A cause, perhaps, for optimism …

… American Catholicism is going back to the future | Spectator USA. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

An American friend, a sober observer of these matters, cautions that, because of the concentration of Catholicism in particular areas of the US, the intensity I’ve noted is inevitable but not likely to spread. His caution is well advised. This is, in so far as it is a revolution at all, very much an intellectual one, thus far confined to elites and small numbers. The grassroots American faithful still tend to be recent immigrants from still deeply Catholic countries – Vietnam and the Philippines, for example – who are regular mass-goers and also firm holdouts on things like abortion and gay marriage. Since a disproportionate number of seminarians in the US come from these communities also, there is a strong possibility that the immediate future of the church may be ostensibly healthy but shrinking within the overall picture. And, as one priest I questioned about this put it: ‘Sadly, the children of these immigrants who enter the universities and seminaries tend to get chewed up in the wood-chipper of liberalism and iPhone sexual anarchy and are spat out spiritually indistinguishable from 4th generation suburbanites. In the main, only those whom penury rescues from assimilation manage to hold on to Catholic doctrine and morals.’