![]() Although there are a few years difference in age between Bishop Barron and myself, I, too, came of age when there was a great deal of experimentation in the Church and, although I did not know it at the time, a bit of confusion as to some essential elements, like the very nature of the Holy Mass and the role of the ordained priest. ![]() ![]() ![]() It was in this cultural milieu that Bishop Barron’s first experience of Church was constructed. Some of these liberals were so enamored of growth, play, and free development that they allowed John XXIII’s flourishing garden to become overgrown and untamed while some of these traditionalists were so attached to an outmoded cultural expression of the Church’s life that they effectively killed off the plants in the garden, pressing their dead leaves between the pages of a book. What I witnessed during that period was a terrible war of attrition between two extreme camps (with, admittedly, numerous shades in between): progressives overly in love with the culture and pushing myriad reforming agendas and conservatives desperately trying to recover the form of Catholicism that predated the council. ![]() I came of age in the late sixties and seventies of the last century, in the immediate aftermath of Vatican II. Barron, in a preface entitled “Cultivators of a Flourishing Garden of Life” found in his collection of essays Bridging the Great Divide: Musings of a Post-Liberal, Post-Conservative Evangelical Catholic (2004), states: ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |