Recently, we’ve had some interesting discussions at R&T about the definition of rock music (examples can be found here, here and here). As the blogs and comments suggest, this is a complex issue. Some people even think rock music is dead. In a 2010 interview with USA Today, John Mellencamp said:

Let’s face it, the best records were made a long time ago. Those first five Rolling Stones records, when they were covering black artists, were great. Dylan’s Highway 61 is the best record ever. Who’s going to make a better record? Nobody. Who’s going to make better pop records that The Beatles? I hear the radio today and it sounds like Saturday morning cartoons to me.

I know a lot of people who feel the same way about much of the theology that’s come out of the Vatican in recent years. They think the height of Catholic theology occurred in the late 1950s and 1960s, the same time period as the birth of rock music. During those decades the world was rapidly changing. The automobile, the airplane, and television radically revolutionized communication and transportation. Levels of education were rising. Political participation was also increasing. Nations that had been colonized were seeking independence based on claims of self-determinism. The stockpiling of atomic weapons and tensions between the Western world and communist Russia and China created the “cold war.” An overall realization of the complex interdependency of the modern world caused a new social awareness.

The Church got a new attitude. Pope John XXIII issued progressive encyclicals such as Mater et Magistra (Christianity and Social Progress, 1961)) and Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth, 1963). He called for the Second Vatican Council, which opened on October 11, 1962, leading the Church on a journey where it would examine its relationship with the modern world. One of the documents issued by Vatican II, Guadium et Spes (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, 1965), moved away from a natural law methodology, which stresses the universal and immutable, toward an approach based on biblical revelation and historical consciousness which recognizes that human nature is ongoing, develops over time, and that this development is influenced by historical and social structures.

Around this same time a new music, eventually called rock ‘n’ roll, not only gained in popularity but also developed an attitude. An anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian, ant-war, anti-censorship, anti-segregation attitude. The music evolved into a culture that screamed for progressive change, refusing to accept the status quo.

With the exception of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, on which my colleague Tom Beaudoin has written brilliantly for this blog (examples are here, here and here), activism in the US appears to be all but dead. People seem to get more enraged about changes to their Facebook or Netflix accounts than they do about the pressing social issues of our day: a disappearing middle class, rapid rise in poverty, high unemployment rate, increasing costs of a college education, loss of civil rights and increasingly dysfunctional government.

Likewise the Catholic Church’s “new” attitude of the ‘60s has deteriorated into a reactionary stupor. Often focused on the mundane, the Church has just spent the last several years rewriting the missal to capture the “original Latin’s spiritual and historical significance.” Now, instead of saying Jesus is “one in being with the Father,” we say He is “consubstantial with the Father.” The changes in the language are rather small overall but reflect a church going backwards, fusing itself with a theology based on hierarchy and paternalism. Moreover, the time and energy spent on the new missal has provided the Church with a convenient distraction from the more important but controversial issues facing it like the sexual abuse crisis and a large decline in members who actually believe its teachings, particularly doctrines on women and on sexual ethics.

I’m not one to fixate on the past. Early rock music and Vatican II theology made their marks decades ago. We can’t, and shouldn’t, go backwards. Music and theology must evolve, not regress. Still, perhaps both rock music and Catholic theology need to, once again, find a new attitude that asks people to stand up, speak up and rise up against social injustice and the status quo.

Mary McDonough

1 Comment »

1. 

   Mary, I find this to be a helpfully sobering reflection — and provocative correlation of theological and musical developments. One thing that comes to mind is just how much risk was involved in those who took the side of the future in the moves toward new ways of inhabiting history that the theologies and politics of the 1960s solicited. In the deep remixing and relativizing of religious traditions today, on the one hand, and in the occasions for a new political participation symbolized by the Arab Spring, the global Occupy movement, and recent Russian protests, on the other, the present seems surely to be one of those times when a new way of inhabiting history is being undertaken that is, we hope, a yes to a future that must prevail.

   Comment by Tommy Beaudoin — December 25, 2011 @ 10:06 pm

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