turner.**
I note that, as it was easy, when the only women who did this were let's say older, and otherwise dressed in a fashion that was old-fashioned, perhaps, or dour. These young women aren't. They're hard not to notice.
Indeed, yesterday, the young woman mentioned went from the front of the Church to the back with a very proud carriage, which is not to suggest sinful pride. Rather, she carried herself the way that people who are very self-assured, for very good reasons, do.
Something is going on.
And It's not just here. A friend of mine in Oklahoma noticed the same thing at his local parish. And it's crossed into other regions, or perhaps hit there first. For example, notable Korean figure skater Yuna Kim is Catholic, and people like to snap photos of her at Mass wearing a chapel veil.
And it's interesting that this is going on at the same time that some members of the leadership of the Church, which tends to be up in years, seems to be trying to insert the liberal.
I've often noticed that people who come up in particularly devise or stressed eras, and maybe more of us do than not, tend to form our view of the world in those times. A lot of people in their upper 60s, 70s, and 80s assume that "what the young want" is what they wanted when they were young.
The evidence for this is to the contrary.
There's a lot more to this. It's interesting.
Footnotes
*It's important to note that categorizing what an entire generation, or generations, want is hazardous. For example, at least superficially, here I'm noting a return to Catholic tradition among the same generation that is exhibiting such things as a belief that you can change your gender.
Well, a couple of things.
At any one time you can have an overall trend in a generation while individual members of it hold an opposite view. There were, for example, more volunteers who served in Vietnam than there were conscripts, contrary to popular imagination, meaning that quite a few young men sought to serve in the war at the same time history informs us their generation had turned against it. By the same token, you can find a few examples of Americans who were adamantly opposed to the country entering World War One or Two, and continued to hold that view after the country declared war. Beatniks were a feature of the supposedly superconservative 1950s.
Secondly, people are more complex than categorists and political parties may suppose, and as a result they can often hold contrary views, or views that seem to be contrary, or views contrary to the ones they themselves exhibit. Indeed, I've heard some of the stoutest denouncements of tobacco from smokers. They smoked, but wished they didn't.
You get the point.
**For some reason, you're not supposed to say this. Well, noticing that a woman is attractive is not the same thing as engaging in Hefnereque behavior, and the fact that creeps have co-opted this entire aspect of communication is just evidence of how weird and pornified our culture is.
We just passed the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, which the poster above commemorates. The Nazis, every year after they came to power, commemorated their failed coup attempt.
Of course, we know how this story goes. German politics were a mess in 1923, but by the early 1930s they were becoming more and more polarized and voters feared the choice was between the Communists and the Nazis. Parties in the center, like the SDP and the CDP were abandoned as voters flocked to vote against the left or the right.
The Nazis came to power, to Germany's everlasting discredit, and through Europe into murder and the world into war.
On Veterans Day Donald Trump, who never served a day in the military, posted this:
Note, I'm not a theologian. I tried to figue this out, and I think I have it right, but I might not. This is copied from a Church in Ireland.
1. Plenary Indulgence of 2 November
From 12 noon on 1 November until midnight on 2 November one plenary indulgence (applicable only to the Holy Souls) may be gained by visiting a church or oratory and recite the Our Father and the Creed there.
Conditions for gaining a plenary indulgence:
Go to Confession (in the week preceding or the week following 1 November)
Receive Holy Communion (1 Holy Communion for each indulgence)
Pray for the Pope’s intentions (one Our Father, and Hail Mary or any other prayer of one’s choice)
One should have the desire to be detached from every attraction to sin, even the slightest
2. 1 — 8 November
The faithful who visit a cemetery and pray for the dead, may gain a plenary indulgence (applicable only to the Holy Souls) once per day from 1 to 8 November.
The above conditions regarding Confession, Holy Communion and prayer for the Pope’s intentions apply also for this.
3. What is an Indulgence?
“An indulgence is a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain prescribed conditions through the action of the Church which, as the minister of redemption, dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfactions of Christ and the saints” (Paul VI, Apostolic Constitution, Indulgentiarum doctrina, Norm 1).
“An indulgence is partial or plenary according as it removes either part or all of the temporal punishment due to sin” (Indulgentiarum doctrina, Norm 2; Cf. Norm 3). The faithful can gain Indulgences for themselves or apply them to the dead (Code of Canon Law, can. 994).
.svg.png)
_in_art.jpg)
