A Good Article in the Catholic Herald

I look at the website of the Catholic Herald every day. A lot of their stuff is behind a paywall, but not all of it. I read the free articles.

(My recent post poking fun at the Latin Mass obsession of the conservative Catholic media was mostly prompted by the Catholic Herald. Every single day they seem to have another Latin Mass-related article, even if it really has nothing new to report. But it was also prompted by the Raymond Arroyo show on EWTN, and half of the Catholic YouTubers I follow, or half-follow.)

Anyway, today there is a very interesting article on the CH's website: "Return of the Word: why the young are turning back to God at remarkable speed".

Yes, there have been a lot of these articles (thank God), but this one is especially interesting.

Before I look at it, I think we're all a bit wary about polls and statistics. How much do they really tell you? How much do the findings of any survey rely on the questions and definitions used? And even aside from whatever caution we should use when approaching statistics, we should be rather wary about hyping this sort of news too much. It might always be a blip. 

Having said all that, it's definitely welcome after so many years of polls and survey going in the opposite direction.

But to the article. Here's a good passage: "From the first postwar generation, the Baby Boomers, through Gen X to Millennials, Western children were largely educated, ruled and raised by adults who had progressively abandoned real belief in the Christian God and strict religious observance. Alongside this was frequently a naïve insistence that their doing so would usher in a utopia of heightened rationality, free from “downer” superstition and cruelty. I believe Gen Z are the first to realise what has resulted is in fact the opposite.

"All our recent forebears have instead achieved widespread family dysfunction, divorce, slavery to sexual appetite, corruption in society, and the rapid undoing of one of the most incredible 2,000-year civilisational inheritances."

Well, I don't think anyone reading this blog will disagree with any of that, or fail to recognize it.

I think "strict religious observance" might be a key term there. Even most of those who were well-disposed towards religion, over the last sixty years or so, didn't seem to think religious observance was very important. It brings to mind G.K. Chesterton's description of his wife-to-be: "She actually practised a religion. This was something utterly unaccountable both to me and to the whole fussy culture in which she lived. Any number of people proclaimed religions, chiefly oriental religions, analysed or argued about them; but that anybody could regard religion as a practical thing like gardening was something quite new to me and, to her neighbours, new and incomprehensible. She had been, by an accident, brought up in the school of an Anglo-Catholic convent; and to all that agnostic or mystic world, practising a religion was much more puzzling than professing it."

The idea seemed to have been that you could have the spirit of religion without the form, the trappings. But the spirit always seems to evaporate pretty quickly without the form.

One thing that surprises me, though, is that the Nordic, Scandinavian, and Baltic countries have been heavily secularised for many decades now-- as far as I can tell-- and this reaction doesn't seem to have occurred among young people there, in all that time. Again, as far as I can tell.

(The article, which I was able to access earlier, suddenly seems to be paywalled...so I'll end my commentaray there, I guess.