It's hard to miss Rev. Marcos Gonzalez, who wears a black cassock every day, a garment most priests tossed out decades ago. But it's not just his clothes that bespeak an older, more traditional era of his Roman Catholic Church.
When some priests spoke in favor of optional celibacy at a Los Angeles priest assembly last year--a position supported by many American Catholics today--Gonzalez booed. In premarital counseling, he tells couples to remain chaste until marriage. Gonzalez also believes artificial birth control and homosexual sex are sins and opposes ordination of women.
Such stances conform with Vatican teachings, he says, but are at odds with many American priests and lay people.
Yet Gonzalez, an associate pastor at St. Andrew Church in Pasadena, Calif., is hardly a relic from a fading past. At 41, he offers one glimpse of the future as a member of a new breed of younger priests ordained during the 25-year reign of Pope John Paul II and committed to the pope's orthodox teachings.
As the health of the 84-year-old pope continues to falter, men like Gonzalez stand ready to guard and propagate the pontiff's legacy. They represent a global trend toward Christian orthodoxy, in contrast to a generation of more liberal priests ordained during the 1960s reforms of the Second Vatican Council.
"We are very, very faithful to the Holy Father and not in any way dissenting from the teachings of the church," Gonzalez says of like-minded colleagues.
The emergence of these young conservatives has set off a flurry of studies, books and debate about what effect they will have on the nation's 62 million Roman Catholics.
Conservative's vision
Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, president of the conservative Institute on Religion and Public Life, says the new breed will reinvigorate the church with youthful enthusiasm, "radical devotion" and a willingness to proclaim church teachings without equivocation.
Others, however, see trouble. Dean Hoge, a sociologist at The Catholic University of America in Washington, sees a potential clash between younger priests' emphasis on the pope's authority and younger laity's view of themselves as fit to make their own moral choices.
Although the young conservatives are still some years away from becoming candidates for bishop, they are beginning to move into the ranks of pastor, where their orthodoxy may change parish policies.
According to Hoge, priests ordained during Pope John Paul II's reign make up 32 percent of the nation's 43,600 Roman Catholic priests.
Not all of them reflect the trend toward orthodoxy.
In general, however, the "John Paul priests" are less supportive than older colleagues of optional celibacy, female priests, democratic election of bishops and greater lay leadership, according to numerous surveys.
They show less tolerance for dissent against church teachings. And they are more apt to favor greater use of Latin prayers and other traditional touches to restore a sense of sacredness to the liturgy, Hoge says.
Hoge also found higher morale and job satisfaction among the young priests.
Gonzalez, for instance, recently held three classes of St. Andrew students spellbound during a pitch promoting the virtues of religious life. With candor and humor, he chronicled dramatic days of literally dealing with the lives and deaths of parishioners, answered questions about sex with aplomb and proclaimed that his was the best job in the world.
"If I had 10 different lifetimes, I would choose every one to be a priest," he told the students.
Gonzalez seems to meld modernity and tradition in the same way he wears hip wrap-around sunglasses with an old-fashioned cassock. Unlike older priests who often complain about what they saw as the church's imperious rigidity before Vatican II, he says, priests like himself grew up amid social uncertainty, and they find beauty and solace in the church's 2,000-year-old disciplines.
Faith is a foundation
That "search for a solid rock" is cited by Hoge and other researchers as one of the reasons many young priests today are more discernibly conservative.
One powerful attraction for Gonzalez is the pope's refusal to "water down doctrine," he says. "But he presents it in a pastoral way and with love."
Gonzalez tries to do likewise.
Among parishioners, Gonzalez's approach has disenchanted some liberals but also won fans.
Ann Druffel, a St. Andrew parishioner since 1955, says she was "startled and very gratified" when Gonzalez gave a passionate homily against abortion and artificial birth control several months ago.
For his part, Gonzalez says, "If you tell people they're sinners who are going to hell, you've lost them. You have to show people why the church teaches what it does. I'm a firm believer in accepting people where they're at and helping them grow."