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A Time to Build Anew

bookhighlights

Here are some highlights from a book I recently read. I found these parts interesting while reading, though they may not make the most sense in isolation. These are put here to aide my recall of the book and to give you the barest of encouragements to read it too.

A Time to Build Anew by Todd Hartch, 2021.

Page 3

...I will focus on three related issues that together help to explain the contemporary Catholic situation: first and most important, the challenges posed by modernity; second, Vatican II and the flawed Catholic response to modernity; and, third, the nature of social and cultural change in the past century. Modernity receives the bulk of my attention because it is the root issue. The heart of the problem is not, as many Catholics believe, Vatican II, but rather modernity itself. As important as the Vatican Council (1962-5) was, both for good and for ill, it was itself a response to larger problems, which we could describe broadly as modernity, and the closely associated processes of industrialization and urbanization. These large-scale developments, far more than the Second Vatican Councils's suggested reforms, represent the biggest challenge faced by Catholicism since the Reformation, and possibly since the Muslim invasions of the seventh and eighth centuries. Taking modernity not in the chronological sense but as the progressive disenchantment of the world, often characterized by secular forms of political power, flattening of social hierarchies, market economies, and the nation state, it is clear why its rise posed a challenge to Catholicism.

9

...Vatican II emhpasized the special vocation of lay Catholics, not to the ambo or the head of the communion line, but to the worlds of family, commerce, politics, culture, and all the many forms of human life outside of the doors of the church. They were supposed to transform their environments and to be witnesses of Christ to all those around them. In fact, they did much worse in this area than the generations before Vatican II, who created vibrant Catholic subcultures. The "crisis of Vatican II" is thus less a crisis of the council's teachings, than a crisis of faulty explanation by the ;hierarchy and faulty implementation by the laity. The most neglected aspect of Vatican II is the mission of the laity, which is a key theme of this book.

10

...a society characterized by continuous scientific discoveries and continuous technological developments will also be a society characterized by rapid social, economic, and cultural change. .. Once-important customs vanish, while new ones, unimaginable to previous generations, come to seem normal, even natural. In reality, a new technology takes generations to evaluate. What does it do to family life? What are its political implications? How, then, should it be limited? But in industrial society over the last 200 years technological change has come so quickly and so persistently that little such evaluation has taken place.

16

As rational creatures, human beings have the god-like ability to know the truth, to magnify goodness, and to let beauty shine. At the heart of our current cultural malaise are failures to seek the true, the good, and the beautiful, due largely to modernity's insistence that reality is simply "neutral", rather than full of truth, goodness, and beauty.

35

The importance of [Frederic] Hart's view is evident in his response to a question about whether the money spent on the National Cathedral might have done more good if given to the poor. "To serve the poor", replied Hart, "you must have a value system in place that makes that important. A cathedral is a repository of that value system."

65

Although the professors [at the University of Kansas' Integrated Humanities Program] were Catholics and Thomists, they taught neither Catholicism nor Thomism in the classroom, the former because they strove to teach literature and not to proselytize, and the latter because they did not think their students were ready for it. .. The issue was not just that Thomas's Summa had been written for students who already had mastered philosophy, Scripture, and the seven liberal arts--the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy--which almost no American college students had done, but that they had not even started on a more elementary program of memory, singing, dancing, nature study, and gymnastics that was the necessary preparation for the liberal arts.

80

...the enthusiastic response of IHP students was so different from the usual response of American university students to academics that it frightened parents, administrators, and other professors. Particularly worrying were the conversions to Catholicism...and the handful of IHP students who went on to become monks.

83

The truth exists and can be known. People know this at a deep level and rejoice in it. From the Catholic perspective we can say that they actually were made to know the truth and they can in fact know the truth. The modern university is doubly disappointing in this vein. First, it is thoroughly Cartesian--ready to doubt anything and to criticize everything, holding nothing sacred, at once overwhelmed by endlesss administrative requirements and anxious never to be fooled or misled. Second, it is thoroughly devoted to means rather than ends, and these means are relentlessly administrative and bureaucratic. Students in the Cartesian administrative university find themselves in a complex impersonal system that produces a commodity called "education", characterized not by love for truth or the human person, but, rather, by procedural rigor with an undertone of angst about meaning.

95

On his [Dominic Legge] knees in the chapel, he grappled with God, afraid even to ask what God wanted, for fear that God would ask him to become a priest, and thus ruin his career and plans for marriage and family. He realized, though, that if he avoided the question and went on with his life, he would be saying, in effect, that he knew better than God. Once he did open himself to God, he felt joy and peace rather than fear. .. Over the next year, despite some frustrations and confusions, he came to believe that God was in fact calling him to the priesthood, not to test him or torment him, but out of deep love for him.

120

...those who enjoy homilies full of personal anecdotes and moral truisms would not defend them on the ground of profundity but rather for being amusing and entertaining. In short, the defenders of folk songs and light sermons argue according to categories that either are not part of the Church's understanding of the liturgy at all, or are subordinate to higher aims that have been laid out in great detail by the Church.

135

The trend toward secularization evident in many Catholic colleges after the Second Vatican Council hit Stupenville particularly hard. The opening Mass in fall 1973, with only six students and eight professors in attendance, exemplified the spiritual and demographic trajectory of the college. .. When Michael Scanlan, TOR, was invited to become the new president, he was, in fact, noticeably depressed and unconvinced that he should take the position. [p136] .. Where most Catholic colleges were succumbing to the pressure to become more like secular institutions and to hide or soften their doctrinal and spiritual distinctiveness to attract students, Scanlan took the opposite approach: "You don't always need to join the pack. Don't panic and simply become like everybody else. I would rather emphasize that you take a fresh approach and fresh proclamation of the mission". [p143] It was simply wishful thinking to believe that a college full of students with no special interest in Catholicism being taught by faculty with no special commitment to Catholicism would somehow come to appreciate the Catholic intellectual tradition, just as it was wishful thinking to believe that they would emerge as paragons of virtue and Catholic devotion after spending four years in fraternities and sororities indistinguishable from those at secular schools. [p143-4]

184

In an essay that indicted Smith and Duncan Stroik for "paranoia and self-righteousness", "noisy posturing", and a lack of intellectual rigor, [Michael] DeSanctis argued that American Catholics could no longer accept the kind of church buildings that Notre Dame's architects [Smith & Stroik] wanted to build. Over the past few decades, Americans had been shaped by "the modernist eye for practicality", which had given them "strong, handsomely appointed buildings with decent restrooms, coatrooms, diaper-changing rooms; proper planning-and-primping-and-feasting-and-mourning rooms, all conceived with the same care as the room reserved for divine worship". Despite his strong words, DeSanctis was making the case for the importance of Notre Dame's new approach. His emphasis on the practical, the mundane, and the functional; his uses of "handsomely appointed", rather than "beautifully adorned"; and his admission that the restrooms and coatrooms had been designed with the same care as the sanctuary: his own words pointed to ta domestication and horizontalization of architecture that could not help but produce drab and pedestrian structures.

205

In 2015...the Historic Charleston Foundation invited architect and urbanist Andres Duany...to Charleston for a...report on Charleston's architecture, more specifically on the mediocrity of much recent Charleston architecture and its failure to relate harmoniously to its surroundings. .. In some of the public meetings Duany took a compative stance, asking why so many new buildings looked like they could have been built in Atlanta or Charlotte and denoucning the modernist Clemson school of architecture. He said the city's architects not only did not understand the place where they were working, but even had "contempt" for the city's residents and wanted "to be liberated from the historic constraints". He challenged them to embrace their locale and develop its native genius, not ape the styles of other cities: "Charleston cannot be a net importer of architectural ideas. Charleston has to model its own genetic material, which is considerable and sophisticated. And Charleston has to become an exporter of architectural ideas. The world is fascinated by Charleston. Charleston is the greatest influence of my own work."

The heart of the matter was that the city's architects "are not loving Charleston" and "they're trying to make it something else". He rebuked the preservationists for opposing almost every form of development except for "geriatric monoculture" that disregarded the needs of families and young people. He criticized the fire marshal for allowing gigantic new firetrucks to determine the size of streets, rather than finding trucks that fit the streets that already existed.

212

G.K. Chesterton['s]...idea that orthodoxy is the true adventure bears repeating because it is continually undermined by the nostrums of public culture, which glamorized rebellion and novelty and denigrates tradition. Heresy and accommodation are both boring, stale, and sterile because they are not based on truth and therefore cannot grow and reproduce; they can only tear down. .. If you want meaning in your life, the last thing you should do is disconnect yourself from your people, your place, and your history, much less the spiritual traditions of the Church founded by Christ himself. If you want meaning, embrace tradition; if you want life, submit yourself to truth.

215

A third issue in these stories is institutionalization. When something goes well, whether it is an artistic endeavor or an academic pursuit, the natural consequence is the desire to institutionalize it [the process by which it was achieved], that is, to make it last. Since we love the good, we want the good to continue. Such a desire is natural and praiseworthy, but it always comes with temptations. I am influenced here by Ivan Illich, who describes two kinds of institutions, the manipulative and the convivial.

The manipulative institution attempts to guarantee results and, in doing so, gradually becomes coercive and counter productive. The classic example is the mandatory public school system, which, starting with the noble intention to impart an education, ends up with a compulsory twelve-year conveyor belt that has come to seem more and more like a prison system and that produces people who have credentials but little love for learning, knowledge, or truth.

The convivial institution, on the other hand, is humble and modest, providing a framework that serves the desired end, but never presumes to guarantee it. The convivial institution has few rules, little bureaucracy, and a high degree of freedom, because it is devoted to serving persons, not producing results.