Balancing Act

SEQUEL TO #271: While conducting a staff retreat last week I realized my earlier comments on Spirituality and Religion were incomplete. It’s true these terms mark a gap between my generation and younger Catholics, but they also mark a gap between us and my parents’ (or grandparents’) generation.

It’s common among my children’s peers to show interest in spirituality without religion. The big questions—What does life mean? What are we doing here? Where is my life going?—have not disappeared, but many younger adults who pose these big questions have no confidence in the Church’s capacity to help answer them.

But I had forgotten the opposite extreme: my childhood experience of Catholicism before Vatican II (1962-1965), when too many Catholics practiced religion without spirituality—that is, they went through the motions, they obeyed all the rules, but without much attention to the inner life where the big questions arise. Such people belonged to Church, but did not pose or wrestle with the big questions.

If spirituality is about the inner life and religion is about belonging, perhaps the next generation focuses too little on belonging, while the generation before mine focused too much on belonging.

The lucky fate of my generation was to witness the way Vatican II struck a happy medium by rejecting not only religion as an end in itself, but also spiritual journeys pursued by isolated indivuals unaided by a community of faith.

Unhappily, this balancing act dominated Catholic life for only one generation. Is it possible Catholicism has swung from one extreme (hollow, empty relgiosity) to another (isolated spirituality) in a mere 50 years?