[From an insightful commentary by Gary Potter, posted at catholicism.org, let me take the unusual tack of posting the tail rather than the head of the article. Please visit the website to read Gary's full article.]
It is foolish to think, as some may be tempted, that if the culture declined as rapidly as ours has, it is proof the society can be changed, can be turned around, sooner than I’ve said here. That is not how reality works. Destruction takes but a moment. Building takes much longer. Consider the Mass of which we spoke earlier. It took a thousand years for the liturgy to develop to that point in the Baroque where it was codified by the Council of Trent. All of that millennial work was undone in a single generation. The same can be said, more or less, for literature, for schooling (from education to job-training), for architecture (from the humane to a “machine for living”), for manners (from cultivated to coarse), for music to become “music,” even for warfare (from the immorality of unprovoked aggression to “anticipatory self-defense”). This downward spiral to bottom — not that we necessarily have reached that point yet — took less than the lifetime of my mother-in-law, who will be 103 in October.
None of it is going to be as quickly and easily turned around. And don’t count on God doing the job for us, no matter how hard some pray. If we pray, He will certainly lend us help, mainly in the form of fortitude (provided we discipline ourselves) and wisdom (if we seek it), but if He was ever inclined suddenly to stop using men as His instruments for the unfolding of history as He has designed it, He would surely have done so in some age when there were a lot more saints around than we see today when it is a Michael Jackson who commands the world’s adulation.
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