#314: An “Encore!” for Renewal

EXCERPT:
The New Year 2011 marks the beginning of a new phase for my generation.

…That's because 2011 is the year when the first “Baby Boomers” (born between 1946 and 1964) turn 65. The “60s Generation” is in its 60s, and it figures that retirement, like everything else we touched, will never be the same.

…. Boomers were the largest generation in US history; now they will become the largest post-employment workforce ever: the population of retired Americans is expected to reach 66 million by 2025.

It's been called the "longevity revolution," the "third wave," and even "gerontocracy"--the idea that elder baby boomers will be the most powerful shapers of American life, and the first elder generation to dominate a society.
All of which makes me wonder: how is the Church affected by this?

Catholic baby boomers, after all, occupy a unique place in recent Church history. Their parents grew up, got married, and started families in a Catholic Church largely shaped by the immigrant experience, the Council of Trent, and the First Vatican Council. That Church spoke only Latin and commanded compliance to a complex set of strict rules and regulations; it offered sure advancement for those who entered seminaries and convents, but consigned everyone else to the passive roles “Pray, Pay, and Obey.” It enjoyed an abundance of clergy and religious communities and the massive support of its members, who took their passive role for granted in an age when Church was more about authority than faith and authority was the monopoly of the ordained.

Baby Boomers were born into that Church. All of them were baptized in Latin, and most boomers (those born 1946- 1958) received their First Holy Communion in Latin. But then the work of Vatican II (1962-1965) began to take hold, and the boomers came to maturity in a changing Church. By the time they settled down to marriage and family, the face of the Church--its liturgy, its sacraments, its devotional life, its public image, its relations with other religions and with the world at large--had all been transformed into something their grandparents could not have recognized and their parents often struggled to embrace.

Not all boomers embraced that transformed Church either, but most did, and they raised a new generation who (ironically, like their great-grandparents) knew no Church but the one they were born in.

This made the boomers the threshold generation, with one foot in pre-conciliar Catholicism and another in post-conciliar Catholicism. By default, they became the custodians of a Church renewal they never chose but only inherited. That custodianship was radically new in one major respect, compared to previous generations: there were never enough ordained boomers to do the job alone. So following through on renewal has eventually passed from a generation (the "greatest generation") of aging clergy and religious women and men to a new generation of laypeople.

And now those laypeople, the boomer custodians of renewal, are themselves feeling their age. It raises the question: what will happen now to the Church's ongoing renewal?