A Much-Needed Kick in Kansas, by Anthony Esolen

When I think of the generation of Catholic churchmen, religious sisters, theologians, and songsters who were coming into their revolution when I was a boy, and who have never admitted a single error, not even in such non-doctrinal matters as what they did to works of art in their churches, I imagine elderly hippies returning to Woodstock with canes and walkers, shimmying to the piped-in blaring of Sly and the Family Stone.  “Bliss it was in those days to be alive!” says Wordsworth, looking back on the hopes he held in the French revolution.

But Wordsworth grew up.  He came to view those days with a critical and judicious eye.  With age, we hope, comes wisdom, and with that wisdom, regret for the sins and follies we all commit, most especially when we follow the spirit of the age and not the Holy Spirit, who does not change, and who is beyond all ages.

Yet I meet, all the time, stuck-in-the-mud progressives, fuddy-duddies of a revolution that has come and gone and left a lot of rubble behind, wit …