#341: An “Encore!” for Renewal

As we continue observing the 50th anniversary of Vatican II, I am retrieving a post from the beginning of 2011. The first Baby Boomers began retiring that year, but the challenge they face continues now...

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

I turned 62 last month -- the same age when my father retired.  Thirty years later, he is still going strong, and has now earned more from his pension than he ever did in 39 years on the job at General Electric! 

It wasn't supposed to be that way.  His grandfather's generation never retired at all--they simply died in the saddle.  And while his father retired, he never fully adjusted to being permanently on vacation; he died within a few years, as was typical of his generation, when life expectancy with shorter than today.  My father had no way of knowing  his retirement would last more than 3 decades.

Yet from the start, my father attacked retirement as an active role, performing do-it-yourself projects on his home and property, helping his grown children with their own projects, joining other seniors for community lunches, mall-walking to keep active, and taking his new electronic keyboard to local nursing homes to lead sing-alongs for the "old folks" well into his 80s. 

Those 30 active years reflect a new profile of retired life, when gainful employment gives way to what Marc Freedman has called an "encore career" of other active pursuits.  So retirement has already gone through two phases, shifting from a "permanent vacation until you die" to a second career. 

Now comes the threshold of the third phase.  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. 

My father, after all, was the exception to the rule.  Not many of his peers lasted 30 years after working, and most did not carve out so many new active roles.  But since the boomers can expect to live to 80 and beyond, long retirements like my father’s will become commonplace. 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? 

In past generations of parish life, of course, Catholics reaching their "golden years" routinely passed the torch of parish leadership to the next generation, usually their own grown children, people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.  But in too many places today, that is simply not happening. The fact is the next generation does not show the emotional attachment to Church that keeps so many boomers active in Catholic life.

  Thus many of my generation wonder how to preserve parish vitality in the years ahead.  Many boomer Catholics are beginning to sense that they are not yet "off the hook," since no one else is available to do the job. Moreover, many boomers believe that the renewal of Vatican II has been hijacked in recent years, and are discouraged and fearful that Catholicism will backslide into a style of Catholic life they've already rejected. 

To me, these feelings frame the next challenge facing Catholic boomers: to enter our retirement years committed to persevere in the great historic task of renewing our church.  We were not renewal’s pioneers, but we may have to be its protectors.

This will require great determination.  Do we believe the work of Vatican II is unfinished?  So be it.  Is the next generation unready to carry renewal’s torch into the future?  So be it.  Has renewal been undermined from within?  So be it.  These are the givens of the challenge we must face.

Columnist (retired!) Ellen Goodman, referring to the place of boomers in American society at large, aptly described the decision facing boomer Catholics:

How will we shape the longevity revolution?  I have the sense that if we don't use this gift of time to open up new possibilities, we may go into a long anxious crouch.  If we aren’t the change agents of aging, we'll be the change resisters...This is a moment to redefine aging...it's not a time to be tired. 

It's true we are arriving at our senior status.  It's true that past generations have taken that as their cue to "retire" from active duty and let the younger generation of clergy and laity take charge of the future.  But times have changed, and anyway our generation has never accepted past ways as a divine mandate.  Rather, we have always regarded inherited routines as something to question and revise. 

If we remain young in spirit, our longstanding desire to make a difference will not flag.  And now that difference may well be this: to become the key players in ensuring that renewal does not die.  Just when others might judge that the renewal promised by Vatican II is either finished (in the sense of completed) or else finished (in the sense of failed), we can be the ones who stand up clapping our hands and call out “Encore!  Encore!” to make renewal live again. 

Indeed, meeting this challenge could mean an encore career for us as Catholics, and could prove to be our biggest contribution of all.  We may not have created renewal, but we can save it.

 Bernard F. Swain PhD 2011