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Today's young shun '60s-style values I spent a couple of hours with Mel Gibson once and it was, as you would expect, a blissful two hours of adoration (mine). He was charming, shallow, jokey, and fun. We talked about his upcoming movies, his binge drinking around Hollywood, his cattle ranch in Australia, his extraordinary success, his six kids. Through it all, Mel grinned, laughed, chortled, giggled, barked and hooted, like the man's man he is. And then, without warning, he said, and I'm paraphrasing, "You know, Vatican II was wrong, a terrible mistake." It was as if a mask had slipped, and a gargoyle had been revealed under that bland, handsome face. I wasn't sure what to say, so I stumbled for a few minutes while he watched me recover, amused, (these interviews play like competitive tennis, and I couldn't find the ball), and finally, I got back up on my hind legs, and we soldiered on, as if the moment had never been. And now we have The Passion, Gibson's version of the last hours of Christ's life, stripped, apparently, of any Vatican II correctness, and causing waves of concern, avalanches of essays, mockery, protest and so on. Much of this concern seems centered around the fact (the critics aren't sure of their facts) that Gibson might have blamed Christ's death on the Jews, and this might cause fundamentalist Christians to hate Jews, after decades of reconciliation. Not likely. That was then and this is now. Gibson only pretends he's an idiot, and is, rather, a wildly successful filmmaker and producer, with his handsome craggy eye keenly focused on every important social ebb and flow of the past 30 years. And like the opposition to gay marriage, which surprises every morally flaccid boomer I know, including myself, ("whatever" papering over our disquiet), he's noticed a flood tide coming. As Bronwen Catherine McShea reports in the summer issue of the journal First Things, the greying upper-middle class men and (mostly) women who prosecuted the liberalization of the Church through the last four decades are losing their influence. Lectures promoting their concerns lie empty, while even at arch- liberal Harvard, speakers who promote a return to orthodoxy are swamped by young enthusiasts. The dominant movement in the Catholic Church, one which apparently only increases in force season to season, is the growing number of young people who want a traditional church rooted in liturgy. They are a young, ethnically diverse group who are turning away from "the moral and philosophical confusions of the '60s" and embracing a Pope "who asserts, without blushing, his divinely ordained authority to define what is right and wrong" -- which means that abortion is wrong, pre-marital sex is wrong, gay marriage is wrong, the ordination of women is wrong, divorce is wrong, and only celebrating the mystery of marriage and the difference between the sexes will lead us back to a culture of life. A 2000 Gallup youth survey found that teenagers identified most strongly with "religious" (55%) instead of "spiritual but not religious" (39% ) or "religious and spiritual" (2%), a shift which Phyllis Tickle, a contributing editor at Publishers Weekly calls "huge." In 2001, the Hartford Institute for Religion Research released Faith Communities Today, the largest survey of U.S. congregations ever conducted. The survey showed a surge in new church development among evangelical and Mormon congregations, and a decline in Catholic and mainline Protestant churches. The insistence on high moral standards was the correlative factor for growth. "A large majority of the most vital congregations report that they have a clarity of purpose and explicit member expectations that are strictly enforced," noted the Institute. In dioceses where bishops are considered orthodox, they ordain nearly five times as many priests as those run by liberal bishops. Why? The brightest, most committed and selfless of the first generation to grow up sexually liberated reject liberation entirely, because they have felt most keenly the results in their lives, and, furthermore, have seen it wreck havoc in the lives of their friends. There are still enough old-fashioned families around for comparison. As a result, the proportion of anti-abortion sentiment has declined steadily since 1990, and is highest in the under-30 group, leading even Salon Magazine to worry in 2001, that abortion was losing support. For those who lived through the sexual revolution as vulnerable children, as Maggie Gallagher says in What Marriage is For, sexual liberalism has "created millions of fatherless children and entire neighbourhoods where lifelong marriage is no longer customary, driving up poverty, crime, teen pregnancy, welfare dependency, drug abuse, mental and physical health problems." I'd go further to say that the sexual revolution has created an underclass so degraded and unhappy, it threatens our collective health. The paranoid among us might think that that was the plan all along. Bureaucratic elites prefer the chaos of a sexually liberated underclass because it means a never-ending source of clients. Strong marriages, as Gallagher points out, have, in every culture, been critical for elite success, and in many cultures, children born out of wedlock have been throwaways, good for fodder, as cheap labour, as prey. A societal norm, like marriage, ensured a measure of stability that could allow a working class or poor family to have one solid thing to depend upon, the marriage that would not fail. This is no longer the case, and she argues that gay marriage would only give more power to the idea that marriage is for the gratification of adults rather than the protection of children, and the health of the culture. The young religious of every faith apparently reject self- gratification as the meaning of life. More tolerant, but less liberal, the point, they say, is not to grab as much pleasure and stuff as possible but to nurture the human community and grow in virtue towards God. Thank that God that in a post-modern culture, even these heretics must have a seat at the table.

© 2004 Elizabeth Nickson The material at this website is available only for personal non-commercial purposes, and it may not be reproduced without permission.