Close but No Kewpie Doll!

Brandon McGinley 

The Prodigal Church Restoring Catholic Tradition  in an Age of Deception 

SOPHIA INSTITUTE PRESS 

Manchester, New Hampshire, Kindle Edition.

    This book captured my attention and promised much in its early pages. Unfortunately to my mind, it did not hold true to its promises. The major problem rests with the couple premises which form the basis for its conclusions. Let me take time to discuss one of those false points of departure!

    Sadly, the author seems to think that one of the reasons for a failed implementation of the teachings of the II Vatican Council in the United States is the old JFK trope about a Catholic Community coming of age through its embrace of the old WASP formula for social and economic success, with a Catholic patina. The author holds, and rightly so, that the Kennedy family was a poor choice to carry the Catholic banner (a devastating mistake). The Age of Deception, as McGinley refers to it, is such because little has happened in the US by way of inculturation in our Catholic world in the US since way before World War II. He appeals to the authority of the eloquent critique of the servant of God Fulton J. Sheen for 1950's and later Catholicism.

    While it is true that the "Camelot" myth weighed heavily in conditioning Catholic secularization or defection from the fullness of Catholic truth, to say that there was not more in play is like pretending to read the actual political scene in 2020 depending solely on the skewed interpretation proffered by the MSM.

    Catholicism's free-fall in Canada, Ireland, Belgium and Holland has had nothing to do with the Kennedy family. Having spent most of my adult life living in the midst of non-American Catholics in various European countries and elsewhere, I cannot see how McGinley's premise is tenable. The poor immigrant wanting to integrate in a protestant world and reach equal status with his neighbors is not the driving force behind much of the rest of the Catholic world's embrace of vapid liturgy, abortion, euthanasia, and moral degradation. Evangelization and catechesis have as surely failed in the German speaking world and not for the reasons the author gives to blame for the emptying of pews and churches across the United States.

     CAVEAT EMPTOR! The book is attractively neoconservative, that is, if you are willing to settle for less than a tuneup of the old jalopy. Let me be clear that the dogfight of recent weeks over whether or not to dump the II Vatican Council and all its works is not my thing. From one point of view the present back and forth makes no more sense than does that #CancelCulture which is tearing down statues in public squares, vandalizing, looting and threatening worse.

    McGinley does not get it. For all the good he says about resetting, recovering, renewing Catholic culture, he has not figured out that the road map is much older, clearer and surer, that the neo-modernist derivative he seems to be flirting with. His facile appeals to "archaeologism" to cancel the wealth of tradition does little more really than condemn him going the route he condemns in no uncertain terms, namely that of the prodigal son's dissipation or dissolution. I am sorry but this book cannot but disappoint.

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