It's hard to miss Father Marcos Gonzalez, who wears an ankle-length 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 most American Catholics today -- Gonzalez booed in dissent. In premarital counseling, he tells couples to remain chaste until marriage, plunging into delicate territory some priests prefer to avoid. Gonzalez also believes artificial birth control and gay sex are always a sin and opposes women's ordination.
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, 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 papacy of Pope John Paul II and passionately committed to the pope's orthodox teachings.
As the health of John Paul -- now 84 and the third-longest serving pontiff in history -- continues to falter, men like Gonzalez stand ready to guard and propagate his 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, its largest religious denomination.
Father 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 troublesome times ahead. Dean Hoge, a sociologist at 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.
