Second Spring:

...Catholicism," In the postwar years, a new breed of Catholic surfaced, well-educated, more affluent and intellectually alert...

...For Fracchia, the 1940s signaled the last days of the immigrant U.S...

...There seems to be no doubt that an increasing number of Catholics in the United States are seeking more, not less, in the way of spiritual experience...

...He anticipates this criticism by admitting that the "book is a premature exploration," that he is "too close to the events...

...Ignatius Institute as a pre-conciliar throwback nor as a conservative rear-guard action...

...sex education in a Catholic elementary school, and his three-year stint in a Jesuit novitiate...

...They were women and men who questioned hackneyed presentations of the church's teaching, showed dis pleasure at carelessly prepared liturgies and dozed through sermons laced with Dale Carnegie banalities...

...In addition, Fracchia finds that increasing numbers of U.S...

...In those days, lay and clergy leaders were, he says, "politically and socially liberal, open to European theological influences, and in revolt against the 'ghetto mentality' of U.S...

...In Second Spring, Charles A. Fracchia recounts his spiritual pilgrimage since the 1940s, while seeking at the same time to explain the tumultuous events that roused U.S...

...senting neo-orthodoxy as "one of the most vital movements in U.S...

...Catholicism during the same decade...

...Catholic charismatic communities will exist side-by-side with Catholic groups that will dedicate their lives to social aposto-lates and gather together each day to recite the Divine Office...

...Catholicism," he describes it through the standpoint of students at the St...

...Catholic church became a tempest-tossed institution in total disarray . . . with attacks on the pope, bishop-baiting, an unprecedented exodus of priests, brothers and nuns from their vocations . . ." and "mass abandonment of Catholic practices among U.S...

...He describes the ritual of the Latin Mass through the youthful eyes of an altar boy...

...This richheritage," he argues, must be recognized and built upon in the "future reconstruction and renewal" of the church in the United States...

...church as a whole his own personal "struggles with the dimension" of his "spiritual life...

...His highly personal memoir stands Fracchia in good stead as he recounts the recent history of U.S...

...Finally, the winter of discontent arrived...

...church, there was the impact of the indecision, the politicking and the dissent that surrounded the issuance of the encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968...

...Many were graduates of Catho lic colleges...

...Catholicism...

...Readers can judge for themselves how well Fracchia identifies the main features of a U. S. Catholicism come of age in the 1980s...

...Then came, in rapid succession, the re forms emanating from the Council: reli gious freedom, liturgy in the vernacular, re-examination of the traditional role of religious orders, fresh appreciation of other Christian churches, dialogue with non-Christian religions, and other changes...

...church...

...The institutional church could ignore the new lay voices only at its peril...

...For Fracchia, the 1950's and early 1960's were the heyday of "Jubilee Catholicism,", otherwise known as "Commonweal Catholicism...

...Thus far, the Catholic charismatic movement has bee,n the most visible and discernible experience of spiritual renewal in U.S...

...Catholics...

...His evocative rendering of pre-conciliar U.S...

...Catholicism following the Second Vatican Council...

...This led to a passive resistance to the anti-intellectual, clerically-dominated,ethnically-inspired U.S...

...Its delay had generated widespread ex pectations that the encyclical would somehow modify traditional teaching against contraception...

...Catholicism in the future," he claims, "will be a structural pluralism...

...When it did not, the repercussions were explosive...

...Catholicism, but that kind of an approach to assessing the future is an uncertain, highly subjective indicator...

...The U.S...

...Catholicism, one which turns it inward, making it just another Christian denomination, a sect without any unique, overriding distinction...

...By the mid-1970's, "the docile U.S...

...church...

...What happened...

...Second Spring, and its unequivocal subtitle, "the Coming of Age of U.S...

...Fracchia reminisces with tenderness.and, at times, eloquence...

...church...

...The ensuing frustration created a mounting crescendo of criticism, and the expanding conflict in Vietnam compounded both the frustration and the criticism...

...going to Confession" for the first time as another first-grader confesses to adultery, thinking it meant disobeying adults...

...That the "assimilation of generations of the descendants of these immigrants into the mainstream of society" has "become an almost accomplished process...

...Gone, probably forever, will be that monolithic uniformity...

...Catholic church is unable to feed this spiritual hunger, many of them will go elsewhere...

...That was the catholic style of John A. Ryan, John F. Kennedy and Dorothy Day, still visible today in the work of Sargent Shriver, George G. Hig-gins, Theodore Hesburgh and Cesar Chavez...

...Instead, they believe they are learning a tradition which is applicable to their contemporary work...

...Their religious stance is ecumenical, outgoing and irenic - singularly free of polemic and dogmatism...

...Furthermore, they refused any longer to remain quiet about an arbitrary or authoritarian reli gious establishment, whether personified by a bishop, sister, lay person or priest...

...Ignatius Institute in San Francisco: "They are more interested in the works of Teresa of Avila than those of Rosemary Ruether, the life of Thomas More rather than that of Charles Davis...

...Traditional values were set aside - often denounced - as the would-be makers of a new order blamed the ills "of society on the established institutions - church, state, corporations, academia...

...church could sense within it the active presence of a laity, highly ar ticulate, well-educated and theologically literate...

...Catholics are rediscovering a neo-orthodoxy within U.S...

...That promise is only partially fulfilled...

...He knows them well...

...What he calls neo-orthodoxy might better be called neo-traditionalism or neo-conservatism...

...Catholicism, the old-time religion, is nostalgic and affectionate, unlike the accounts of others who discarded it with disdain and bitterness...

...In that era four major influences were shaping the U.S...

...If Fracchia correctly projects the religious future, he maps, in his optimism, a different road for U.S...

...This was a United States which had gone from the Camelot idealism of the Kennedy years to the massive efforts of the Johnson administration to end poverty in the United States...

...church in the 1980s...

...the assimilation of the past into the present.'' The genius of twentieth century Catholicism in the United States was that it could generate women and men who had an impact on both church and state, who moved easily between city square and cathedral...

...It enables him to disguise his own preferences as trends and to extrapolate to the U.S...

...Catholicism," promises to reveal substantial clues to the direction of the U.S...

...It "had its roots in the 1930's and its beginnings in the metropolitan centers of New York [where the Catholic Worker, Jubilee and Commonweal were published ] and Chicago [home of the Christian Family Movement, Friendship House, The Grail, Catholic Labor Alliance, Thomas More Bookstore, St...

...Unblushingly, he drops the name of a fellow novice, Edmund G. Brown, Jr., the "future governor of California...

...In addition to these influences upon the U.S...

...He qualifies this hasty generalization by noting that the impact of the new waves of immigrants, mostly of Hispanic origin, "has not been comparable" to that of earlier Catholic immigrants...

...Only a marooned Catholic could es cape the call for aggiornamento, the im pact of the debates which stirred the Sec ond Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965...

...But is it not precipitate to conclude, and he does, that "the immigrant experience for the church has ended...

...To suggest at this time, as he does, that in the United States the rapidly growing Hispanic population of fifteen million, predominantly Catholic in origin, will not significantly affect tomorrow's Catholicism in the United States, is too provincial - and too dismal - an outlook...

...society...

...the cultural experience of Sunday Mass at an Italian Catholic parish in San Francisco...

...If the U.S...

...And yet, he says, "the work of description and interpretation must begin somewhere...

...Benet Library, Chicago Inter-Student Catholic Action, Sheil School of Social Studies and similar organizations ]." It was an era of optimism, of intense identification with the Catholic church, and of new movements to bring that church into the modern world...

...More important for Fracchia is their indifference to the swirling controversies of recent decades: "These students don't see their involvement with St...

...Each of them, in his or her own way, could not influence one terrain without also affecting the other...

...In the background was U.S...