Remembering the Long Hot Summer
Remembering "the Long Hot Summer" How the Church and American society have changed since 1968.
By James Hitchcock
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the infamous "long hot summer" of 1968—a season in which the Western world seemed poised on the edge of some revolutionary cataclysm. Arguably the most shocking images that remain from that summer (some of them reproduced on these pages) came from Paris, where a determined band of radical students mounted what appeared at the time to be a serious revolutionary effort—an effort not to influence the government but to overthrow it.
But the students fighting from behind barricades on the Left Bank were not the only rebels of 1968. In the United States, the same summer saw the first serious manifestations of the anti-war violence, as well as a series of race riots in major urban centers, while the assassinations of two leading political figures added to the tension. By the following academic year, the revolutionary contagion had spread to America's college campuses.
Within the Catholic Church, meanwhile, the promulgation of Humanae Vitae on July 29,1968 provoked a storm of protest, and triggered another wholesale attack on institutional authority.
And then, after months of mounting tensions, the revolutionary effort faded away, and the same institutions remained standing. Was the rebellion that began during that "long hot summer" a failure, then? CWR asked James Hitchcock, a historian and regular contributor, to reflect on the long-term consequences of a revolutionary era. —Ed.
The end the Second Vatican Council coincided with one of the greatest cultural crises of modern times, a crisis which radically transformed America and most of the Western world. Almost before the Council was over, it became impossible to separate the authentically religious roots of renewal from the cultural upheaval which surrounded it, and inevitably the very idea of renewal came to be understood in distorted ways. At every point the religious crisis and the secular crisis were parallel to one another. While the phenomenon called "the Sixties" lasted approximately 1966-72, the year 1968 was perhaps the key year which epitomized, for better or for worse, the revolution of the age.
That revolution has usually been understood only symptomatically. Even at the time it was misleading to concentrate on specific issues like the anti-war movement, since particular grievances were merely manifestations of a much more fundamental crisis.
The spirit of the age was supposedly summed up in the claims of moral idealism put forward by the revolutionaries. Students were protesting the immorality of the war and the racism of American society, as dissident Catholics, especially priests and nuns, were angered by the complicity of the Church in those same American sins, and the failure to take a "prophetic" stance against systematic evil. In 1968 black students marched across the campus of Cornell University, carrying rifles and uttering threats against faculty who opposed their demands. But whites on the left, among them the "pacifist" Jesuit Daniel Berrigan, applauded the symbolism of the students' actions.
America could be indicted for its sins because, like all societies, it had sins. However, in citing this as their justification for action, revolutionaries in Church and society implied, misleadingly, that they were still operating within a traditional moral framework. If these injustices were corrected, they suggested, peace and order would be restored. But in reality they did not foresee, much less desire, the restoration of normalcy. Instead the stance of revolution itself was seen as permanent; society and Church were viewed as so fundamentally corrupt that it was impossible to envision a time when moral people could once again offer those entities their allegiance.
Rebellion for its own sake
The New Left began with anti-war protests on college campuses and moved on to include protests against the plans of universities to expand their campuses into surrounding neighborhoods, or their engagement in research projects sponsored by the American military. But as each grievance was resolved, it merely led to the discovery of a new grievance, and eventually the revolutionary leaders candidly acknowledged that specific grievances were for the most part unimportant. It was the act of rebellion itself which mattered.
Within the Catholic Church in America, the focus of post-conciliar discontent—as expressed for example in the battle that pitted the Immaculate Heart Sisters of Los Angeles against Cardinal James F. Mcintyre—was that legitimate conciliar reforms, such as the revision of the rules of religious communities or the speedy introduction of authorized liturgical changes, were being thwarted. But very quickly these ceased to be real issues, as religious communities "renewed" themselves in practically any way they chose and liturgical innovation became a completely chaotic process. As in the secular world, the specific issues were far less important than the continued act of rebellion itself.
Very quickly the alleged moral idealism of the protesters showed itself to be rooted in self-interest. Students might protest the immorality of the war and the racism of American life, but once they were no longer worried about being
drafted their protests mostly ceased. Today it seems clear that most of those people who constituted the leadership of the New Left thirty years ago have now settled into comfortable niches within middle-class society. So, too, many priests who left the priesthood after the Council fell into the habit of calling press conferences to denounce the Church's alleged complicity with war and racism, and oppression of the laity—notably through the Church teaching on birth control. Then, almost as an afterthought, the departing priest would introduce his fiancee, who was often a nun. In both Church and secular society, aggressive proclamations of moral idealism turned out often to justify mere self-interest.
Claiming that the entire society was deeply implicated in immorality, the revolutionaries aimed to discredit all forms of authority. The ominous march of the black students at Cornell, like New Left activities on many campuses, revealed more than simply the fact that the rebels rejected any claim their professors might make to hold any sort of moral authority over them. The professors in turn acquiesced. The spirit of the age was dramatized in the scene in which President James Perkins of Cornell, attempting to mollify rebellious students through concessions, was threatened and sternly ordered to be quiet, a command which he meekly obeyed, afterwards expressing his deep appreciation for the moral purity of those who had humiliated him.
By contrast, also in 1968, Cardinal Mcintyre directly confronted those who challenged his authority—the Immaculate Heart Sisters and several rebellious priests—and he succeeded in retaining his authority. In Washington in 1968, Cardinal Patrick A. O'Boyle—who the previous year had tried to dismiss the dissident theologian Father Charles Curran from the faculty of the Catholic University of America—attempted to impose sanctions on priests in his archdiocese who had rejected the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae. But Cardinal O'Boyle found it necessary to retreat in both cases, and since that time very few American bishops have shown any inclination to deal decisively even with open rejection of Church teaching. Catholic bishops since 1968 could increasingly be seen as like President Perkins, hoping to placate their adversaries by concessions.
Since 1968 a style of leadership has emerged in both Church and society in which those in authority appear to feel morally intimidated by the demands of organized dissident groups, as though the very vehemence of such people (feminists, for example) itself certifies the righteousness of their cause. Often such leaders make formal statements upholding official policy (such as the clear Church teaching that women cannot be ordained), even as their very tone of voice seems to indicate that they personally question that policy. Often it appears that those in authority, even when they reject outrageous demands, feel that their adversaries are purer than themselves.
The surrender of authority
Church and university are similar institutions, in that both posses wealth and a certain amount of social and political power, yet both claim an authority which rests on some spiritual truth which transcends the temporal realm. It was precisely this claim which rebels challenged in 1968, asserting that such claims were a cloak for power and control. When directly confronted with this charge, educational and religious leaders generally retreated, if they did not actually surrender. Academic and religious authority had collapsed together in the American bishops' surrender in 1967 to groups demanding that Father Curran be retained on the Catholic University faculty.
Also in 1967 a group of Catholic college presidents had issued the Land O'Lakes statement, proclaiming their institutions' independence from all Church authority. In effect this was also a declaration that they wished to be as much like the prestigious secular schools as possible, which therefore meant sharing the spiritual and intellectual collapse of those institutions. In 1968 Catholic educational leaders could see only the dangers (real or imaginary) posed by ecclesiastical authorities; they appeared blind to the dangers from within academe itself. As in secular society, there were no enemies on the Left.
By 1968 both Church and university were finding it more and more difficult to discharge the responsibilities for which they officially existed, which was the proclamation of higher truth. Instead they began offering themselves, with increasing boldness, for the task of solving the problems of the world. University faculty who were quite confused as to what they should teach in their classrooms began formulating plans for the eradication of poverty and racism, even as clergy who were uncertain about the identity of Jesus made dogmatic pronouncements on every imaginable issue of public policy.
The ultimate claim of the New Left was that all institutions are of their very nature oppressive, and all claims to authority are spurious. While there was much talk of "community" in the Sixties, both in Church and society, in reality the spirit of the age was one of rampant individualism, an almost solipsistic resistance to any intrusion on the self in the name of something higher. In both Church and society, the formal structures of authority, the people holding positions of authority, and the rules and obligations themselves were all rejected as illegitimate impositions on the free self. In politics this produced a burst of literal anarchism, while in religion it gave birth to the ultimate antinomianism: the rejection of all law in the name of an inner spiritual light.
Thus 1968 was the summer of Wood-stock, when many thousands of discontented young people converged on muddy fields in New York for a marathon festival of rock music, drugs, sex, and unrestricted freedom of expression. On the opposite side of the country the San Francisco neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury was being cited as the living example of the coming new age, in which freedom replaced law and a spirit of love substituted for social structures. But Woodstock left a legacy of great disillusionment, with many of those who were in attendance later recalling only the appalling living conditions, the illnesses, and the drug overdoses, while Haight-Ashbury quickly deteriorated into a squalid center of drugs, vandalism, crime, and destitution.
Only vaguely understood at the time, phenomena like Woodstock and Haight-Ashbury were in effect experiments meant to disprove the Christian doctrine of sin. They were predicated on the assumption that human beings were fundamentally good and that social structures alone promoted evil. But when such experiments ended in sordid disaster, few people drew the obvious lessons.
Almost unnoticed by secular society, there had for centuries been Catholic versions of this dream of community. While the structures of authority were never absent from religious orders, their essential spirit was one based on love, and Catholic religious houses were probably as close to being real communities—as the counter-culture understood that term "community"—as history could provide; they were one of the very rare historical demonstrations of the ability of human beings to create communities on some basis other than the family.
But for all the obsessive talk about community in the Sixties, the spirit of the age was lethally subversive of all real community, including the family. Imbued with the spirit of the times, many Catholic religious communities were now rapidly disintegrating, having abandoned their own authentic traditions (now scorned as oppressive structures) and adopted instead the counterculture's own Rousseauvian notion of what community ought to be. Religious men and women began leaving their communities in large numbers, and few new novices joined. Those who remained often found the community itself rent asunder, as members pursued their own careers, moved into their own apartments, and kept their salaries for personal use. Meanwhile one of the most sustained and successful lay experiments in community in American history, the Catholic Worker, was being torn apart by drugs and free sex, despite the vehement opposition to those trends on the part of the movement's founder, Dorothy Day.
The faith disenfranchised
The year 1968 brought the crises of Church and society together in other ways as well, revealing the deep ambiguities inherent in the religious commitments of the time.
In April, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed by a racist assassin, an event which caused the black liberation movement to split into numerous factions—a process in which the explicitly Christian motivation which King had provided for that movement was largely forgotten. The first half of the 1960s had seen one of the most dramatic manifestations of religious authority in American history, as the imperative of racial justice was preached from countless pulpits (many of them Catholic) with significant effect in terms of changing minds and hearts. But after King's death religion was shunted aside, as merely a tool which had been useful at one time but no longer had any claims of its own. Many politically active Christians began to discover that they had, often imperceptibly, changed their positions so that for them it was now the social struggle alone that mattered, rather than any theological foundation that struggle might have. The most popular theological work in America was Harvey Cox's The Secular City, which explicitly argued that the distinctively "religious" element in Christianity was an obstacle to social progress.
In July of that momentous year Senator Robert F. Kennedy was also assassinated, destroying the hopes of many people for ending the Vietnam War. Robert Kennedy was killed less than five years after his brother, the first Catholic president, and the Kennedy brothers were often cited as shining examples of Catholics taking moral responsibility for the good of the nation. But privately, a week before his death in 1963, President Kennedy had revealed to a journalist his support for legalized abortion, and Robert Kennedy had openly supported that legalization in New York.
After Robert Kennedy's death the mantle of the anti-war movement fell on another Catholic, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, a man whose claim to deep Catholic roots was much stronger than any the Kennedys could make. McCarthy had once been a Benedictine novice, and after marrying he and his wife tried to live the liturgical cycle on their farm. Eugene McCarthy then taught sociology, imbued with the spirit of papal encyclicals and other Church documents, in a Catholic college.
But before long it was revealed that the McCarthys' marriage was disintegrating, after more than thirty years and several children, and his wife Abigail recounted that Eugene had returned from a retreat in a Benedictine monastery to tell her that theologians were no longer certain that marriage was even a sacrament. The McCarthys divorced, and it was no longer clear whether Eugene considered himself a practicing Catholic.
That same summer thousands of young radicals, many of them now supporting McCarthy for president, descended on Chicago determined either to force the Democratic Party's national convention to repudiate American involvement in the Vietnam War or, failing that, to disrupt the entire affair. Here they found themselves locked in mortal combat with yet another prominent Catholic figure, the Democratic mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley, who combined fierce loyalty to the traditional Democratic Party, and specifically to President Lyndon B. Johnson, with a visceral contempt for the rebellious young people in the streets.
Daley won the battle but lost the war. The convention rejected McCarthy in favor of Johnson's vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, and numerous street rebels were arrested, even as they were effectively kept away from the buildings where the convention was meeting. Daley was a prime example of what had become a traditional kind of American Catholic politician: economically liberal, strongly anti-Communist, morally conservative, and firmly within the Democratic fold. But over the next four years the political genre which Daley represented would be systematically purged from the party, so that when Daley's son emerged as a major political figure in his own right some years later, he had adopted a suitably "progressive" outlook and made no pretense that his Catholicism was very deeply ingrained.
Thus, unknown at the time, loyal Catholics were being politically disenfranchised in the summer of 1968, soon to be driven out of the Democratic Party by the party's aggressive support for abortion, homosexual rights, and other divisive social issues which were not yet on the public agenda during that hot summer. Soon Catholics would in effect be effectively denied the right even to have a political agenda of their own.
Thus in 1968 the McCarthy experience and the Daley experience, in their different ways, revealed a fissure in Catholic politics which had not previously been visible. Catholics who wanted to continue to play an effective role in politics were in effect being taught that they would have to abandon the Church's belief that stable families were the essential foundation of society, and that traditional Christian "personal morality" was essential for social progress. Thirty years later even some American bishops would apparently accept the claim that "justice" for homosexuals ought to be one of society's highest priorities.
Failed counter-revolutions
In 1968 the New Left only seemed to be a serious political movement; in fact that political movement collapsed once military conscription was ended. Even in the first bursts of radical activity it was the counter-culture—based on an antinomian idea of personal freedom and symbolized by sex and drugs—which was clearly predominant. The rebels were always less interested in whether their universities were implicated in the "military-industrial complex," or whether the Viet Cong would triumph, than in whether the universities attempted to regulate their students' personal behavior.
In the Church the dissidents of 1968 still hewed to a relatively conservative line—insisting, for example, that they only approved of birth control for the use of responsible married couples. But when the sexual revolution hit with full force, most liberal Catholics accepted it. The secular culture kept devising new tests for liberal Catholics to pass, and most of them obliged.
Feminism too was relatively inconspicuous in 1968, and feminists would later complain that they had been treated as inferiors even within New Left groups theoretically dedicated to the fight for equality. But the logic of the New Left was bound to issue in feminism, since if all established social relations are oppressive of the individual, the institution of marriage must be the chief among the culprits. Militant feminism was thus the inevitable unfolding of the spirit of 1968, and when it emerged it would prove to be irresistible.
In this respect Catholics may have been ahead of the secular culture. Already by 1968 groups of women religious had identified the male hierarchy as the great oppressor class and were busy eliminating all manifestations of male authority from their lives. Catholic feminism had not yet blended into an anti-Christian paganism, as it now has, but in the person of certain nuns it was already highly visible.
Both in Church and society the destructive forces of the Sixties encountered much resistance, even principled opposition, and periodic attempts to roll back the major changes of the era. These movements apparently culminated in the late 1970s, when John Paul II was elected Pope and Ronald Reagan President of the United States. Whatever large dissimilarities there were between them, they were alike in being perceived as leaders who stood for principles that were quite at odds with those which had triumphed a decade earlier.
Both men in a sense led counter-revolutions, publicly reaffirming beliefs which had been attacked in the Sixties, officially committing themselves to restoring communities which had been damaged morally and institutionally by revolution. Yet in the end both counterrevolutions proved to be less than fully successful. Reagan left no lasting legacy even within the Republican Party, and John Paul seems to have failed ever to have gained adequate control of the ecclesiastical machinery, so that throughout his pontificate he has had to cope with bishops, most of them his own appointees, who do not share his vision of the Church.
But tragically, the vaunted counterrevolutions of Pope and President have served as much as anything to demonstrate the tenacious power of the legacy of the Sixties, which has proved strong enough to withstand even the most determined efforts to deprive it of legitimacy. The fact that often neither Reagan nor John Paul seemed to pursue their announced goals as vigorously as they might itself reinforced that impression. Why else would Pope and President not use the full powers of their offices to achieve their goals, unless they judged the forces opposing them to be so deeply entrenched, so strategically placed, as to be almost invulnerable?
Thus in 1998, two decades after the beginning of those counter-revolutions was announced, the cultural legacy of the Sixties is stronger than ever, having gradually trickled down from the elite social groups who formed it to the level of ordinary people who unthinkingly embrace the philosophy of self-fulfillment, and even regard it as the authentic understanding of Christianity.
Modernity enthroned
In Church and secular society the Sixties also spawned a "lost generation" —people who were young at the time, who imbibed the spirit of the age as naturally as they breathed, who grew into adulthood merely assuming that the outlook of the Sixties reflected reality. It was a phenomenon which made the Democratic Party the permanent stronghold of Sixties beliefs and produced a generation of Catholic priests and religious, now in their 50s, whose formative years were spent amidst total theological and spiritual confusion and in the belief that renewal meant the repudiation of as much of the Catholic past as possible. Although many religious of that generation believe they were liberated by post-conciliar events, in reality most were merely passive victims of a cultural upheaval which they scarcely even began to understand. Had the culture remained stable, most of those who are now bitter towards their religious past would have continued to be happy and productive in their vocations.
Thus such counter-revolution as exists, both in the Church and in the world, tends to be the work of younger people, too young to have been deeply affected by the Sixties. These young people, as they grew up, could readily see the destructive legacy of the previous decades. In the Church, then, there is a rising generation of orthodox priests in their 20s and 30s.
Among the many dramatic events of the year 1968, the death of America's most liberal prelate. Archbishop Paul J. Hallinan of Atlanta, was not much noticed. But following his death his young auxiliary bishop, Joseph L. Bernardin, was made general secretary of the newly reorganized National Conference of Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Conference, and under his guidance that body was shaped to make it cautiously receptive to Sixties ideas. Ever since that time, the NCCB/USCC has defined the dominant spirit of American Catholicism in ways which even the most intrepid bishops seem unable to resist.
The full implications of the spirit of the Sixties were not understood even by many of its proponents, for the simple reason that it cut so deep and spread so wide. It was nothing less than a global attack on the idea of truth itself, on the very possibility of any understanding of reality which might lead to stable social relationships. It was a visceral, compulsive reaction against anything or anyone making claims to such truth.
Ultimately this has been merely the final and inevitable working out of the spirit of modernity itself, because the modern spirit has for three centuries defined itself precisely as the autonomous but oppressed self systematically struggling to liberate itself from outside constraint. Thus all authoritative claims must be rejected, not on their merits but simply because they are authoritative. As modernity understands it, the self will be truly free, and truly a self, only when all vestiges of external "infringement" have been eliminated. This logic reached its inevitable climax in the Sixties and was only half-coherently expressed in the counter-culture. Although various ideological reasons were given for the violent upheavals of the Sixties, finally acts of destruction were simply self-validating.
In 1968 this spirit manifested itself in such things as the terrorist Weathermen group and the Yippies who ridiculed and profaned everything which anyone held sacred. In the Church also it is now the visible agenda of groups such as feminist nuns who casually speak of "christofascism" and identify themselves with Eve in her defiance of God's command not to eat the forbidden fruit. There is a concerted movement to grant a privileged position in the Church to every kind of sexual deviation, even as traditional forms of worship are abandoned and the liturgy stripped of all traces of transcendence,
Both in Church and society such efforts proceed according to a kind of irrational compulsion, and will never cease while anything sacred is still left standing, so long as the revolutionaries encounter no effective resistance.
The most radical legacy
In education the entire curriculum has been "deconstructed," in that there is no longer any agreement as to what should be taught or why, no philosophical basis on which even to make an argument. But much more is at stake here than curricular battles, because if the universities are supposed to be repositories of secular truth, they now admit that they possess no truth apart from the personal beliefs of the individuals who make up the educational community.
The school of literary interpretation called "deconstruction" is an approach to documents which seeks to deprive them of all authority, through the simple expedient of showing that every text, no matter how clear it appears to be, is fundamentally ambiguous and thus subject to differing understandings. It is the ultimate relativism in that it not only rejects all claims to authoritative pronouncement, it even asserts that such pronouncements are impossible to articulate.
In 1968 the full measure of this intellectual revolution was not obvious, although the successful attacks on the traditional curriculum implied it. But just as discontented nuns were a few years in advance of secular feminists in their rejection of "patriarchy," so also there were already Catholic deconstructionists in the mid-1960s, a decade before the term became known in intellectual circles. For it was precisely a kind of deconstruction which was practiced with respect to the documents of the Second Vatican Council itself. Ecclesiastical rebels began by claiming those documents wholly for themselves but when challenged replied that such disagreement was based on a naive reading of the conciliar decrees, which had generated a "spirit" of change which was not dependent on the actual letter of the texts.
In both Church and society the revolution of the Sixties was the triumph of a "soft" culture over a "hard" one—that is, a culture stressing duty, discipline, sacrifice, and responsibility gave way to one which glorified self-fulfillment. In 1960 the hard culture still dominated; by 1968 it was being routed almost everywhere.
Before long this soft culture came to be identified, rightly or wrongly, with what became the most enduring revolutionary legacy of the Sixties: feminism. Women were soon defined as the ultimate oppressed group, because their oppression had the deepest roots of all—in biology and in the institution of the family, which had for millennia been regarded as the only proper way for human beings to live. On the religious side militant feminism is the only enduring legacy of Liberation Theology. Most of the revolutionary groups that flourished in Latin America a decade or more ago are now moribund, but North American feminists have appropriated the ideology of liberation for their own purposes.
Feminism has proven to be the most radical legacy of the Sixties in that its full implications have even now not been worked out. It requires nothing less than a complete revolution in the relationship of mothers and children, and changing relationships between men and women require psychic transformations so deep as to be only dimly comprehended.
The question of the status of women had no place in the campus upheavals of the Sixties. However, that generation of educational leaders, such as Cornell's James Perkins, were often men who had compiled distinguished records in World War II, had been respected in their profession for decades, and might legitimately claim for themselves vastly more worldly experience and moral stature than their immature student adversaries possessed. Thus in cravenly bowing before those adversaries, men like Perkins could be seen in retrospect as repudiating the traditional masculine idea of authority and in a sense "feminizing" the nature of leadership. It is the style of leadership now preferred by perhaps the majority of American bishops.
In both Church and society this has meant the exaltation of what are claimed to be feminine traits—trust in feelings and a sense of personal need rather than in objective rationality, the claims of self-fulfillment over duty, a sense of vulnerability over courage and self-sufficiency. Today's feminized leaders do not wish to be seen as strong and decisive so much as sensitive and caring. Many bishops for example, seem to think that their chief pastoral responsibility is to make as many people as possible feel "comfortable" in the Church. It is a style of "leadership" which has developed inevitably from the nihilistic rebellions of the Sixties, since leaders cannot be allowed to claim any authority for themselves other than their respect for each person's subjective point of view.
The homosexual agenda is itself an inevitable result of the Sixties, even if it was not prominent in 1968. It marks an orchestrated assault on one of the few remaining moral taboos. It dogmatically asserts the subjectivity of all moral beliefs. And it claims to contribute to a more humane, because a more feminized, less masculine, society.
"Don't trust anyone over 50"
The New Left as a visible movement disappeared rather abruptly around 1973. However, this was not because the movement had been defeated. Rather, the New Left no longer needed to exist as a recognizable social movement because its program had begun to enter into the mainstream of American life. Young rebels had been urged to "work within the system," and they had begun to do that, encouraged by the promise that if they did, the elders would ensure that "the system" did indeed work in their favor. Many of the elders now submitted to a role reversal, in which they ceased trying to teach the young and willingly began learning from them. Leaders of Church and society began, as far as possible, to adopt the outlook of the rebels, hastening to endorse changes they would never have chosen on their own. Many older people implicitly accepted the claim of the rebels to be the most moral generation in American history. In the Church even some members of the hierarchy seemed to accept the claim that the true meaning of Christianity had not been discovered until the Second Vatican Council.
Since the Sixties, many of the leaders of American society appear to stand in some combination of awe and fear before critics whom they ostensibly regard as mistaken. Some bishops, for example, do not appear comfortable talking about abortion when they find themselves faced with angry feminists who accuse the Church of being oppressive. Often the vehemence of the rebels' assertion is itself taken as proof of their moral superiority—precisely the reaction of so many educators to the campus radicals of the Sixties.
By now the members of the generation which became famous for the slogan, "Don't trust anyone over thirty," are themselves in their 50s, and they control most of the institutions of American society. It is ironic that the phenomenon which began in 1964 as the Free Speech Movement now uses its institutional power to impose various kinds of restrictions on free expression. The highest recognized moral good is no longer individual freedom but sensitivity to the demands of particular aggrieved people, even if the prescribed methods of expressing this sensitivity entail the violation of democratic rights. But this stance is not as contradictory as it first appears. Moral relativism prevents even so basic a value as free speech from being treated as absolute, since the belief that personal feelings alone are the ultimate source of truth requires that those feelings be protected from assault.
Thus in the Church, liberal ecclesiastics, after three decades of being nervous about the exercise of authority, have found a new boldness, as Catholics who support traditional principles are declared "divisive" and driven to the margins of Church life. Liturgical changes are now simply imposed by hierarchical fiat, and those who resist are warned of their duty to obedience. In Los Angeles, in what appears to be almost a conscious replay of Cardinal Mcintyre's confrontation with the Immaculate Heart Sisters, Cardinal Roger Mahony has requested the Holy See to take disciplinary action against Mother Angelica, founder of the EWTN television network, because of her public criticisms of his pastoral letter on the Eucharist.
Icon for a lost generation
It is purely coincidental that the first American president to have attended a Catholic university should be Bill Clinton, who is not a Catholic. But in another sense it is more than coincidental; in fact it is highly appropriate. President Clinton is recognized by both friends and enemies as almost summing up the Sixties in his own person, to the point where the controversies which surround him are perceived as a kind of referendum on that era. As numerous people have observed, Clinton combines on the one hand a seemingly unlimited moral self-righteousness (embodied even more exquisitely by his wife), and on the other an almost casual contempt for traditional moral rules, the transgressions in his personal life justified by the correctness of his ideological opinions.
But despite the fact that he is not a Catholic, and despite his undenied transgression of Catholic moral teaching, the President is highly honored and admired at his Jesuit alma mater, Georgetown University, as someone who can be regarded as the embodiment of the ideals of "renewal" which Catholic higher education now seeks to inculcate in its students—which are essentially the values of the Sixties.
Clinton has used the presidential office to institutionalize the sexual revolution in government policy, while his alleged marital infidelities are not so much denied as defiantly excused. In the minds of some Americans, not all of them overt secularists, the President's personal behavior is itself evidence of enlightened maturity, of his having transcended the narrow "puritanism" of American society before the Sixties. In his person the spirit of 1968, both in Church and state, comes together to form an icon for a generation. •
James Hitchcock is a founder of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, and a history professor at St. Louis University. © The Catholic World Report, P.O. Box 591300, San Francisco, CA 94159-1300, 800-651-1531.
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