As Benedict’s visit gets closer, anticipatory commentary makes less and less sense.
Take, for example, Stephen Prothero’s column in USA Today.
(Prothero is chair of the Religion Department at BU. His column expresses a pretty thin understanding of Benedict, but I’ll just get to the end)
The point is that young people don’t relate. That young people are turned off by Church teaching. Benedict probably can’t do anything to fix that and will make it worse.
According to a recent report by the Pew Forum, Catholicism in the USA is holding steady at about 25% of the population. But underlying this calm is a lot of churn. Immigrants are flooding into the church — nearly a quarter (22%) of all U.S. Catholics were born in a foreign country, and almost half of all immigrants (46%) are Catholics. But native-born Americans are fleeing. In fact, the Roman Catholic Church has lost more believers than any other religious group in recent years. Approximately 10% of Americans are former Catholics.
One problem is Catholic education. Young Catholics are shockingly ignorant of the most basic tenets of their faith. Many cannot name any of the four Gospels, or identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible. To educate American Catholic youth, however, is to tell them that their church opposes premarital sex, condoms, abortion and the ordination of women — teachings that according to Sex and the Soul, a recently released study by my Boston University colleague Donna Freitas, are chasing Catholic youth out of the church in droves.
Young American Catholics treated John Paul II like a rock star. Yes, he was socially and theologically conservative, but at least they could relate to the guy with the “Popemobile” and the smile and the energy to travel to some 130 countries during his 26 years at the Holy See. But can they relate to Benedict XVI? And can he relate to them? What can a pope who is an academic theologian first and foremost offer young Americans, save for dogmas they don’t believe in and rituals they do not understand? Is he coming to scold us? Or to hug us?
We are about to find out.
Several brief points:
1) The implication is that young Catholics stop associating with the Church because of its teachings on sexuality and ordination of women. This begs the question – and an important one – do young people raised in churches that do have more liberal views on these issues stick with their churches? Do young Episcopalians stay Episcopalian, for example? Are Episcopal Churches filled with young adults?
And when young adult Catholics leave the Church, where do they go? Most don’t go anywhere, but those that do go somewhere, to another Christian body…where do they go? Repeat. Do they go to Christian denominations that are more liberal on these issues?
I have no doubt that the core of the finds Prothero cites are true – that these teachings are rejected by many young adults. But haven’t they always? (well, maybe not the ordination of women part). And what difference does it make? The implication is that the Church needs to change these teachings in order to appeal to the young. I’m sure the young (like the rest of us) also live in a way that puts to the background the Gospel mandate to live simply, not accumulate possessions or put one’s priorities and heart towards acquisition of earthly things.
Is it time for the Church to revisit that, too?
In all of this academic posturing Prothero neglects to mention the basic dynamics of young adulthood, which involve not only self-definition apart from family and parents but entrance into a busy world of work and social life that is unrelenting, busy and dedicated to creating the self as an adult in a secularist culture. It takes a lot for a young adult to see the Church as having anything to do with that. To a great extent the Church is responsible for young adults not seeing the Church as having much if anything to do with their real lives on this journey. But my point is that while some church bodies do prioritize this in their mission and do bring in young adults, all Christian church bodies are worrying about this now, because they all see essentially the same trends among young adults.
Even the Episcopalians. Believe it or not.
2) The flip side of the “youth are alienated by” question is to look at the youth who are not alienated. There are plenty of young people around in Catholic institutions. Not as many as their should be, but you know, they’re here. What do the excited, engaged Catholic young adults think about these issues?
3) Prothero is correct, of course, about religious education. Partly. What he gets wrong from his perch up there in Boston is that while Catholic kids are ignorant about their faith, it’s not because they’re being taught for 8 or 12 years all about the “hot-button” issues instead.
Yes, Catholic catechesis is a mess, as we’ve often blogged here. Prothero’s precise description of the problem is incorrect. The simple version of a very complex question is:
*Catholic catechesis tends to be thin, but I do think that evaluating the results of catechesis needs to factor in questions of whether a person being surveyed attended Catholic school or parish religious ed for twelve years and whose family was a faithful Mass-goer or went to Catholic parish religious ed for 8 and whose parents rarely took them to Mass. Filter all of that out and the picture is not quite so dismal. It’s depressing, but I think you’d find that the level of knowledge among those coming from committed families is not as bad as the total picture looks.
And the fact is that Catholic catechetical materials do tend to stress the basics of the Gospel (albeit in a truncated form) above the Church’s particular teachings on Prothero’s issues. I think Catholic catechetical materials are sorely lacking, but I don’t think that’s the fundamental issue. The fundamental issue is Catholic culture. Catholic schools and parish religious education and textbooks are a relatively recent invention. How did the faith get passed on before that? Inquiring minds want to know.
(And it’s not correct to suggest that the faith didn’t get passed on , and that it was just blindly accepted by ignorant, fear driven-sheep. Research into medieval and pre-Reformation Catholicism is showing more and more that this is just not true.)
I could go on, but I’ll just finish by saying that articles like Prothero’s irritate me because they are either obtuse or disingenuous. What is his point? That the Catholic Church should, today, celebrate sex outside of marriage, abortion and start ordaining women, and that then young adults would start coming back to Church in droves?
No, I’m thinking they’d still be working ten hours a day and letting off steam with their friends afterwards, with Church as a faint memory and not a real object of desire or interest. But not because they’re mad about the ordination of women. Rather because they don’t see the connection between whatever spiritual yearnings they have and whatever church they came from. Their own liberal sexual practice (which is true of most of them) factors into that as a self-perceived obstacle, either out of guilt or conviction, but it’s really only a symptom of something deeper.
And that “something deeper” is exactly the problem Benedict has dedicated himself to addressing. From his homily at his installation Mass:
If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to him, are we not afraid that He might take something away from us? Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes life so beautiful? Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our freedom? And once again the Pope said: No! If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation. And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ – and you will find true life. Amen.
Hardliner that he is, you know.
Oh, those young people. Clearly, some of them have a great desire to slaughter their classmates and professors. Clearly, the Church should become more relevant by getting behind this desire to murder professors. Maybe teach them to do it more tactfully, with poison in the faculty coffee machine, instead of all this messy Virginia Tech business.
Oh, wait, that would be wrong. But only if we maintain absolute standards of good and evil, and believe that divine revelation remains true, of course. :)
Seriously… it’s difficult to understand why this writer is interested in studying religion at all, much less teaching it. He seems to think that religion has no power to change minds or behavior. Art History has more of a truth claim than that.
It’s also depressing to see a scholar refuse to write about another scholar’s writings in any real depth. Heck, you could review Agatha Christie’s corpus and preferred themes in this much space. But he’s just not interested.
Well, the reason I could “relate” to John Paul II was that he traveled to 130 countries, just like me. And traveled in the Popemobile. Wait, Benedict travels in a popemobile, so that couldn’t be it. And come to think of it, I haven’t traveled to all that many countries. Gosh, maybe it’s because he had something wise to say about how to live in this world. How to understand God. But then I wouldn’t be relating, I’d be listening. And you didn’t have to do that when he was Pope, did you? :-) I pray that we all listen this week to our Holy Father, as he continues teaching and calling us to repent and believe in the gospel, in the tradition of his predecessor, John Paul the Great and 2000 years of saintly doctors of the church.
It’s hard to know where to start. Thanks for your remark that on the passing on of the faith: “Research into medieval and pre-Reformation Catholicism is showing more and more that this is just not true.” That’s been a canard for years. There’s a British sociological study (of all things) that makes this very clear, by Steve Bruce (God is Dead: Secularization in the West).
Catholic culture before the Reformation WAS the culture. After that one needed catechetical materials, etc. to differentiate from the various Protestant denominations. Before that the liturgy was the pre-eminent form of catechesis as well as the fact that people were attuned to the God-centeredness of everything, even if they were illiterate and uneducated. The sense of the divine origin of all things permeated every stratum of society.
I think this is the problem and it is this that Benedict has been addressing since the beginning of his pontificate. God is the alpha and the omega. That is what is missing from our perception of life.
Wellborn’s response to this Prothero’s article should be required reading. Bravo! Arguments like Prothero’s are taken out of mothballs every time there happens to be some event of significance to the Catholic Church.
The scary thing about Prothero is it is his job to teach the faith to BU students. I would be he actually teaches them the Episcopalian faith and says this is where the church will be in 20 years when they realize how smart I am. Then when young people get turned of he blames guys like Pope Benedict.
The idea of “sheep” is certainly not confined to our Church – certainly as witnessed to by the daily news pertaining to our culture. There are new age sheep; political sheep; sheep following the gurus of scientific cloning and human manipulation; sheep bumping into the walls of gnosticism/atheism; literary sheep; junk entertainment sheep; sheep settling for some limited substitute for the entire fullness of the Faith (but, of course if they never got a chance to hear it or see it they just may be justified in wandering from what is clearly NOT the Church in the first place).
But our dear Lord certainly had a fondness for HIS sheep who distinguish His voice from the rest of the false shepherds. And He even leaves them, trustingly, to continue to seek out all of the above as well.
But, unfortunately, history shows us that once so many sheep wander off into those unprotected territories of disobedience and self direction, only a remnant survive.
Those are the stats that the author should be truly concerned with or once again history will repeat itself.
Yes, but… the crux of the matter could pivot the scales of justice in favor of a merciful treatment of the journalist and a punitive treatment of the circumstances he finds himself in (as Allen said on the Pew dais, we insiders get it, outsiders haven’t a clue where to begin to look, and when they do they see our own tyranny of relativism [abuse crisis; clerical corporatism; tribalism bias in TV, radio, print news] not the culture’s)?
Allow me to compare 3 loci in this phrase
upon which we:
materials published centrally by for-profit commercial enterprises contravenes Catholic social teaching of subsidiarity: my advice? discard ‘em all! Require dioceses to invest in local web-based data warehouse of materials created by the catechists themselves ( akind of CCD-Wiki) to share with others in their locale, and spend the fees the parents pay not on non-returnable glossy books rather investing in institutional wisdom a la “train the trainer” sessions. At a minimum move toward a thriftier newsprint periodical based format that could be paid for by sales of advertizing (cf. parish bulletins).
____ > small scale interfacing with local commercial involvement may inform regional journalist’s and their audiences, but is unlikely to change a National journalists impression of Catholicism
catechetical culture is a function of the time spent in relationships with others, a Eucharistic ethic of “communio” – the kids who spend 5 x 7 hrs per week plus Sunday Mass and occasional Saturdays at reconciliation in the company of other Catholics and 5 x 1 lessons per week from the “material” mentioned above get a lot out of it for sure… they are the privileged ones, even more so if there Parish has a CYO for sports and recreation activities. Where’s the “preferential option for the poor,” the underprivileged ones? Where exposure is rationed to 1 x 1 hour per week (forcing teachers to select which 20% of the “materials” above, designed for a Catholic school curricula with 80% more time a week, they will cover) and families rarely attend mass, or reconciliation and are often excluded from CYO and other ministries, I would advocate diocesan clusters investing in developing content for local media channels to offer broadcasts of local Catholic news and edutainment (choral performances, college sports, local Catholic history) at a minimum begin with YouTube and a MyFace page or blog for local families to share in fun times together, and court underswriting by bigger enterprises (local faith based hospitals, colleges, chainstore retailers etc)
____ > the medium is the message, and the wider community would be exposed to a positive sense of how Catholics being good Catholics makes the neighborhood a better place, but still probably not enough to register on a National journalists radar screen. Which leaves us with…
Catholic the cooperation of the Bishops to promote the life of their Catholic flock has been sorely tried with the crisis, so I’m not going to pass judgment on the past other than to point out that in keeping with “subsidiarity” and “communio” they need to butt-out of the work of the lay people and their pastors at the diocesan level and do what only they can do at the National level, engage the culture with courageous prime time lectures, TV and Radio interviews, sponsoring excellence in dialog between secular and religious experts (cf In Our Time from the BBC), encourage more insiders like Allen to parse the mulititude of sources into digestable chunks for outsiders while discouraging the slothful purist pundits who, when challenged to engage the culture at their level, direct the inquisitive yet busy journalist to “go read his books, he’s written 40 you know.”
____ > the model was Christ, who didn’t say to the apostles “go read the Old Testament you’ll find all you need to know in there” but lived patiently through many a trial and then paid with his life.
The new CARA study indicates that Mass-going “young people,” i.e., those born since the 1980s, are among the most faithful members of the Church (along with those born before 1960.) Prothero’s fears are better directed at thirty- and forty-somethings, who appear to be the least catechized and least observant.
http://cara.georgetown.edu/sacraments.html
Here’s an example of a YouTube clip that’s a different flavor of tribalism (evangelical) but probably wouldn’t get much more than a sneer from EWTN types:
The format is described here (HT: MarkShea Catholic and Enjoying it)
http://blog.ancient-future.net/2008/04/07/trish-reels-in-a-big-one/
How are consumers of media supposed to parse out this stuff by themselves?
Kudos to courageous pastors like Fr. Jim McGhee…
Please sir, can I have some more…
… which actually was preceded by this musical number (which perhaps makes my point better)
My simile for arguments sake: the secular world are the boys in Dickens’ poorhouse, the media see the privileged few inside gorging in the midst of so much destitution and suffering as evidence of a corrupt clerical culture, and the Pope as a kind of pompous Mr Bumble
Its up to us to show them otherwise… and perform a different narrative, the harvest of twisted olives is great …
the workers few…
And the comments under Trish’s blog are prescient: a lapsed Catholic bewailing the Feeding of the 5,000 preached as a pot luck supper not a miracle….
Regarding post #5: Just to clarify, Boston University is a Protestant school with Methodist roots. It shouldn’t be confused with Boston College, a school “in the Jesuit tradition”. I’m pretty sure Stephen Prothero is not a Catholic or former Catholic.
To get a feel for Prothero’s outlook, watch his interviews on the Jon Stewart show (March 19, 2007), and the Tavis Smiley show (April 6, 2007). A revised edition of his book _Religious Literacy_ just came out in paperback, and I think I want to read it.
He seems to have some catching up to do in “Catholic literacy”, though.
Rich
Unforetunately, the CARA study also indicates that among Catholics who attend Mass once a month, the youngest or Millenial Catholics as a group go to Mass less than any other group and a 2005 poll by NCReporter found them to support abortion far more than any other generation of Catholics (twice that of pre Vatican II generation) on the question of whether one could be a good Catholic and still accept abortion… 86%. You did not deny this but you had stressed those who do attend Mass as being faithful by saying: ” The new CARA study indicates that Mass-going “young people,” i.e., those born since the 1980s, are among the most faithful members of the Church …”
The problem is that as a whole group, they represent the worst position on abortion of any Catholic generation and twice as bad as the pre Vat. II group.
The times and places in which Catholic culture WAS the culture were extremely different from our time and place.
We are flooded daily with thousands of words, images, and competing ideas and viewpoints, most of them from commercial media sources that are attempting to influence
our thinking and behavior, for various reasons and in various ways, for their own gain. Our minds are cluttered, our lives are cluttered, and among none of us is this so
true, perhaps, as it is among the young.
It doesn’t seem like a very fair fight…and one of the unfair things about it is that the thinking of even those of us who are well-meaniing about overcoming our culture’s obstacles to reach out to the young (and to all) on behalf of Christ tends to be influenced in ways we’re often not aware of, so we may think that another plan, another comittee meeting, another super-duper program should, could, will come along to show us the way to overcome these obstacles.
If we recall, though, that Christianity began as a little, tiny movement in a big, complex empire and world that didn’t care a fig about it, we might get some clues: Get together in small groups, with no particular plan or program but to help young people (and others) truly understand the nature and call of Christian Catholic faith.
Let them know that they can ask anything they wish. They might talk about what questions they’d like to ask God. They might talk about why they find it hard to believe in God or hard to believe in Jesus (if they do). They might talk about the challenges to faith that they see in everyday life. Many, maybe most, young people need to consider and to talk about all of these things and more. Help them to feel comfortable enough to be as honest, as real, as possible.
Give them an atmosphere in which they feel that
the church is not just another organization trying to “sell” them something, but a living body of people who genuinely care for them, with all their questions, imperfections, doubts, fears and hopes.
Then be honest and real to them. Present to them the case for God and the case for Jesus directly, simply, honestly.
If young people support abortion, for example, probably it’s because they’ve actually only heard superficial discussions about it. They don’t understand the depth of the church’s position regarding it.
They have no idea of what it means to live counterculturally as a Christian. They need to understand what it means, in all its many dimensions, and to be called to do so. And so, of course, they need teachers and leaders who understand what it means, too!
Once again Amy has hit it right on the head. As a professional catechist myself (youth minister turned theology teacher and campus minister) I can testify to the challenge of educating young people in this culture, and the challenge of dealing with teens who are not catechized, largely because their own parents were so poorly catechized. It’s almost scary to think about, but I have had much more problems with parents concerning me teaching their kids orthodox Catholic belief than the kids themselves. It’s a tough fight when not only is it me and the catechism against their materialistic, relativistic world; it’s almost an impossible batter when their parents are on their side.
We need a revolution in the truth in Catholic education at every level, and we’ve been so blessed as to have two Catholic professors and theologians to lead our Church for the last 29 1/2 years. These brilliant men were there at Vatican II, they knew and know what the Council meant to teach, and they’ve dedicated their lives at teachers, pastors, bishops, and popes to conveying those messages. This week’s trip from Benedict should be an amazing blessing, because I see it once again energizing the faithful to share the faith with those they encounter and minister to, much like WYD in Denver did in 1993. We need to be fearless in the gospel, knowing that God will provide. We need not to look at trying to throw out the Truth to “fix” the Church, but to instead “open the doors to Christ [and to His truth]” We have to embrace again that the Truth has worked for 2,000 years for a reason. As Amy pointed out- look at the “liberal” churches in any tradition…they do NOT work, and are dying. Liberal Protestantism is dying almost exponentially faster even that liberal Catholicism. And where do we find these young seekers running to? Evangelical movements that emphasize knowing and sharing the faith (as they understand it) and living very “conservative” moral lives, or we see them running home to Rome and to the Mass, to Adoration and to the Rosary. We have to break down the walls that seem to think that the historical-critical method, contraception, and women’s ordination will return church-goers in droves. It does not work. I will never forget shocking a promient Catholic seminary president and member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission when I mentioned that young people like going to adoration. I understand he’s working with academics and not teens most of the time, but he is training those who will evangelize those teens. We have to fight back, and it starts with teaching the Truth.
The Columbus Dispatch has been quoting NCR (National Catholic Reporter as if anyone had to ask) and Rev’s McBrien and Reese, and I’ve come to the conclusion that conflict is the mother’s milk of the newspaper business and thus they will seek out papal distorters and dectractors as naturally as dogs seek bones.
Still, one would expect that part of that desire of conflict would allow for responses from a few orthodox Catholic sources, but then fairness in the media nowadays seems as antiquated as chivalry.
To TSO- it’s all about politics and ratings. FOX News goes to the other end and often has Legionare Priests on their channel, and I’m sure you’ll see similar (or interviews with the likes of Niehaus, Weigel, and Anderson) on more “conservative” papers.
While I obviously believe in the Truth of the Church, you can see the political agenda from the other side too as they have on their site those who they would think would fit a more “conservative” mold. It’s a mess everywhere. All the more reason to have this historic visit by the Holy Father.
I’m old and I’m sick and tired of hearing about the young people leaving the church in droves about the kiddie issues–pre-marital sex, shacking up, condoms, abortion as another form of contaception, the gay stuff and on and on. It’s not a crisis of faith but I realize now that I really don’t understand the big theological stuff, soteriology for instance. Exactly what did Christ do on Calvary? And loads of other questions which are no more addressed in homilies than sexual issues. So kids have problems with sex teachings. I envy them. My suggestion is that the Church stop worrying or stop letting itself be worried about the pelvic issues which the presently young will outgrow and start finding more compelling ways to deal with the heavy theology to which the present youth will return most likely with mainly blank tablets thanks to their poor catechesis. They may not know much but how blessedly little they will have to unlearn.
I have to say that this is a wonderful reply to that USA Today article. As a “young” Catholic, I have to say that the rates of mass attendance by my peers is deeply troubling. I went to college at Notre Dame, and there almost everyone went to mass at least once a week. I think we had a real sense of community there that is sadly lacking from some parishes, and maybe even from most Catholic colleges nowadays. I admit that these issues, or rather the Church’s teachings on them, are probably a turn-off for many young Catholics. Still, I dare say every generation of Catholics has had difficulty with some aspect of Church teachings. Even I have had some difficulty in accepting all that the Church teaches, but I pray about it and I defer to the Church. I think it is perfectly natural for even the most Orthodox Catholic to have a difficult time with some aspects of our Catholic faith. But having difficulty with an aspect of dogma or moral teaching is not the same as rejecting it out right. I put my trust in God and I don’t assume that my opinion is the correct one. I think that humility is one of the greatest but least appreciated Christian virtues of our day.
The thing that really bothers me, however, is that the mainstream media rarely pays any attention to orthodox young Catholics. They always portray Catholics of my age as “unorthodox” or obsessed with the Church’s teachings on sexual matters or the ordination of women for that matter. Their articles imply that anyone (especially a young Catholic) who does accept Church teachings in these matters is either right-wing or just plain wrong. They ought to visit Notre Dame, and report about something other than the Vagina Monologues. They would find a community of students who attend mass together and often, who are devoted to traditional devotions such as Eucharistic Adoration and the Rosary, who genuinely love their Church, and have a great commitment to serving those who are less fortunate. And Notre Dame is very pro-life! The Church’s teaching on abortion is not a turn-off; it’s a rallying cry to action! Please forgive my complaining about all of this, but it does bother me.
I wish the media would not simply report on the controversial to the exclusion of the rest of the Church’s message. I guess writing the article “Catholic Church still caring for poor, sick, and downtrodden” doesn’t sell many copies at the newstand! Benedict can call for peace and an end to world hunger a 1000 times, and all they want to talk about is Regensburg. It’s all very frustrating, but hopefully Benedict’s trip here will have a galvanizing effect on American Catholicism. I’m driving up to see him tomorrow in D.C. and I can’t wait!
Amy,
Perfect reply. As long as this type of hollow analysis remains the norm, I suppose we have to keep restating the facts.
If you have a modernist or post-modernist outlook, the idea of the Trinity, a less disputed basis of Christianity, is more difficult to value or belief than orthodox teachings on the ‘hot button issues’. ‘Liberal’ Christianity serves as a temporary, comfortable resting place, mostly for those who are older, on the way to agnosticism. To ease the transition, so to speak.
As you say, Amy, it’s highly unlikely that the child of a ‘liberal’ Christian, free from the shackles of nostalgia, will inherit any Christian belief at all.
If Prothero were not intellectually lazy, he would spend his time questioning Christianity itself, not cherrypicking doctrine.
How many of these alienated young people are the victims of their parents’ divorce? Before we can tackle the issue of religious ed. and transmission of the Faith, we need to be honest about adult prep for marriage and support for married couples. It’s a lot worse than the watered-down crap that passes for kids’ catechism. If we were doing a good job “selling” the Church as a community that would help its young people have permanent marriages, we’d have a lot more young adults there.