This Perverse Generation (Book 4/Collected Works)

If you thought the Catholic Church and American culture were doing just fine up until Vatican II, you won't think so after reading the devastating critique of Carol Jackson Robinson. Writing in the late 1940s, she shows the Revolution to be already well under way and thoroughly ensconced, with the majority of "Latin-Mass" Catholics of her day all but asleep to, if not complicit in, the great evils that were quickly metastasizing around them: parish life—liturgical, devotional, recreational—compromised and atrophied by sentimentalism and worldliness; professional life depersonalized and mechanized; married life corrupted by birth control, the irresponsibility and selfishness of men, and the ensuing feminism; emotional life poisoned by therapeuticism; and cultural life dechristianized by an already rampant secularism. Robinson is truly the American Chesterton, yet even more militant and provocative, combining profound spiritual wisdom, penetrating analysis, and an exquisite sensus catholicus. Reading her laments about the degraded and compromised state of American parish life, work, psychology, education, morality, and spirituality, one would swear she was describing today's world. Yet, she is a woman of hope, and the supernatural solutions she prescribed for her time are even more the solutions for our time. This is a book all Catholics need to read. – Dr. Thaddeus Kozinski, author of Modernity as Apocalypse: Sacred Nihilism and the Counterfeits of Logos (Angelico Press, 2019)

Written in 1949, Carol Robinson’s, This Perverse Generation, does not paint a rosy picture of the pre-Vatican II Church. Her sharp observation of things before the Council is invaluable for helping the rest of us keep things in perspective. 

Robinson shows her superb eye for social and moral detail and offers an unsparing analysis of faults and opportunities. It is penetrating, energetic, concise writing, full of telling insights, and pithy zingers to wake the mind from torpor. It shows how much the pre-Vatican II Church, lay and clerical, needed renewal and reform, and how misguided as a result nostalgia for that Church really is. – Dr. Peter Simpson, Professor of Philosophy and Classics, Graduate Center, CUNY; author of the Authenticity of the Gospels (HarperCollins)

Carol Robinson had a sharp eye, a clear head, and the ability to see everyday realities and relate them vividly to constant principle. Each of these short pieces takes some feature of American life—work, marriage, courtship, popular culture—and asks questions that get overlooked but are obvious when asked. Do these things help us live better? Become better people? Grow in holiness? Or give us joy? And if the answer is “no,” shouldn't we do something about it?

Her observations are as useful now as then. The human wreckage and outright insanity are more obvious today, but the same principles were accepted 70 years ago, even among mass-going Catholics. Basics change very slowly, so our world gives us the same choice she saw between heroism and the open-ended accommodation that leads to dissolution. May we have the grace to choose rightly! – James Kalb, author of The Tyranny of Liberalism (ISI, 2008), and Against Inclusiveness (Angelico Press, 2013)

Carol Robinson is a cartographer of the most rare kind. If Plato’s famous allegory was fundamentally right about the nature of education or the lack thereof, then Robinson has drawn us a map to find our way out of the modern American cave. By illuminating the soul-destroying shadows that have beguiled and enslaved us, Robinson shows us to ourselves in This Perverse Generation, and thereby charts us a path to Heaven.

Certainly such a claim will be met with skepticism, especially by an American audience subject, Robinson reminds us, to two grave errors: rugged individualism and the right to private judgment. Fully indoctrinated by these twin shadows of the American cave, the response of most American readers will be one of outraged arrogance: “Who is this woman to tell me what to do or what to think?” Robinson’s answer is disarmingly simple: Sequere Deum. For God, Robinson knows by faith, has Himself shown us the way out of the cave of the world by establishing the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church of Rome. – Jeffrey Bond, Ph.D, University of Chicago