March 7, 2004

The early 1970’s marked the apogee of the Flower Child movement. The Church was reeling from the cultural revolution, the sudden changes clumsily brought about by misunderstandings of Vatican II, and the seductive integration of Catholics into mainstream American culture. These were the ingredients for a “perfect storm” in the Church. We should not be surprised that recent surveys indicate that those years also were the incubator of terrible moral and spiritual corruption in the Church. The highest rates of attrition in the priesthood and religious orders, and the greatest number of perverse crimes happened then. We are now suffering the aftershock. It was a time of Clown Masses with balloons, and in schools and seminaries crucifixes were replaced with pictures of cheerful butterflies.

Hard doses of reality have moved us a long way from Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Jesus Christ Superstar, which appeared in 1971, to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. The flower children liked a non-threatening dancing Jesus. Since then the world has danced itself into a frenzy of decadence. If those entrusted with the Gospel will not sweep the churches clean, the Holy Spirit will. Those who object to the “gratuitous violence” of the Passion must realize that Christ’s suffering was violent but it was not gratuitous. It conquered sin and death. In 2004, the Risen Christ is challenging the Church to rise up and be the Church again, and the power of his sorrowful Passion is doing violence to superficial piety.

Kenneth Woodward, an editor at Newsweek has recently written: “Mr. Gibson’s film leaves out most of the elements of the Jesus story that contemporary Christianity now emphasizes. His Jesus does not demand a ‘born again’ experience, as most evangelists do, in order to gain salvation. He does not heal the sick or exorcise demons, as Pentecostals emphasize. He doesn’t promote social causes, as liberal denomination do. He certainly doesn’t crusade against gender discrimination, as some feminists believe he did, nor does he teach that we all possess and inner divinity, as today’s nouveau Gnostics believe. One cannot imagine this Jesus joining a New Age sunrise Easter service overlooking the Pacific...This Jesus carries a cross that not many Christians are ready to share.”

Christians are free to go the way of Islam and Buddhism and Hinduism in their incomprehension of the Passion of Christ. Christians are free to dance like ageing flower children with faded blooms in their graying hair. But they cannot continue as Christians unless they take up their own crosses. Jesus is an eternal Saviour and not a 1970’s Superstar. This may be a golden time for Christians, if they pack away their clown suits and burst their balloons. As for those whose Catholicism consists only in “ashes and palms,” they may find the cultural war too violent unless they also embrace confession and communion.

Fr. George W. Rutler