Wanted: a new mentality, a new attitude, a new way of being, a new culture. Nothing less than this kind of revolution is what the Church of Rome thinks Catholics need in our stance toward older people.

Also needed is a new spirituality, one that is based on continual rebirth. For this spirituality the key text is the dialogue between Jesus and Nichodemus. “How can a person enter back into his mother’s womb?,”  the would-be convert asks. Jesus answers that only through water and the spirit can that happen.

These two references stand out among the highlights in a remarkable new document issued last April by the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for  the Laity. Entitled “The Dignity of Older People and Their Mission in the Church and in the World,” this instruction embodies the Catholic Church’s most important statement yet about later life.

When I shared this latter opinion with Msgr. Charles Fahey, director of the Third Age Center at Fordham University and the most prominent priest-gerontologist in the United States, he concurred. “That’s a fair statement,” he said of my appraisal.

Characteristic of this document is the emphasis placed upon a positive view of growing old. Again and again the authors refute the pessimism that prevails in the modern world about the prospects of older men and women. They stress “the great potential that older people still have” and take pains to lay out the “opportunities for growth and commitment” open to elders.

Clearly the Church wants everyone to regard older people, not as a problem, but rather as a resource. The authors take pains to reject “the current, largely negative image of old age.” In doing so we can help elders not to succumb to “self-isolation, resignation, and a feeling of uselessness and despair.”

Elders have received precious spiritual gifts that equip them well to offer service as well as to receive it. In calling for a radical new approach to the aged, the framers of this statement zero in on the older members of the church as gifted people.

Among the charisms or spiritual gifts proper to old age, the authors list five: Disinterestedness, Memory, Experience, Interdependence, and a more complete vision of life.

•    Disinterestedness means “giving  something, or giving ourselves, without any thought of a return.” This kind of giving appears especially valuable in a society feverishly occupied with getting.

•    By memory, the document is talking about an historical sense that is vital to the well-being of society. Without memory, younger people run the risk of losing their own identity.

•    Experience offers value to society despite the way in which  technology seems to make it superfluous. Nothing substitutes adequately for what an older person has learned of life through the events of many years.

•    The fact of interdependence is often obscured in the United States because so many people like to think of themselves as rugged individualists, needing nobody else. Elders remind everyone that we are all bound together in an interlocking network of needs.

•    A more complete vision of life is available in one’s later years. “the age of simplicity and contemplation.” As the writers say, “older people understand the superiority of being over having.”

The document devotes a section to older persons as seen in the Bible and provides several texts for prayerful reflection.

Richard Griffin