"Face it, hippies!"

Over at Orwell’s Picnic there is a post entitled “Face it, Hippies”, with this graph:



Fr. Z comments: "I sense a trend" (October 3, 2011), and continues:

The growth is slow, some will say. But there is growth. There is growth in several important spheres of the Church’s life, including a growth in vocations to the priesthood answered by men who are faithful to the Church’s teachings, many of whom desire traditional liturgy. In the meantime, the acceleration of the “biological solution” is sweeping a certain vision out of positions of influence. As the Church in the wealthy West seems to in some ways growing in numbers, it doesn’t seem to be growing in numbers of people who know their faith well and practice it diligently. We seem to be moving toward what Pope Benedict referred to as a “creative minority”. Now look at the graph again.

We need a Marshall Plan for the renewal of our Catholic identity, and the New Evangelization. The key to any renewal of any aspect of our Catholic lives must be our liturgical worship.

Did you catch that? The last two sentences are freighted. One of my colleagues, in fact, was just commenting the other day on the need to re-think the New Evangelization in terms of traditional liturgy. Ad fontes!