The new breed ridrew. IMPRIMI POTEST: John J. McGinty, S.J., Provincial of the New York Province, nihil obstat: John A. Goodwine, J.C.D., Censor Librorum. imprimatur: Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York. August 10, 1964 Sf.ec Co. i?0\ rr\ The nihil obstat and imprimatur are official declarations that a book or pamphlet is free of doctrinal error. No implication is contained therein that those who have granted the nihil obstat and imprimatur agree with the contents, opinions or statements expressed. Copyright 1964 by The America Press, 106 W. 56th St., New York 10019 The New Breed REV. ANDREW GREELEY 2 What Makes Them Tick DONALD CAMPION, S. J. 12 A Word from the New Breed DOROTHY HUNT 21 A Word to the Old Breed JOSEPH MacFARLANE, S. J. 28 THE AMERICA PRESS The New Breed REV. ANDREW GREELEY 2 In a footnote to his new collection of essays, Abundance for WhatP, David Riesman notes that he has observed a change in college graduates in the last seven or eight years. The cool and apathetic senior of the middle 1950’s has not vanished, but a new and very different kind of person has appeared on the scene. Riesman is not too specific about what the new graduate is like, but I think I know what he is trying to describe. Several years ago I wrote a book about young American Catholics, which, in a burst of pessimism, I called The Age of Apathy, A certain sympathetic churchman suggested to me that with all the changes going on in the Church I might regret the title in a very few years. I am happy that I followed his advice, for the title finally used (Strangers in the House) enables me to compose much more gracefully the "change of emphasis” in this article. Rev, Andrew Greeley is a senior project director at the National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago, and the author of many books and articles. This article appeared originally in America, 3 There has risen up a New Breed that was all but invisible five years ago. There are not very many of them; they might not show up in any sample; the majority of their classmates in the colleges, the seminaries, the juniorates of the country continue to be listless and indifferent. But the New Breed is making so much noise that one hardly has time to notice the majority. Almost any college president or seminary rector will admit their existence and will confess puzzlement about what they want. All I can report about the New Breed are my own impres- sions, and the impressions are often confused. There are many things about the New Breed that I like, but many things that baffle me. I think I understood the "Strangers in the House” of whom I wrote half a decade ago; but the New Breed are different, and I fear I do not know them. First of all, they are greatly concerned about things like honesty, integrity and authenticity. They must know the reason why. They do not refuse to obey, but before they obey they want to sit down and discuss the reasons for orders; they are confused when those in authority feel threatened by this desire for discussion. As a Jesuit college administrator ob- served: "For four hundred years we have been in the aposto- late of Christian education, and now we suddenly find that our seminarians are demanding that we justify this apostolate.” And a confrere added: "Jesuit seminarians are the most radical people in the American church-bar none.” Neither of the two was opposed to the New Breed, just puzzled by them. With this concern for integrity and honesty there comes an inability to be devious or opportunist—or even diplomatic. One generation of Catholic radicals (at least of the variety I know in Chicago) accomplished their modest goals by in- finite tact, patience and political skill. The New Breed will have none of this. All issues, minor or major, must be brought into the open and discussed. Truth must be spoken even if speaking it does no good and may even cause harm. To do 4 less would be to debase one’s honesty, to compromise one’s authenticity. It is hard to negotiate with them, because they seem to feel that the mere repetition of what they take to be true will eventually carry the day; they seem so eager to make almost any question a matter of principle that one is tempted to feel that they are looking for a fight—though perhaps they are only looking for a cause. With some exceptions, however, they are not intentionally disobedient or disrespectful of authority. They are appalled when their honesty is taken as disrespect and their desire to discuss is understood as disobedience; they can’t see how such an interpretation can be put on their intentions. They think that they are being much more open with their superiors than those who comply with an external show of docility and then complain bitterly about authority when authority’s back is turned. They contend that their desire for understanding is much to be preferred to a hteral obedience that dehberately sabotages the goals of authority. They argue that superiors are much better off with the consent of free men than the comphance of automatons. They cannot understand why many superiors do not seem to agree with them. Fierce Personalism They are greatly worried about “fulfillment.” Their pre- decessors saw a job that had to be done and did not ask whether the job was going to fulfill the needs of the people who did it. But the fierce personalism of the New Breed will not tolerate such a “nonhuman” approach. They feel that they can help others only if they can relate as persons and that they cannot relate unless there is a possibihty of “fulfillment” in the relationship. They are not attracted by a task that seems to rule out the possibility of an ‘T-Thou” dyad. They are anxious about loving and being loved—or more precisely, with whether they are able to love. It is not at all 5 unusual for young people to be concerned with love; but it is surely new for youth to question its own ability to love, especially when to the outside observer it often seems that those who are the most able to love are the most likely to doubt their powers of love. They do not identify love with sexual romance, and indeed this latter aspect of love is much less a source of worry to them than friendship, encounter, relationship. They have no doubt that they can be sexually stimulated, but they are not sure that they can be "friends,"^ that they can ""encounter " a sexual partner or anyone else. As a result their ""radicalism” is not likely to have anything to do with ""causes”; they are more interested in people than in ideas. Their predecessors on the picket lines of the 1930 s were quite unconcerned with whether they were ""liked” or not; there were enemies to be fought, principles to be de- fended, wars to be won. The New Breed wants to help people and wants to be loved by them. Hence they are not political ideologues; they are not ""radicals” in the traditional sense of the word, since they are almost completely without a coherent political philosophy. While they work for civil rights, and may periodically throw up picket lines ( sometimes, one thinks, for the sheer hell of it), they are not very active in the militant civil rights organizations or in the peace movement and studiously ignore the ideological overtones of these move- ments. Neither do they find much but amusement in the radical conservatives who are shouting so loudly. The New Breed is not, by any means, uninterested in politics; they are fascinated by the political game, may be active at the pre- cinct level, and are tempted by governmental careers. But, like their heroes of the Irish Mafia, they are pragmatic rather than ideological in their approach. Unlike the "‘Strangers in the House” of whom I wrote five years ago, the New Breed does more than talk about human suffering. It is from the ranks of the New Breed that volun- teers are recruited for the Peace Corps, Pavla, the Extension 6 home missions, and especially the various inner-city student programs that are spreading across the country like a prairie fire. Such work is with people; it is non-ideological and ""ful- filling.’" One hears the volunteers observe: ""We re getting more out of it than the people we are supposed to be helping.” While such statements may not be true, they fiunish a very revealing insight into the New Breed. But whatever their views as to the natme of the work, make no mistake about it, they are proceeding with a cool and nonchalant competence that is often quite disconcerting. The Northern Student Move- ment and related tutoring programs are anything but amateur. The New Breed knows how to work with committees, write brochures, give speeches, raise money, utilize community re- sources and issue press releases. CALM (Chicago Area Lay Movement), the inner-city movement I am most familiar with, was a going concern almost before those of us who were watching it closely were conscious that it had even started moving. Indeed, it managed to get stories into the news- papers about its work before it had begun to work—which is surely the height of something or other. This competence should not be too surprising, since the New Breed is com- posed of the young people who have been student leaders through high school and college and know all about organi- zations. As one full-time worker put it: ""After running things for eight years, it would be terribly dull just to sit in a class- room and teach school.” Nor does the New Breed seem in- clined to view its involvement in the inner-city as a passing phenomenon. Grace Ann Carroll, the cofounder of CALM, spoke for most of the New Breed when she said: "‘Before we re finished, we’re going to think up a lot more things to do, so that everyone who wants, no matter what their age or responsibilities, can get involved.” We may be witnessing a major social change as the future members of the upper middle class return to the inner-city from which their parents fled. 7 The non-ideological coolness of the New Breed does not make them easy to deal with. Those who have positions of authority and responsibility over them surely deserve sym- pathy. The New Breed are frequently groping and inarticulate about precisely what they want, but they know that they want change. Often they seem almost to be hoping that then- superiors will refuse their requests so that there may be a clear issue about which to fight, a definite change around which they can rally. They want freedom now;--whatever that may mean. The " radicaF Catholic youth of the past never expected to win. They did not think that in their lifetime they would see the ideals of the social or liturgical teachings of the Church become a reahty. They were resigned to being a despised minority fighting for a lost cause. But the New Breed is not going to play the game that way. They have tasted enough change in the last few years to want much more. They are quite confident that they are going to win and that they will live to bury those who stand in their way. Now—Not Next Week The New Breed is not flexible, it is not gradualist. It wants a Church that is relevant to its own needs and the needs it sees in the world, and it wants it now, not next week. Un- fortunately, it is not able to say exactly what that relevance involves, and at this stage of the game neither is anyone else. Thus the New Breed is a trial to its elders; we cannot under- stand them and they can't really understand themselves. They are the product of a revolution of expanding expectations, and in the midst of such transitional situations, friction (and occasionally very serious friction) is inevitable. As much as we are annoyed by the inconsistencies and irrationality that the New Breed often seem to display, we must not overlook what they are trying to tell us; they are trying to say that you 8 cannot have a half-souled aggiornamento, that if you open the window you are not going to be able to close it again and that the wind that blows in is likely to bring all sorts of strange things with it. I have a hunch that the New Breed is basically gradualist; if it sees progress being made it will be content with a moder- ate pace of change and not demand everything all at once. Their present resistance to the gradualist approach may be merely an objection to a pace of change that is so slow as to be almost imperceptible. They may oppose a gradualist aggiornamento because many of them feel that almost no change has filtered down to their level. As the pace of reform and renewal accelerates at the grass roots, they may be much easier to deal with. This view, however, could be the wishful thinking of a member of the older generation, hoping that in a few years the New Breed will start acting like their elders. Yet it would be a terrible mistake to think that they are going to leave the Church, either by apostasy or alienation. It is their Church and it would be difiBcult even to drive them out of it. They have been told that they are the Church so often that they now believe it, and while they may dislike many of the things they see in the Church today, they are sophisticated enough to know that these things can be changed and young enough to think that they are going to help change them. They are restless with the Church, but they are restless with it as the fair bride that they love. Nor are they anti- clerical, even though they may object to many of the policies they take to be “clerical.” Indeed, anticlericalism may well decline among the New Breed since its lay and clerical mem- bers share so many common problems and hopes. It often seems that the most “anticlerical” of the New Breed are those who are seminarians; and while a very few of the ex-semi- narians have, temporarily at least, left the Church, the majority of the “ex’s” simply become leaders of the New Breed laity (as do the “ex-postulants” and “ex-novices”). No, the 9 New Breed is not going to leave, nor is it going to be quiet. We are going to have to put up with it for a long time. How has the New Breed come to be? How can we explain it? The answers are not easy. The New Breed has known neither war nor depression, but only cold war and prosperity. It hves in the midst of a psychological age when even the Sunday magazines talk about existentialism. It has read the philosophy and literature of the day, with its heavy emphasis on significance and personalism. It hears of the aggiornamento in the Church and can follow in detail the progress of reform in journals of the Catholic Estabhshment. Its prophet is Fr. Teilhard (in one New Breed college apartment I saw a shrine to Teilhard), and it has found its patron saint in John Kennedy, who, with his youthfulness, -his pragmatism, his restlessness, his desire for challenge and service, his vision of a new freedom, refiected in so many ways what the New Breed wants to be. Perhaps there are other explanations too. It is too early to say whence the New Breed has come; we will have to wait until they can explain themselves. What will come of them? We have said that few will leave the Church. Some will become cynical and alienated. Others will bow to pressures of family and friends and settle for the good life; yet others will dissipate their energies in romantic dreams or confused and futile love affairs. Not a few of them will marry people who are not of the New Breed and endure lives of agony or frustration. Some will mellow with age. But it is a fair bet that enough of them will remain. They will mature with time, but we will be kidding ourselves if we think they will mature in our patterns. They are different now and they will be different twenty-five years from now. They are a paradoxical bunch, supremely self-confident, yet anxious and restless; they are organizationally efficient and yet often diplomatically tactless; they are eager to engage in dialogue and yet frequently inarticulate in what they want to say; they are without ideology and yet insistent on freedom; 10 they are generous with the poor and sufEering and terribly harsh in iheir judgments of their elders and superiors; they are ecumenical to the core and yet astonishingly parochial in their tastes and fashions; they want desperately to love but are not sure that they know how to love. They want to scale the heights yet are mired in the foothills. I am sure tibere is a resolution of these paradoxes, that the New Breed has some principle of inner consistency, but because I am not one of them I cannot discover this principle. It should be clear that I am ambivalent about the New Breed. I am fascinated by them and I admire their courage; yet they frighten me. In another quarter of a century they will be taking over the American Church. They will be the bishops, the mothers general, the rectors, the pastors, the provincials, the superiors, the scholars, the politicians, the organizers, the editors, the leaders of lay organizations. I don’t know quite what their Church will look like and I wonder how much room there will be in it for someone like me. The New Breed has reason to be confident. Everything is on their side—their youth, time, the wave of history, and, one suspects, the Holy Spirit. What Makes Them Tiek DONALD CAMPION, S.J. 12 It would be foolish to try to improve on, let alone quarrel with, Fr. Greeley’s probing analysis of the New Breed. As a matter of fact, I find myself nodding assent to almost all his judgments. And this is so not simply because he winds up admitting to the same ambivalence I myself entertain toward this emerging generation. Moreover, I share his conviction that “the New Breed has some principle of inner consistency.” With him, I can only grudgingly confess my own suspicion that “youth, time, the wave of history and . . . the Holy Spirit” favor them. They certainly give the impression of being bent on building a new world and a new Church. Though I am steeling myself for the day when they propose to drag me into this world and this Church, my hunch now is that they will have done a good construction job in both instances. For the moment, however, it may be profitable to speculate on what has made the members of the New Breed tick the way they do. After all, though they are shaping new patterns Fr. Donau) Campion, S. J., is an associate editor of America. 13 in every area of life, they did not pop forth as the New Breed out of some antiseptic, timeless, culture-free vending machine. Certainly Fr. Robert O. Johann is correct in observing, as he did in the May 2, 1964, issue of America magazine, that a distinctive mark of contemporary man is his conviction that "the individual ... is no longer responsible merely for his own conforming to pre-existing patterns.” But in that essay he took pains also to note that the same individual, who "must now assume responsibility for the very patterns them- selves and the shape they are henceforth to have,” is himself to a significant extent the product of history and of the cultural context out of which he leaped onto history’s stage. It is fascinating to peer into a crystal ball at some of the changes that will likely be wrought by the New Breed in days to come. Much can even now be foreseen on the basis of what we know about present social trends and mankind’s available technological capabilities. As one scholar recently estimated, "the changes in our economy, our society and our culture during the next forty years . . . can be expected to equal in significance the changes of the past four hundred years, all taken together.” More important, of course, are the possible repercussions of such changes on man himself. Fr. Johann pointed to some- thing of this sort when he wrote that "the prodigious increase in communications confronts the individual in his formative years with such a range of competing world views and tradi- tions that automatic acceptance of them is no longer possible.” Their Special Quality Much of the future depends, in other words, on material and cultural forces that already exist and are in motion. Even more fascinating to observe, however, is one further com- ponent: the personality of the generation summoned to exer- cise human control over these forces. Fr. Greeley has put us 14 in his debt by highbghting key aspects of the New Breed s make-up. But what is there in the world and the Church to date to account for the special quality of thought, attitude and style it possesses? To put it another way: What is it that explains the very breeding of the New Breed? The world that the New Breed has been bom into, and that has done so much to shape its personality, is expanding at an unprecedented and almost incomprehensible rate. In the United States of 1950, the total population stood at 150.8 million, with 30 million young Americans going to school. By 1960, the national total had reached 179.3 miUion, and there were 43.8 miUion students in our classrooms. One conservative “best guess” of population experts has it that the general population will exceed 285 million by 1985, with 74.5 million of that number crowding into the nation’s schools. And all this will happen in a country that is by no means the fastest growing in an exploding world. Facts, figures and projections of this sort have a way of shocking people into new awareness of what the world may hold in store for today’s youth. Such data will not automatically ciu-e aU cases of parochialism, whether it be of a national, racial, pohtical or religious variety. But they nevertheless im- part something of the vision and sense of urgency behind Cardinal Suenens’ description of the central problem of the Church today as one of bringing “our Christian people to pass from a state of passivity to a state of action.” The generation of American Catholics now coming of age finds itself in a world made up of four non-Christians for every Christian. Small wonder, then, that it insists on exploring new forms of the apostolate in response to the Belgian cardinal’s challenge: “How will we succeed in having each Christian bring the message of life to four others?” Not only is the world of the New Breed a more crowded one. It is one in which races and religions find themselves forced by a host of circumstances to enter into more and more 15 frequent and intimate contact. It is one that lives under the shadow of the Bomb, but one that has managed at the same time to fix its eyes on outer space. For this reason, perhaps only an alert European bom at the dawn of the marvel-filled 16th century could properly interpret the impact of mankind s first ventures into space on the psychology of the generation reaching maturity in the 1960’s. And not even a spokesman from that golden era of expanding knowledge could fully tell us what to expect from a tide of men and women who have grown up with an explicit sense of the planetization of the human race. There is another set of circumstances shaping the person- ality of the New Breed. It must be seen in its unique time- and-space-bound cultural atmosphere and is compounded of the age’s distinctive economic, social, political and intellectual developments. Today’s college student, for example, came into a world that was just shaking off the nightmares of World War II and the lingering memories of America’s struggle with the Great Depression. During his brief life span, however, he has known at least a shadowy kind of peace on earth and a relative affluence at home that seems to be as permanent a fixture on the American scene as rising health standards and expanding educational opportunities. He knows, for instance, that the future should lift U.S. college and university enroll- ments from a 1960 total of 3.6 million to a giant 12.8 million undergraduate and graduate students by 1985. Time and again one hears older persons wondering aloud at the organizational ability of younger people. Fr. Greeley cites typical instances of their success in setting up and pub- licizing civil rights demonstrations and community betterment projects. Equally striking evidence of their know-how and capacity for getting things done may be seen in the rash of student-initiated, student-controlled and student-financed pub- lications blossoming on and off college campuses. I am think- ing, for example, of three that were begun recently by young 16 Catholics: New Generation, the first of them to be published; Inquiry, put out by a group of Fordham students; Stimulus, the latest recruit, brain child of a hardy band of student editors drawn from Trinity, Dunbarton, Georgetown and Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Some may hold that the outstanding feature of such ven- tures is the independence, not to say brashness, of youthful judgment they reveal. But independence bordering on rebel- lion has always characterized collegians. More notable, per- haps, is the demonstrated capacity of these students to exercise their independence in an effectively organized way. Here we confront, I suggest, the earliest fruits of an educational ex- perience that will increasingly manifest its impact in the New Breed s distinctive activities. Through exposure to TV and its unending flow of forums, panels, roimd tables and the like, this generation s characteristic working approach to any prob- lem is that of organized group discussion leading to organized group action. No wonder beleaguered college deans, civil oflScials and religious authorities are discovering to their sur- prise and occasional discomfort that the day of administration through bare ukases posted on bulletin boards has given way to faculty-student committees, open forums, seminars and other mechanisms of group dynamics. Those Agitators Within some sectors of the American Catholic community, the fashion is to invoke a ‘‘devil theory” in explaining the New Breed’s exasperating behavior. “Things would never have got so out of hand if those agitators weren’t around, sowing all this unrest.” How simple, if that were the real story. But the fact is that a Hans Kiing, for example, was not needed to create current interest in freedom in the Church. The phenomenal interest his lectures aroused throughout his tour of this country did 17 not spring from thin air at the summons of Fr. Kiing’s mag- netic personality or some revolutionary spark in his remarks. He simply crystallized thought and sentiment that had already circulated among Catholics, clerical and lay, on and oflE uni- versity and seminary campuses. Perhaps that venerable octogenarian, John XXIII, was the one who really fired young minds and hearts in our day. His Pacem in Terris, whose language has been described by Car- dinal Meyer as “redolent of courageous optimism and creative vision,” spoke for and to the world they know. The Council he summoned and set in motion has proved to be the mirror and voice of the Church they instinctively love. For they stand confidently ready to tackle anew the mission of renewing the face of the earth and all things in the Holy Spirit. This is why Pope John will remain a symbol of what the Christian can do when he unites faith and hope to liberate the potential of evangelical charity. There is a certain restiveness in the New Breed. But it springs from that conviction set before Dutch university stu- dents by Cardinal Alfrink: “Freedom to express one's views— circumscribed by certain conditions—is a precious good in the Church that she cannot do without.” The outspoken “rebels” so often turn out to be, at the same time, the best students we have. One priest professor recently described them well when he said of the leaders of a student demonstration on his campus: these boys are also the ones who last summer spent their vacation laboring for destitute peons in Mexico, who staff weekly CCD programs for public school children in near-by parishes, who coach underprivileged teen-agers in a city slum, and who raise their own funds to rent a country house where they and their fellow students can make “closed” weekend retreats under priest counselors. They are, I suspect, also the reason why almost every Catholic college newspaper in the past year has carried debates on the quality of undergraduate theological instruction. 18 Perhaps the first step toward understanding what gave rise to the New Breed and their fellows is to see them as both product and promise of the new world and new Chmch that an ancient dreamer of dreams like John XXIII comprehended for us all. A Word from the New Breed DOROTHY HUNT 20 After Soren Kierkegaard had broken with his fiancee, Regina Olsen, he wrote in the Journals that only one thought obsessed him; . . either you throw yourself into the wildest kind of life or else become absolutely religious, . . When Father Greeley’s pessimism moved him to write Strangers in the House, he described something akin to the "either” clause of Kierkegaard’s proposition; now, with "A New Breed,” he has chosen to emphasize the alternative "or.” I suppose it would be expected that I wholeheartedly concur with Father Greeley’s findings. I should raise my voice in a lusty "New Breed, We Stand and Hail Thee.” But it would be at most traitorous and at least pedestrian of a New Breeder to produce the expected, and dishonest to re-aflSrm Father Campion’s conviction that there is little to improve on in Father Greeley’s descriptive catalog. Perhaps "improve on” is too brash a phrase, even for a New Breeder. Maybe "am- plify” and "qualify” would more accurately suggest my pur- Dorothy Hunt is one of the founders of the Chicago Area Lay Move- ment (CALM) and a former assistant editor of The Critic, 21 pose. I do not, of course, disagree with Father Greeley s thesis; I merely find some fault with his emphasis. Most of us would agree that many of the "new"" qualities of the New Breed have been around for a long time. Certainly the Old Breed agonized over honesty and love and "fulfill- ment."" True, such concerns were not expressed so intensely, nor debated so exphcitly, largely because Camus and Buber and Teilhard de Chardin had not yet filtered to any consid- erable number of people. Existentialist drama, the possibility of nuclear extinction, the Kennedy shibboleths, the Council, Birmingham had not yet created the atmosphere for awaken- ing. When, however, that atmosphere intruded upon the cli- mate of the 1960"s, it forced one to apply a scientific method- ology by re-examining his paleolithic axioms in the flash of nuclear evidence. A scrupulously just investigation netted Kierkegaard"s either/or proposition. As Rodgers and Hammer- stein would have it, "With Me It"s All or Nothing."" This choice did and still does confront any of those fortunate enough to see it, and did not gravitate inexplicably only to the young. It was, after all, the product of an era; as such, it embraced the forty-year-old as well as the man half his age. Admittedly, we now see the first twenty-year-olds to exhibit the character- istics Father Greeley has so rapidly delineated. But it seems rather obvious that these young people are the first of their kind only because they are the first young people to have been affected by the currents of the 1960"s. There is something to the observation that people did not join the Peace Corps in 1955 because, in 1955, the Peace Corps did not exist. It is true, however, that New Breed-ness has burgeoned most noticeably among the young. It is also true that, although the Catholic liberals of the 1930"s may have shared many of the same agonies and aspirations which the New Breed now wrestles with. New Breeders have attacked these common questions with totally different maneuveurs. Above all, they have endorsed personalism, the anti-ism, and have created or 22 been provided with concrete outlets for much of what used to be merely campus abstraction. The Old Breed is too tied to its past to take advantage of this new opportunity. The Old Breed is tired, and its blood clots readily. They must leave the entrechats to us whipper-snappers. Already the New Breed has grown accustomed to leaping. To say, then, that New Breeders are gradualist is woefully short of the mark. The trend of aggiornamento, to be rendered irreversible, must be accelerated. What slows down has a strong chance of braking to a halt. Martin Luther King can t wait, and neither can we. What we can t wait for is the question. Here, I think, the New Breed grapples with its greatest diflBculty; specifying what it wants. What it doesn t want is painfully evident; what it proposes to substitute is distressingly elusive. The Ideal Answer Here the New Breeder must combat the temptation to damn the status quo, which, by definition, exists in the real order, and then proffer solutions, which, existing as proposals, belong to the ideal order. Naturally the ideal seems punctme-proof, because it escapes the scrutiny and failure which concrete implementation will impose on it. Tumbling into this illogical pit requires no effort at all. Anybody can construct a Utopia, even though it may turn out to be another Erewhon. The status quo falls short of my needs and fails to challenge my potential; I submit, therefore, ideal solutions—in the ideal order. “Scholastic theology just doesn’t grab people; you must incorporate theology into contemporary thought. The Mass setting is a cultural anachronism; you must place it in the context of everyday existence and cease to cloak Christ in a mantle of medievalism. Ecclesiastical directives on current issues are slow to arrive and irrelevant when they finally ap- pear; you must allow us our burden of exercised freedom.” 23 As you see, this jump to the ideal is effortless; it is also largely ineffectual. Faced with this dilemma, the New Breeder has to grope his way toward an answer. He strives for something both elastic and practicable. The abstractions implicit in his an- swers may apply to his fellows; the particulars are sound only for him. What the New Breeder wants most is to love himself. This may seem rather egocentric, and contradictory to the stipula- tion that New Breeders are so concerned with loving others. But it only seems that way. As Erich Fromm has pointed out, self-love is the very antithesis of selfishness. The selfish person is too anxious about his own security and position to love him- self. Bemanos concretized this dilemma in The Diary of a Country Priest; his cure found release only in the enlightening discovery that he loved himself: am reconciled to myself, to the poor, poor shell of me . . . the supreme grace would be to love oneself in all simplicity. . . It is impossible to map out a general course to follow in attaining this objective. Each of us would find a different way, because each of us would love a different person. One criterion for the search is a faithfulness to integrity — the acquisition and retention of which helps the New Breeder to realize his personhood and thereby to love himself. The New Breeder wants to be able to forgive himself for any half-hearted response to the New Breed virtues of charity and coinage, magnanimity and drive. He is not content with utilizing his talents, but feels that he must exploit them. When he fails at that, he may be disgusted or angry with himself. But if he has even begun to love him- self, to accept gracefully what he cannot do, he will shake off his initial disappointment in himself, and he will go on. If the New Breeder encounters dilficulty in this area of loving himself, he meets insuperable odds in loving others. Most New Breeders find it impossible to confront the ‘‘Thou’" of a box elder tree with the “Ts” of themselves; they blithely 24 leave the trees to Martin Buber, and move on to the human beings around them. Sometimes, as the drive in Mississippi has so aptly illustrated, this move involves locomotion. One story on the Freedom Schools in Mississippi, an accoimt clear- ly by an Old Breed hack, ridiculed a student because, when asked his reason for going, the student had said that he was there "to relate'" to other people. Why, the story went on, couldn't this youngster have stated the simple simply? "To help the cause of civil rights" would have been a clear and respectable answer. But it would not have been the right answer. The student could have stayed in his own back yard and helped that cause in any one of a variety of ways: picket- ing, tutoring, joining in the melee of a splash-in or any of the other "in's" now fading out of the civil rights picture. But that student felt that he had to go to Mississippi; he had to acquire some proximate awareness of the struggle for civil rights. When you love people, you want to be with them. Chief Advantage Both before and dmmg this struggle to love, the New Breeder must meet the problem of communication. This may elicit from him an ocean of invective against the Catholic ghetto which has restricted him to its stifling confines. What- ever parochialism the New Breed may exhibit is only the remnant of his ghetto upbringing. It may take New Breeders some time to shake off the last vestiges of this defunct phenomenon, but time is something that New Breeders have an abundance of. It is, in fact, their chief advantage over the man who was bom in 1930. Time allows them to seek novel contacts outside the ghetto — people the like of whom they have never encountered before. The New Breeder is deeply ashamed of his parochialism, and he tries to stifle it when it rears its shrunken head. In the New Breed, there is no place for the man from the provinces, and when the New Breeder 25 finds that man lurking in himself, he strives to exorcise that spirit into oblivion. "Catholic ghetto” is not a paradox, but a contradiction. As falsehood, it deserves only extinction. In burying the remains of his parochial outlook, the New Breeder digs a companion grave for the interment of tradi- tionalism. The test of the past is sometimes a criterion for the present, but it is not always a sound criterion. What has been done is not necessarily what should have been done, and is often what should not be done now. Tradition allows for little flexibility, and flexibihty is basic to the personalist approach. Among those traditions the New Breed discounts are CFM, YCS, YCW, the KC’s, the necessity of Catholic higher educa- tion, the Catholic diocesan press (Reporter excluded), the Catholic Lawyers’ Guild, Catholic Action and the Roman Catholic. These traditions erect barricades to the American Catholic; they frustrate the Christian in diaspora. They belong below the Alpha Point. At the heart of the New Breed’s rationale is this idea of diaspora. New Breeders want to assimilate the world with themselves and themselves with the world via osmosis. Through the membrane of being Christian, the New Breeder reconciles himself to the world and the world to himself. In doing this, he reveals himself as a strict reactionary. He goes to the Gospel for his direction. He finds there that he must love — not abstract "people,” but persons. Most important, he finds there that he must return his talents, including the talent of loving, with interest attached. He relates this idea directly to the diaspora: he must be competent in the pro- fessions and the trades not only to live with himself, but also to live with diaspora. He enters the diaspora alone, free of institutional associations, and will succeed only on his own. Believing that, he develops a natural abhorrence for the or- ganizational. He hates categories so much that the label "New Breed” caused him to protest; he had hoped to escape any monogram. Thus, his association with PAVLA or the Peace 26 Corps, will provide him only temporary respite. The genuine New Breeder must retain his elasticity at the expense of the clear-cut purpose and solid comfort he might have enjoyed through espousing some organization. Fortunately, the New Breeders love for the Church pre- scinds from his distaste for the institutional. He loves the Church precisely not as an institution, but as the person Christ striving for rapprochment with the persons of creation. The New Breeder wants a healthy Church. Some have attributed his vocahsm in this regard to callow impatience, but the mo- tive for his criticism digs deeper. If New Breeders are too harsh in their evaluation of the past and demands for the future, lay that to concern and not to restlessness. If someone you love is sick, you may have to yell a httle to get the doc- tor s attention. When, as in the case of the renewal of the Church, doctor and patient are the same person, you may find it necessary to sound the fire alarm. In all of this, the New Breed’s awareness of the terrible biurden of freedom weighs them down. In one sense, they have no choice, because their vision and its concomitant re- sponsibility chooses them. In Frost’s words, they ‘"get dedi- cated.” But there is always the possibility of “getting undedi- cated,” of selling out. The New Breed hopes that it can hang on to Camus’ observation that real generosity to the future means giving all to the present, and that, in choosing con- tinually to choose, tliey will have chosen from the beginning. If they succeed at that, the New Breed will have little chance to stagnate. Its members will gladly make way for the neo-New Breed of 1970. As Frost has noted. There’s always been an Ararat Where someone someone else begat To start the world all over at. Starting the world all over isn’t really such an outlandish proposition. All you need is a covenant. And the New Breed has that. 27 A Word to the Old Breed JOSEPH MacFARLANE, S.J. 28 There is a new generation in the Chiurch and the world, thank God — alive, dynamic, courageous and generous. They are existentiahsts — almost all of them. No preplanned cookie-cut- ting for them. No pat answers. No easy, ready-made solutions. No external conformity as a substitute for genuine conviction and personal involvement. They don t want to sit passive and listen; they want to speak out -- and to be heard sympatheti- cally. They will have nothing to do with lecturers who will not try to understand their world. They don’t think they know everything, but neither do they believe anyone else does. They feed spastic children; teach drop-outs how to catch up; mingle with Negroes and Mexicans in imderprivileged areas with programs for developing leaders among them; en- gage in ecumenical projects with Jews, Protestants, and non- believers; serve in Community Fund shelters; teach catechism to local parishes; expose Newman Club students to Catholic Fr. Joseph MacFarlane, S. J., is editor of Direction, published by the National Sodality Service Center. His article appeared originally in Direction. 29 philosophy and theology; visit delinquents in jails; and engage in countless other projects, all the while striving to excel as students on campus. There is atomic energy in this coming generation. What is to become of them? What is waiting for them? This is a most important problem for the adult generation. Will there be adult organizations ready to receive their like, or will a wall of separation between the older generation and the new drive youth away to join or to form new organiza- tions? Make no mistake about it. For good or ill, this new genera- tion is dynamic and they have much to give which this world needs if it is to have modem Christian leaders. Our older generation was trained to accept the institutions in the Church and the formulas by which they were defended; we learned a reverence for authority in a spirit of obedience which made it imchristian to challenge decrees, decisions and regulations handed down by authority, even those we couldn’t understand or didn’t like. We may not easily understand this new genera- tion, but we must make up our minds soon how to face this new instrument, this new grace God is fashioning to cope with the world of today and of tomorrow. I see grace and God’s providence in this new generation. I see only tragedy in trying to turn back the clock to an ap- parently safer, more secure, more clearly defined (premature- ly), more authoritarian, more easily controlled-from-on-top attitude. And, to be honest, while admitting that our genera- tion has accomplished much, it is not at all clear that we have found the most eflFective ways to spread the kingdom of Christ from our entrenched positions behind the walls. Age has nothing to do with it. Pope John was no youngster nor is Cardinal Bea. Between them, they helped to open win- dows and doors which had been closed for centuries. It might have been more comforting behind the closed doors, sure that we alone were right, but we have passed a turning point in 30 history and there is no return to the days we once knew. We are entering a new age and we need new thinking to meet it. Let us open our minds to the future and our hearts to the new generation. Admittedly, they have much to learn. They can, at times, be superficial and inexperienced in many ways; brash, if you will; and much less willing to listen to us than demanding we listen to them. In their wonderful sense of discovery, of self-reahzation, of inter-personal relationships, of courageous involvement, they are exuberant. They can, unfortunately, be overconfident in their new-found vitality, not realizing that early religious ex- perience, like young love, can wither without deep roots. On the other hand, their enthusiasm and eagerness to try new ways should not be dampened because we are older, wiser, wearier, and lack the sparkle of earlier days when we were the young enthusiasts seeking to set up our own new ways. They prefer to talk rather than to think, yet they are willing to think hard when the truth is put to them in ways they can understand. They want love to rule them, not laws; but they will have to learn that love must follow most demanding rules or it will perish. They want to discover things for themselves, not be told things are so — a wonderful way to be, if they can only learn in time the awful difiFerence between mistakes from which they have a chance to learn, and the blind traps of self-destruction from which there are no exits. They have much to learn, and we have much to learn, too, we of a generation that was sure it had so many final answers. They need so much of what we learned, but we have to learn how to present our wisdom to them in new ways. We need more doubts about human infallibility, our own especially; more regard for individual liberty; more reluctance to appeal to authority; more reliance on the power of persuasion; more appreciation for the true spirit than for the traditional form. They need to learn that new and old are not the same as good 31 and bad, just as our generation has to learn that a thing isn t necessarily wrong because we never did it that way. In short, we have to learn to respect each other, to look for the good that each generation can bring to the Lord s work, and to join forces. If we do not condemn their youth while they are learning, they will learn that living for the moment may be exciting, but not satisfying for long. If we are patient while they learn the lesson, they will soon under- stand that solid progress seldom comes quickly. But if patience is required, shouldn’t we have more than they do; if maturity and balance are needed to bring about an intelligent transition, shouldn’t the older generation be capable of seeing the good in the new without being upset by the changes involved? There is no progress without change, and no renewal without changes. Let’s not fight them. Let’s welcome them as new reinforce- ments with new weapons sent by God to reinforce the acies ordinata, the spiritual troops all lined up for an age-old strug- gle that has not yet been won. 32 This Thing Called AMERICA What is AMERICA? Editor: America is a weekly journal of opinion founded in 1909. From its inception it has been the work of a team of Jesuit priests. What norms guide AMERICA in making its policy? Editor: We take our stand, first of all, on the dogmas of our Catholic faith. We also rely heavily on 'that part of the Judeo- Christian tradition which is known as the heritage of the natural law. Other points of reference are the insistent social teaching of the modern Popes, the pronouncements of the American hierarchy, and those of other countries. Are you liberal or conservative? Editor: Depending on the points of view of our correspondents, we are blamed for being both, and often in criticisms of the very same article or editorial. Our purpose is to try unfailingly to be Catholic — both upper and lower case. Thus, we lay claim to the best in both traditions, that of liberalism and that of conservatism, and explicitly reject extremists in either of the two camps. Where does this leave America? In the extreme center, I suppose. For whom is AMERICA intended? Editor: For men and women who want serious, consistent opinion on the news of the day. America is generic in content and presents thoughtful commentary weighed in the balance of Christian morality. The subscription rate is low $8.00 for one year Introductory offer; 22 weeks at $2.89 Order Today! AMERICA • 106 W. 56th St. • New York, N. Y. 10019 —1 Other Recent Pamphlets From the America Press PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS: NO REASON FOR PANIC OR PESSIMISM A calm, reasoned analysis of the state of parochial schools in the United States by the past-president- general of the National Catholic Education Associa- tion, Archbishop Shehan of Baltimore. (A-80) WHAT DO THEY WANT NOW? C. J. McNaspy, S.J., John Courtney Murray, S.J/ and William J. Davis, S.J. A fresh approach to the question of Negro-White relations, after the summers of 1962 and 1963 by the author of Lefs Talk Sense About the Negro. (B-79) 250 CATHOUCS ON THE SECULAR CAMPUS Father John A. O’Brien points up the difficulties facing the growing number of Catholic students. (A-65) 150 WHY A CATHOUC COLLEGE? A defense of the Catholic philosophy of education by George Bull, S.J. (A-3) 150 NEW VOCATIONS FOR CATHOUCS by Walter M. Abbott, S.J. A thorough discussion of secular institutes for those who wish to follow the more perfect life taught in the Gospels and the vocation of total dedication in the world. (B-70) 250 THE America press 106 W. 56th St. • New York, N. Y. 10019