In response to “Not as the World Giveth: The Lost Civilization of American Catholicism”
MARCH 2024
Caution should be exercised while reading Donald Lospinuso’s article on “The Lost Civilization of American Catholicism” (Dec.). His reportage might enrage you at what was lost — needlessly lost.
Emotion runs high with each passing paragraph. Lospinuso sets our feet in a past Catholic world that seems too good to have been true. His article is elegiac without being sorrowful, though sorrow follows closely as he reminds us of the splendors of the pre-1965 world of Golden Catholicism, now simply a memory. It was a Church stitched together by a Catholic population of clerics and laity who basked in the glories of the faith. It was a time when Roman Catholicism unabashedly trumpeted the high aspirations of sanctification through virtue, penance, and prayer — a Catholicism pulsating with a majesty that brought men to the point of intoxication. Its sacred liturgy, its churches and schools, universities and colleges, seminaries and convents, hospitals and vast system of good works left men awed. Lospinuso carries us back to this wondrous world through the lens of a tiny part of the Church Universal — the Diocese of Brooklyn and the Diocese of Rockville Center in Long Island — and, more specifically, through his friend Msgr. James W. Asip.
The good Monsignor was a model priest in an age that burst with model priests. Lospinuso’s descriptions of this exemplary priest (as well as scores of others) leaves the reader emotionally rent. But he doesn’t stop with Msgr. Asip. He gives accounts of other priests, each surpassing the other in heroic virtue.
Lospinuso spent many hours carefully perusing The Tablet, Brooklyn’s diocesan weekly (at that time covering all of Long Island as well, since the erection of the new diocese had not yet taken place), in which “nearly every issue” featured “a report of a new church, school, convent, hospital, or other institution, or additions to existing ones, and in some weeks more than one,” with artists’ sketches accompanying “the announcement of a plan or campaign or groundbreaking, and drawings and photographs of a completed building at its dedication.” Ironically, Lospinuso read these back issues in the library of a former seminary that shut its doors years ago due to a lack of vocations.
One of the high points of the article is when Lospinuso treats us to part of a speech to lawyers delivered by Fr. Laurence McGinley, president of Fordham University in 1952. It was a typical Jesuit tour de force on America’s decline, owing to her forgetfulness of the natural moral law. Yes, that was Fordham. O tempora! O mores!
Lospinuso’s article raises the question: Why did this idyllic Catholic world vanish? Why did such a robust Church, teeming with vocations, dedicated laity, and storybook priests and nuns, require an “update”? Why did a Church bellowing the need for sanctity and works of charity need fixing?
It seems the Church should have been left alone to flourish and cover the earth, for it was a Church mirroring the Face of God, a Church bringing His glorious Face to the world.
Fr. John A. Perricone
Secaucus, New Jersey