Gen Y priests and Baby Boomer priests

There is a great article by a young priest about the differences and shared concerns among generations of priests in the USA, in Commonweal, here.

A snippet to whet the appetite:

The following generation, the one before mine, was also dealing with a world very different from the one in which we live today. It came of age during or just after Vatican II. Vietnam was a war zone, and the sexual revolution was underway. A new age had dawned. For my first parish assignment, which lasted from 2003 to 2007, I was blessed to be placed with a pastor who was ordained in 1968. He entered the seminary before the council, was formed as the council was meeting, and ordained in one of the most turbulent years of the last century. His ordination class had thirty-three other men, only ten of whom remain in active ministry. I had some initial prejudices about living and working with a baby-boomer priest. After all, I was what people now call, in praise or disdain, a John Paul II priest. On paper we really were not supposed to get along. But we were both sons of Vatican II, and we were genuinely interested in learning about each other’s experiences of seminary formation. We also wanted to talk about our different understandings of the church, and about the direction in which we thought the church was heading. We also liked being priests, and since we were going to be housemates for the next four years, we made it work.

Our best conversations took place at the dinner table. My pastor recalled memorizing the Baltimore Catechism in grade school. I told him that I made collages about my feelings in religious-ed class. When he complained that his seminary formation had been too militaristic, I told him of my frustrations with a seminary formation that seemed too lax. When he spoke of the years he spent studying Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, I expressed embarrassment at not knowing how to chant the Pater Noster as I concelebrated Mass with Benedict XVI at World Youth Day a few years ago in Cologne. When my pastor expressed gratitude that the clerical dress code had been relaxed over the years, I said I thought it was important that the priest be a visible sign of the church, to remind the world that God is not dead. But when it came to the abuse scandals, we were on the same page-or at least in the same book. The scandals hit us both hard, though in different ways.

Hmmm...it strikes me that this is not just about the priesthood, but about those in Church leadership of all stripes. Feel free to comment here or in class.