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April 23, 2002 8:45 a.m. Something Good Is Coming The great awakening ahead.

n a fairly regular basis, the Lord makes His people suffer, His church, His Beloved. The present has been such a time, and our own sins have brought on our troubles.

The much acclaimed "Church of Vatican II," the church of "the progressives," energized since 1965 by dissent and rebellion against many traditions and teachings of the Church, and intent upon foisting on the Church a new morality of sex and marriage and birth and priesthood, has made an awful botch of things.

In 1964, I called my first book A New Generation: American and Catholic. Magazines those days were full of stories about "the New Breed" of priests and laity, and how great the "renewed" church would be. Implicitly, how much better than the old.

We certainly showed them. Never has the Catholic Church in America been so shamed, humiliated, and mortified before the whole world. The "new morality" of the New Breed has turned into a disgrace.

Much good, of course, has been done in and through the Church during the last forty years. Many things — ecumenism, for instance — have been made better. (In my opinion, the liturgy in many ways is far worse done than earlier, with far less respect, and far less sense of holiness, dignity, and awe.) Openness and dialogue are much better, even though some have taken "openness" to mean an inner hollowness, without content or character of its own.

The current scandals, alas, have made the name "Catholic" a badge of self-inflicted shame, a shame inflicted by a tiny proportion of the clergy.

If interviews in the press are correct, some of these culprits actually picture themselves as an advance party for a new and better sexual morality than that of the tradition they loathe. They are not in favor of celibacy — and certainly not of chastity, either — but of "self-exploration" and "self-acceptance of one's own body and its pleasures," of "being at home in one's own body," and other such rationalizations.

To some extent, this pattern may be explained by the tsunami of the sexual revolution of the Sixties and Seventies, that earthquake/hurricane/tidal wave which threw millions of souls into confusion about who and what to believe about authentic morality. Many good people, conservative as well as liberal, were thrown off balance in those days. A fairly large proportion of Catholics, like others, may be tempted to rationalize away their own errors of those days, by trying now to "normalize" what in other ages was taken as plainly sinful, or to use the current secular term, "deviant" behavior. Abortion, for instance, adultery, homosexual actions.

But the sexual revolution does not explain the full pride of the "reformers" of Vatican II, who when the ink was not yet dry on the decrees of that council, were already foreseeing Vatican III, and a wholly new church of their imagination.

A utopian church of the progressive dream emerged, always different from the Church dragged down by the weight of the actual Rome of Pope Paul VI (in his day as loathed by progressives as John Paul II is today). In the name of this airy and future church, all sorts of opinions and actions and policies were countenanced as "forward-looking" that in other ages would have been seen as wanderings far from authentic faith.

This was the climate within which the "deviancy" that brought on the current scandals prospered, undetected, undeterred. Note, for instance, that most of the scandals being reported in 2002 actually happened more than ten years ago, in the heyday of those thirty most-progressive years from 1965 until about 1993. About that time, reforms instituted by the bishops began to take effect. Many badly errant seminaries were cleaned out, or shut down. A number of new, more orthodox and traditional seminaries began to bear good fruit and to prosper in vocations.

The change already under way in many places is tangible.

The life of celibacy can be a very hard one, especially in times of aridity in prayer, and career frustration, and normal loneliness — and when acute temptations arise in situations almost wholly undefended by safeguards and precautions, by ascetical practices, and by a surrounding community of loving fidelity and chastity. Maintaining chastity requires abundant graces. These require silence and prayer for their reception.

A life too long lived apart from intense daily prayer, meditation on the lives of the saints, the devout praying of the daily office of the Church, and a slowly and reflectively enacted sacrifice of the Mass each day, is not a life in which the probabilities of fidelity are enhanced.

On the contrary, the probabilities of chastity decline exponentially, as neglect of the life of the spirit extends its control, like a summer drought spreading its reach across sun-baked fields. Where the love of God withers, the love of this world gains a chokehold.

There is a lesson in the present time: The prayerful, orthodox, and faithful priests and religious of this generation did not bring about the scandals that now humiliate the church.

The sins that have brought us low were abetted by a culture of rebellion, pride, and moral superiority, among those who thought themselves more intelligent, more able, more in tune with human progress, open, experimental, and brave. They despised the merely traditional, observant, and orthodox, whom they considered closed-minded, rigid, and intransigent. They turned away from the tried and true asceticism and paths of holiness of the past.

The sins that have disgraced us are the sins of those who promised "renewal" and "progress" down "new" paths.

"But we did not mean child-abuse," the progressives will say in self-defense. "We didn't mean the abuse of teenagers."

But, hey, a climate in which it was regarded as "rigid" to say that sex outside of marriage was sinful, was not a climate in which playground sand long held lines drawn in it. Young people in pre-marital coupling, older couples "experimenting" beyond the marriage bond, and same-sex coupling were in that climate not regarded as "disordered" but as "healthy experimentation."

"When is the Catholic Church ever going to get over its Victorian moral qualms, and get up to date with contemporary sex science?" was the subject of many a dinner-party interlude. Remember those days?

The "progressive" vision of the human being embodies a profound error of anthropology. It imagines human beings to be "persons," whose bodies are somehow separable from these genderless "persons," and malleable for deployment in any of a number of culturally and personally preferential ways, so long as the person of the other is "respected" and, in its fashion, "loved."

Progressivism, in short, is a form of gnosticism. Its systematic separation of body and person (soul) is a very ancient heresy. The moral dissoluteness to which it gradually leads has been witnessed in many earlier cycles of human history.

For the curing of this disease, the greatest kindness is strict adherence to a more demanding regimen: respect for a more accurate anthropology of the embodied person, the spirited body, the incarnate person, the flesh-and-blood human being fashioned by the Creator for His own inhabitation. This is the regimen of the oneness and wholeness of God's transcendent love, diffused by understanding, reflection, and loving choice through every organ, member, and fiber of human tissue. It is the regimen of that chastity of the heart which is, to paraphrase Kierkegaard, to will one love.

The current humiliation of the Catholic Church will, I feel sure, lead to the great grace of remembrance — remembrance of our true and most precious inheritance, trust in the Word of God bequeathed to us by the ancient Church, and by the Sacred Scripture to whose canonical status it attests. "He is no Catholic who is not united in sacra doctrina with the Bishop of Rome," Stanislaus Hosius says, on a tablet memorialized on the walls of S. Maria in Trastevere in Rome, the titular church of the great Cardinal Gibbons.

There is coming an awakening of a great love for orthodoxy, for fidelity, for clinging to the whole truth as it was handed down to us. There is also arising, justifiably, a certain hard-won contempt for the learned doctors whose pride led them to try to sell us a bill of goods for, lo, so many decades now. To what a miserable state have they reduced their lower regions of the church.

The good and solid things of the Tradition have proved more reliable than they. By far.

These are the notes I look to hear from Rome, more sweetly said, during the coming weeks and months — and maybe days.

— Michael Novak, the George F. Jewett scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Novak is the author, most recently, of On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding.