World War II changed Western history. The post-war Catholic parish was an institutional wonder.

It took off with the baby boom, reached its peak in the 1980s, started its decline in the 1990s and may well be mortally wounded by the COVID-19 epidemic in the 2020s.

The parish of my wartime infancy appeared timeless.

It was an identifiable part of the wider culture but, for Catholics, it was a mainstay of life. Baptisms, marriages and funerals happened there. Most Catholics started formal schooling there.

That is where you ritualised being a Catholic. Lifelong personal and family friends were made. It had its social oddities such as not eating meat on Friday, the practice of confession and regular Sunday Mass. Adherence was tribal.

Post-war reconstruction for Catholics brought new vitality to the parish. With population growth came new parishes and schools.

The baby boom brought not only a large new generation of members but increased vitality and vision to the whole of society. The times - they were a changin.

Vatican II was in tune with that change

The fortress church lowered its drawbridge and out streamed the People of God on a march towards establishing a new Kingdom of God - a new world order marked by identification with the hopes and joys, the griefs and anxieties of all, mutual respect, the discarding of bygone enmities, diminished sectarianism an improved life for everybody and a fairer society.

Parishes implemented that new vision. The laity moved into active mode. There were youth groups, senior citizens groups, social justice groups, parent groups, social groups sporting groups.

And all had their formal coming together in the parish liturgy which, while led by clergy, was no longer a clerical preserve, and was in a language all could embrace and understand.

Lay action and leadership became a top policy in the renewed Church - especially with the youth. The Young Christian Worker movement (YCW) formed a whole generation to see, judge and act. Loads of young priests who were mentors of this movement.

The parish was a scene of action and vitality.

But an undertow was forming under this enthusiasm.

Paul VI went along with the awakening vision but was still a product of the Ancien Regime of Christendom and a lifetime operative of its clerical bureaucracy.

He feared that the new enthusiasm would get out of hand. So, he put on the brakes. He re-affirmed priestly celibacy and condemned contraception. His technique of moderating the exuberance was by appointing conservative bishops.

Ten years later, Restoration became the official Church policy with the election of John Paul II.

By the end of the 1980s fault lines started to show in the Church. You noticed them in the parish. The earliest pointer was a drop in Mass attendance and affiliation.

Adult parishioners in their day had found their social life in the parish. But, now, the new generation found their social stimulus in a wider world. Once they reached adulthood, they dropped Mass.

No longer compelled to set an example, their parents started to drift away themselves.

As society became more secular, the Church hierarchy grew more rule-insistent and less pastoral.

Rather than re-discovering the core of the Jesus message and recontextualizing it, the hierarchy, supported by revisionist Catholics, chose to stick more tightly to their guns only to be left irrelevant and increasingly alone.

The bishop in mitre and crosier - once an image of authority - became a curio from the past.

Enter COVID-19

The numbers tell the tale.

Already by the time the pandemic hit, Mass attendance had dropped to about 10 percent. Catholic school enrolments are not as solid. Locally born clergy are dying out. Foreign priests are struggling. Parishes are being closed or amalgamated. The ranks of committed supporters are ever thinning. The institutional decline is clear to all.

And now COVID-19 lockdowns have hit.

Large areas have not had a church gathering for months. Where religious gatherings have been resumed, only a fraction of the former congregations seem to have come back. Social distancing results in unrecognisable liturgies. It's not the way it used to be.

At a practical level, income has dropped - perilously - and with no signs of reversal. There is a critical level of income below which you cannot run a parish.

The institutional parish as we knew it is on its knees. Hence the grieving for lost glory days.

Mind you, it is an institution that is being mourned - not the central vision articulated by Vatican II.

The church as an institution is in trouble but not the Church as the People of God.

All institutions rise and fall. Visions endure and can find new institution vehicles. There are millions of true believers out there. They just find the current institution is not fit for purpose.

The shape of future Christianity

Synods and regional councils are institutional attempts to address the challenge.

A German synodal assembly seems to be making progress. The Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Union (COMENCE) is doing its own soul searching on the problem.

An Australian Plenary Council is in preparation but getting mixed support. Some, including many bishops, don't want it. Others, browned off by past efforts which went nowhere, are cynical.

One hopeful sign is the emergence of small groups of well-informed Catholics with Church renewal as their shared objective.

They are not well received by the institutional leadership but are persistent in their wish to re-invigorate Catholic Christianity.

They are active in synod and council preparations but do not rely on them for their future. Groups of them meet regularly to remember and celebrate the Lord as the first followers did.

The institutional parish may have run its course, but the Christian spark is not extinguished. It is just taking new forms.

• Eric Hodgens is a theologian and senior priest of the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne (Australia).

I was an army chaplain at Puckapunyal preparing conscripts for Vietnam and, at the same time, an undergraduate at Melbourne University where the Vietnam War was taboo. Those two worlds were a universe apart.

As I drove into the university car park the car radio told me that Paul VI had reaffirmed the intrinsic immorality of contraception.

I was shocked.

His advisory group had advised differently.

We now know he went against most of the bishops he had chosen to consult.

Little did I know that this was just the start of a journey to sexual common sense for the whole church.

Five years later, I was parish priest of a brand-new parish full of baby boomers with growing families. They were enthusiastic Catholics who loved parish involvement. Life was full on.

As families grew, so did the parish school. Vatican II was the guiding charter. Liturgy was alive — the source and summit of the life of the parish.

Two things were of interest.

• Nobody ever mentioned contraception.
• Very few went to confession.

Fifteen years later, the younger generation was courting and moving into partnerships.

First, they had sleepovers, then holiday trips together, then they moved in together. Their baby-boomer parents moved gradually from concern, to acceptance and, finally, approval.

The younger generation was re-educating the older.

Some saw this as an erosion of values; others saw it as the emergence of common sense, replacing a strongly ingrained pre-judgement that sex was bad and dangerous.

Then they started thinking.

• Was the pill a bad thing because it allowed license, or a good thing because it allowed greater freedom?
• Was vasectomy a violation of nature, or a newly available option for alleviating anxiety?

Were the tortuous arguments of Catholic moralists based on a prejudice that sex is somehow suspect, rather than an integral part of a fully human life?

John Paul II pre-occupied with sexual morality

The 80s were dominated by Pope John Paul II's fight back on the issue.

He had a hand in framing the original encyclical and seemed pre-occupied with sexual morality.

Over a five-year period, he lectured on his Theology of the Body at the Wednesday Papal Audiences. These cerebral, rationalistic talks moved the focus of discussion of sexuality from human experience to rules and regulations.

He was an old-time student of scholastic philosophy which he propounded in the Wednesday talks and in the two encyclicals "Veritatis Splendor" and "Fides et Ratio."

Human sexuality, as a wholistic human experience, got lost in this arid universe. Was he fighting his own inner demons?

Sexual ethics, a new Church industry

John Paul II's intense pre-occupation with sexual ethics emboldened the law and order wing of the Catholic Church and created a new industry.

In 1981 he established the Pontifical Council for the Family. Its chief focus was sexual morality, especially opposition to contraception.

Under the 18 years of the controversial Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo's presidency, it was renowned for opposition to family planning, use of condoms, even as AIDS prevention, gay marriage and embryological research.

Another spinoff was the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family.

It has developed a heavily ideological course program using the JP II Theology of the Body as its ideological bedrock.

Allied to established theology schools, it grants degrees under a moral theology or bioethics rubric. George Pell promoted this institute in Australia first under the leadership of Anthony Fisher and then Peter Elliott.

Moral theologians like Charles Curran, who argued a more nuanced view of Humanae Vitae, were blackballed by the pope.

During the 37 years of John Paul II and Benedict XVI a chasm grew between an ever more entrenched, Roman, anti-sex mentality and a Catholic faithful who had adapted to a more wholistic vision of sexuality in human life and love.

Official Church ossifies

The church at large was getting freer while church officialdom dug in and ossified.

The doubters were not just pleasure seekers.

They sensed that integral humanity was at the core of their conviction. A narrow, cerebral path of study had led officialdom away from God's reality.

Margaret Farley, a leading American moral theologian, backed up this intuitive sense with her book "Just Love." Justice is the top criterion for loving - including sexual love.

At the same time, something new was crystalizing in this cauldron of ideas.

The mind of the church is formulated by the teachers ("magisterium" in Latin), but it needed to be received by the church at large to receive its final endorsement.

Reception theology now had its day. Ask Father Ormond Rush, an Australian theologian in the forefront of this study. The common sense of the faithful was solidly founded after all.

Cat out of the bag

Paul VI was shocked by the response of the church at large to his encyclical. It caused turmoil for many and departure from the church for some, including priests.

But it prompted others to formulate their conscience for themselves.

No longer is the pope's or bishop's word law. Make the case or lose the argument.

So, Humanae Vitae turned out to be a watershed moment.

Paul VI meant to settle the matter but, instead, began a movement that put conscience, reception and sexual taboo under the microscope.

John Paul II laboured for 27 years to bag the cat again - but lost.

What a roller coaster ride it has been!

But the church is, consequently, better informed and wiser.

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• Eric Hodgens was ordained a Catholic priest in 1960. In 1973 he graduated M.A. from Melbourne University Criminology Department in 1973. For seven years he was Director of Pastoral Formation of Clergy for the Archdiocese of Melbourne. In 1965 he was appointed an Australian Army chaplain part-time. He was heavily involved in the army's Character Guidence Course program during the Vietnam National Service conscription period. He held this appointment for 15 years. Eric now blogs at Catholic View. Reproduced with permission.
• Image: La-Croix International