They really are just obsessed with this whole “New Adult Faith” thing they’ve got going.

First Things
A Cool Cardinal

Blase Cupich wants Catholics to grow up. Cardinal archbishop of a city famous for the husky, brawling laughter of youth, he preaches the virtues of “mature, well-integrated adult spirituality.” Witness to a man who said “Let the little children come unto me,” he endeavors “to renew the life of the Church by getting people to act like adults.”

No matter what problem Cupich encounters, his solution is to tell people to be more mature. How can we fix immigration? “We all have to act like adults.” What about ending abortion? It must be done “in a constructive way and as adults who respect each other.” And what was Amoris Laetitia about, anyway? Ah, yes: “moving out of an adolescent spirituality into an adult spirituality.”

Common to all these remarks is a refusal of responsibility. Some people have a quaint idea that a bishop should say what is right and wrong, in season and out, but Cupich has evolved beyond this. Cupich wants to liberate Catholic consciences from clerical control. “If people come to a decision in good conscience,” he says, “our job is to help them move forward and to respect that.” If you’re okay, so is he.

Cupich credits his ideas to Pope Francis. He says that Amoris Laetitia “put the responsibility on each individual, rather than an outside authority telling people what to do, as though they were children.” Don’t expect the pope or the bishop to tell you what to do. Daddy’s gone. Now you’re the man of the house.

Oh trust me, Cardinal Blase, we of this generation, the one just after yours, know aaaaall about being abandoned by mummy and daddy and having to step up and be the grownups. It was that or starve. We know more than we ever wanted about parents and other adults who couldn’t be arsed to give us any guidance, and leaving us to figure it out on our own.

And the funny thing is that what we figured out was that your generation were a pack of narcissists who would rather watch their children starve than get off their asses and be the adults.

No one born in the last forty years will be surprised by this rhetoric. There was the cool dad who winked and left you two alone, the cool dad who told you he didn’t keep count of the beer . . . . Even when the matter was trivial, the refusal either to forbid, or to accept responsibility for permitting, made him something less than a father. He told us to act like adults so that he didn’t have to.

Pretty much.

There is a sense, to be fair, in which he is right, of course. We know, for instance, that we are to exercise our knowledge of the Faith to tell us that when a bishop, cardinal or pope suggests breaking faith with Christ in order to be seen as “merciful” or “accompanying” – when they tell us to follow the world instead of the plain words of Christ in holy Scripture, we must very adultly say, “I’m sorry, Holy Father, but you have no power to mandate apostasy, heresy, blasphemy or sacrilege.”

So, there’s that.

NuChurch – where it’s forever 1976, and never Christmas.

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