c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin Press.)

UNDATED _ Tom Brokaw’s new book,”The Greatest Generation,”sits atop the New York Times’ list of non-fiction bestsellers. In it, the distinguished newsman places that of his parents at the summit of his best generation list.

America’s grandparents now, these men and women survived the Great Depression, won World War II and rebuilt American prosperity. They did all this in the style of one of the great film heroes of that era, the man bound to honor who carries out his duties without complaint and shrugs off credit for his achievements. In short, Gary Cooper in a shelf full of films.

What strikes Brokaw, as well as director Steven Spielberg, who also pays tribute to this generation in”Saving Private Ryan,”is the character of the members of this cohort. Character, despite the contemporary whirling dervishes of spin, does count.

In fact, in the judgment of this book and film, character explains the attainments of these people across whose lives the shadows are now lengthening as they do across baseball fields in October.

If America owes a great deal to these unwhining forebears, American Catholicism owes everything to the same group. Its members, especially dedicated religious, like the uncomplaining cathedral builders of antiquity, laid the foundation and raised the proud structure of today’s Roman Catholic Church in the United States.

As a new year begins and a millennial celebration looms, one may recall these people without romanticizing them and recognize their accomplishments as almost without parallel in the history of Christianity.

Those of us who like to think that we have helped to implement Vatican II, should remember that its inspiration came from and its work was accomplished by men and women shaped by the discipline of Vatican I.

It is past time to re-evaluate many of the leaders of that era who deserve more sympathy than they generally receive in their caricatured memories. The distinguished novelist, John Gregory Dunne, a master at recreating the Catholic culture, has done this, for example, with everybody’s favorite pre-Vatican II tyrant, Cardinal James Francis McIntyre of Los Angeles.

In a review essay of the late Cardinal’s biography in the New York Review of Books, Dunne observes that, along with philanthropist Dorothy Chandler, McIntyre is the person most responsible for the transformation of Los Angeles from a sleepy and scattered town into a sophisticated international city. McIntyre, had he died a decade earlier, would, in Dunne’s judgment, have been recognized as a strong-willed prelate who built the churches and the schools indispensable for the flowering of Catholicism in that city.

Instead, he rises regularly in recollection as a figure who did not understand the changed times he had helped bring about by his commitment to Catholic education. He went down, his colors still ribboning in the wind, in mean and minor skirmishes that still obscure his accomplishments.

Perhaps more important are America’s religious men and women, the anonymous corps who gave their lives to staffing the Catholic school system, to rooting it deeply in the culture and to achieving the standards of excellence that make these institutions oases in the wasteland of so many of the nation’s educational systems.

The Catholic schools of America are now recognized for what that”greatest”generation gave to them, a commitment to excellence, to an integrating religious tradition and to the service of the poor. At the century’s dawn, they were a risky experiment for the economically lower class Catholics who financed them and, to suspicious secularists, a possible threat to the WASP empire.

At century’s end, they are the envy of politicians and educators everywhere. How did that generation do it, they ask, how did they educate their own people so that Catholics have achieved so greatly and have become a part of mainstream American culture?

They did it through character, through their heroic dedication to their classroom tasks, through their self-discipline, and their extraordinary faith. Just like their brothers and sisters now well remembered by Messrs. Brokaw and Spielberg.

Now, these same religious are remembered as in dire need of the retirement collection that is taken up every year because they lived the religious vows that kept them largely out of the framework of Social Security.

Or they are remembered in bitter memoirs of Catholic education or in stage productions whose one-joke premise is the totalitarian irascibility of grammar school nuns. The erudite Sister Wendy, conducting televised art museum tours, is a better representative of these learned women, many of whom get their names in the paper for the first time when they die.

Save for the character of this”greatest”of our generations, we American Catholics would still be waiting to come of age in this country.

DEA END KENNEDY