by Msgr. Robert J. Batule.

When I was ordained a priest in 1985, my first pastor was about to turn 50 years old; he was a member of the Ordination Class of 1962. He saw himself and others saw him too as a "Vatican II" priest. There were meetings galore, a lot of "co-ministry" with women Religious, and, in discussions, frequent references to the marginalized and minorities of various kinds. But I don't recall that we had a single Holy Hour in the Presence of the Blessed Sacrament in my five-year assignment there, nor do I remember hearing a word against co-habitation in the parish Pre-kayne-ah program. Moreover, I have no memory of any notices in the weekly bulletin announcing seminars on the topic of natural family planning.

There are always going to be different pastoral emphases, even in what might be regarded as not particularly ideological parishes. What developed, however, in many post-conciliar parishes are what we now call "safe spaces," meaning places you could go and not be reminded of words and ideas you don't like. When the "safe space" is breached after decades in some cases, you can well imagine the displeasure in certain quarters. But it was bound to happen at some point.

Over the last few years, men ordained priests in the 1970s have been marking their fiftieth anniversaries and are retiring from the active ministry. They are being replaced by men who weren't even alive in the 1970s! Indeed, the men in the cohort of younger priests now were only ordained in the last two decades. These younger priests are doctrinally more conservative than the priests they are replacing. This is not just anecdotal; the survey research bears this out too.

This has produced not a little bit of friction as the "spaces," to use the parlance invoked above, have gone from "safe" to "unsafe." Again, not in every instance, but changes are apparent in the pulpit, at the altar and in the Confessional, and in the classroom where there are parishes with elementary and high schools. In contradistinction to the examples I used from my first assignment, Holy Hours are regular occurrences in many parishes now, Pre-kayne-ah presentations are more apt to point out not just the incongruity but the sinfulness in cohabitation, and, relatedly, that marital chastity is not attained so long as contraception is practiced.

We always have to be careful with the words we place immediately before "Catholicism" in our speech or in our writing. We are, after all, referring to our faith, which is not, taxonomically, a political phenomenon. Nevertheless, there is a clear pertinence to conservatism since faith has attributes that most definitely tend in the direction of preserving whole and undiminished what is being "handed on." In this sense, then, there are distinctive biblical and ecclesial correlatives with conservatism.

Bishop Robert Barron, in the aftermath of the National Eucharistic Congress last year, commented that "liberal Catholicism could never have pulled off what happened in Indianapolis." What impressed him the most about the Congress was the sight of the outdoor procession with the Blessed Sacrament throughout the city streets of the Indiana capital.

Seeing so many thousands and thousands of Catholics take part in this devotion, along with their reverence and piety was deeply moving to Bishop Barron and no doubt countless others who saw what he saw. This caused Bishop Barron to observe that against the reverence and piety for the Eucharistic Lord, liberalism in religion tends "to reduce the supernatural to the natural."

If the Eucharist is merely a symbol, as a majority of Catholics think and believe it is, what you would want to do is re-define the meaning of the Real Presence and transubstantiation. For the transcendent and ontological character of these terms would need to be re-interpreted so that they focus on ourselves and not on the Lord.

That, unfortunately, is the trend that got started decades ago. It began with catechesis in the 1...