..... and this reason isn't from a kooky right-winger, or a frowny trad, or anything of the sort. It's from Camille Paglia:
Elements of New Age sensibility seem to have entered American Catholicism, which in the 1950s was already moving away from its déclassé ethnic roots and Protestantizing itself through a startling drabness of church architecture and décor. The folk songs, Protestant hymns, affable sermons, and literal hand-holding in today's suburban Catholic churches illustrate mellow New Age principles of inclusion and harmony and reinforce the casualness of the vernacular Mass and the slackness of unpoetic contemporary translations of Scripture. Priests, meanwhile, are now being trained to be social workers; theology and learning per se are no longer as heavily emphasized. The priest, with his public performance of the mysterious Latin Mass, was once an embodiment of learning for ordinary people. Latin, which I still believe to be the basis of most strong writing in English, was intrinsic to a priest's official identity and gave churchgoers a moving sense of historical continuity with classical antiquity, when the Christian story began. The priest, in other words, was an educator, just as university education began in the Middle Ages as training for priests.
In the wake of the 1960s cultural revolution, organized religion in America has clearly tempered its authoritarianism and tried to make itself more user-friendly. But in this welcome process, which posits the parish as a happy family, what has been lost is the sense of theology as intellectual history, complex and daunting. Jesuit colleges, following the mandate of early Jesuit missionaries to learn native languages and customs, tended to be hospitable to the post-sixties movement for multiculturalism. But I am not aware of Jesuit voices taking a leading role on either side of the public debate over poststructuralism, which seeped into American universities inthe 1970s and early 1980s and has in my view damaged the humanities in ways that it will take a half century to repair. Surely Jesuit professors, with their scholarly training and tradition of disputation, could have been in the vanguard of engaging poststructuralism in its own terms as a putative philosophy and freeing nascent multiculturalism from its grip. Certainly the response to the theory trend by the professoriat at secular institutions was too slow and feeble, so by the time the general alarm sounded, it was too late.
She can see our cultural obligation- to the centuries of faithful, priests, martyrs, bishops, scholars, saints- to keep Latin and rigorous theology and philosophy alive. Now why can't we...
PS- She gave this speech at Santa Clara University, a Jesuit college. I wonder how this portion of it was received.
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