Gimmee That Ol'Time Religion

It's not often that you will hear us espouse on religious matters, but recent announcements coming out of the Vatican have left us a little perplexed.



Several weeks ago the Pope announced that congregations wishing to use latin during mass would be free to do so. This comes as part of the general conservative trend that seeks to undermine and roll back the clock on certain liberal efforts of recent popes such John Paul II. In fact, Pope Benedict XIV's endorsement of last year's book by Archbishop Augustino Marchetto deliberately downplays the importance of the Second Vatican Council, almost as if the popular mid-twentieth century conference on religious reforms never happened the way the public imagined it: you know, no more meatless Fridays, no more priests disappearing behind screens during mass to whisper in languages people no longer spoke, and host of other things.

In fact, our own Marchetto, has suggested that it was the popularity of Vatican II that kept many Catholics out of the counterculture of the 1960s. Our Marchetto (Sean), working off a survey done in the 1960s by Kenneth Kenniston that showed Catholics made up 5% of the "hippie" population, supposes that involvement in a counterculture can be viewed as a measure of dissatisfaction within a particular religious community. The achievements of Vatican II, coming out during the late 1950s and early 1960s satisfied the needs of Catholics for change and modernisation. Now it would seem, the pontiff is suggesting that modernisation is not what the members of the Universal Church are looking for, and perhaps this is true - maybe we are simply assuming that the rapidly growing non-Western populations want the same as their Western counterparts, or, perhaps we are assuming that today's kids, who are flocking to organized religion at surprisingly high rates want a religion with more structure and tradition. As we said, we are perplexed and intrigued.