Why Gen X Catholicism is a fighting faith

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 31, 2025

Remember the 1990s? Well sure, everyone over a certain age does. But do you remember the Catholic 1990s?

Fr. Raymond de Souza does. He was there at the time, writing from Rome for the National Catholic Register during the tail-end of that decade. Some of his columns in recent years have harkened back to that era, reminding readers on the anniversaries of key events.

You don’t have to be the same age as Fr. de Souza to appreciate those columns. But if you are, if you were reading him in your late 20s when he was writing in his late 20s, it does add something. I feel this way about all of us who were born in, or within a year or two of, 1970.

In the Catholic world this would include Fr. Roger Landry who, like me, was a college freshman in 1988 and whose experience in Rome of the day in 2005 that Benedict became Pope sounds nearly identical to the one I had that day in Hartford. And EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo, Benedictine College’s Tom Hoopes and others. When former Register movie reviewer Steven Greydanus writes that he first became acquainted with Star Trek through its 1970s reruns, or compares a scene in one Star Trek movie to “the Olympus of George Pérez’s Wonder Woman comics,” I know I am reading someone who experienced the same culture I did at about the same age I was.

Which is why I found it so interesting that Fr. de Souza’s thirtieth anniversary tribute to Pope St. John Paul II’s pro-life life encyclical, “Evangelium Vitae,” appeared the same week as a New York Times story bemoaning “the Gen X career meltdown.” Writes the Times:

It seems fitting that Gen X-ers would reach middle age amid an upheaval. They always had cursed timing. Their moment on the cultural center stage was brief—roughly between the release of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” in 1991 and the rise of Britney Spears at decade’s end. Many Gen X icons died young and tragically, a list that includes Kurt Cobain, the Notorious B.I.G., Aaliyah, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Anna Nicole Smith, Tupac Shakur, Brittany Murphy, David Foster Wallace, Shannen Doherty, Elliott Smith, Adam Yauch and Elizabeth Wurtzel.

The Times has apparently kept a Kurt Cobain-era narrative about Generation X going for the last thirty years. In the secular world, my generation is either not noticed at all or we still smell like teen spirit.

But Fr. de Souza’s columns marking key anniversaries of the John Paul II pontificate are a reminder that, in some ways at least, to be a Catholic Gen Xer is to have had the very opposite of cursed timing. Catholic Boomer talk is still almost all-Vatican-II-all-the-time, whether pro or con. Millennials and Zoomers bring something essential to the conversation, a needed corrective, with their longing for Tradition. But all three of these experiences are different than what Gen X brings.

We Gen Xers were youth and young adults under John Paul II. We did our later adulthood and early middle age under Benedict XVI. Most of our lifetime occurred during a brief sweet spot where it seemed like the post-Vatican II Church had stabilized and might even re-evangelize the West.

Then it got weird again. But still, those of us whose 1990s was less Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation and more Pope St. John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae, we bring a different experience to the conversation. “Prozac Nation” was not my 1990s manifesto. The Gospel of Life was. It gave me my life’s mission.

This is not to dismiss the ennui that many felt about the 1990s at the time, a feeling that was not limited to the 20-somethings of Prozac Nation. Many writers at the time noted how our national culture in the ‘90s seemed to lack spiritual meaning. Think of David Brooks’ critique of “bourgeois bohemians” or David Foster Wallace’s E Unibus Pluram essay.

Against the moral listlessness of that era stood what Fr. de Souza reminds us of, quoting George Weigel: Pope St. John Paul II’s “encyclical triptych on the ‘moral foundations of the free and virtuous society.’” Says Fr. de Souza “They [the first three papal encyclicals of the 1990s] presented a new Christian charter for the world after the Cold War.”

Would that the world had followed that charter these past thirty years! What a better place it would be in right now. But some of us did heed the call. Some of us spent our 20s (and beyond) defending unborn human life, our 30s (and beyond) defending marriage, our 40s (and beyond) speaking for those threatened by assisted suicide, and now arrive at our mid-50s standing against the madness of gender ideology.

This is not unique to Generation X, of course. There were good people fighting these—or other—battles long before us. And good people will be fighting these—or other—battles long after us. My point is not to dunk on any other generation. Only to note the good fortune of mine—or that portion of mine—who were blessed to be young when Pope St. John Paul II outlined his bracing vision of a culture of life marching against a culture of death. And who chose to follow that vision, instead of the lesser ones which the world urged on us.

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own. See full bio.

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• Posted by: ewaughok - Apr. 15, 2025 10:42 AM ET USA

  Synodal “paths” (I.e., organizations and events) imposed top down by Holy Father Bergoglio, undermine the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, specifically Lumen Gentium and Christus Dominus. They establish parallel structures to the episcopacy, and seek to give these authority. These parallelisms do not exist under current canon law, and so have no legal authority. But under constant pressure from the Pope and his bureaucrats, the church is transforming into a post-Vatican II synodal self-parody.

• Posted by: gskineke - Apr. 02, 2025 11:30 AM ET USA

  "Most of our lifetime occurred during a brief sweet spot where it seemed like the post-Vatican II Church had stabilized and might even re-evangelize the West. Then it got weird again." There's the rub. Why did it get weird again? Was there ever stability after V2? We were told "a hundred years to really establish the Council," but we're over half-way there and still in free-fall. Not all of us boomers are in love with the Council, it pretty much depends on where we stand on the life issues.