Fr. Philip, OP, at the University of Dallas has wise words for all those who work in youth/campus/young adult ministry:
Here’s what works for us:
Teach the apostolic faith full on…no compromises on basic doctrine or dogma. This generation of college students can smell an intellectual/spiritual weasel a hundred miles away. They would rather hear the bald-faced Truth and struggle with it than listen to a priest/minister try to sugar-coat a difficult teaching in the vain search for popularity or “hipness.”
Preach the gospel full on…ditto. Tell it like it is and let the students grow in holiness. Yes, they will fail. Who doesn’t? But let them fail knowing what Christ and his Church expects of them. Lowering the moral bar comes across as expecting too little from them. What does that say about the Church’s view of our future ecclesial leaders? They can’t cut it, so we have to shorten the race.
Give them charitable work to do…present this work as a kind of “churchy social work” and they will not stay away in droves. I regularly cite Matthew 25 as my scriptural backing for asking them to do volunteer work in the community. Frankly, They have been beaten with the Social Justice-Work stick all their lives and most of what they hear sounds like the socio-economic engineering agenda of a modernist, socialist political party. This is attractive to some, but my experience is that students yearn for a chance to do something Truly Good for their community. If their leaders loudly and proudly attach volunteer work to the Gospels as a an exercise in charity rather than an experiment in social engineering, they will come.
Challenge them intellectually…these are smarts kids. They want to know what the Church teaches and why. They don’t always agree with the Church. Fine. Coming to holiness through obedience is a long, long road for some (..even for Dominican friars who try really hard!). They aren’t afraid of tough texts or difficult arguments. Just give them the documents, read along with them, answer questions honestly and clearly, and let them make the choices they will be responsible for. You have no control over what they will come to believe or practice. Fortunately, that’s not our task. Jesus said, “Preach and teach the gospel.” He said nothing about punishing those who will not hear or see.
Feed them…they’re poor and hungry. Yes, I mean feed them spiritually, but I also mean feed them literally—food, drink, and fellowship do amazing things for students on budgets and for students who have endured slap-dash catechesis and dumbed-down, irreverent liturgy.
For the ecclesial leaders over 45 y.o. (esp. campus ministers):
These students aren’t you at 18. Apply your own standards of liberality and let them explore the fullness of the Church’s ancient traditions. You had a crappy childhood at St. Sixtus of the Perpetual Frown under the bruising discipline of Sr. Mary of the Five Wounds of Christ, so religious habits, rosaries, crucifixes, devotional booklets, Latin, incense, sanctus bells, etc. all remind you of stifling dogmatic lectures, knuckle-rappings, silly moral imperatives, triumphal-martial Catholicism, etc. Guess what? They aren’t you! They didn’t have these experiences, so they don’t associate Eucharistic adoration and First Friday Masses with intellectual repression and physical pain. Let them transform these traditions and make them their own. This is what you did, right? Well then, be consistent and apply your own principles. If you don’t, they will simply ignore you as a dinosaur and look for unofficial leadership elsewhere…which is exactly what you did when your elders failed to allow you the room you needed to explore and grow!
There is a wonderful letter from a 16-year-old boy in this week’s Georgia Bulletin, the newspaper of the Atlanta archdiocese (this issue is not yet on line). The young man says that he had been attending “teen mass” and listening as the priest ad-libbed prayers in a vain effort at relevance. From this he and other teens learned “that we also should distrust the power of the liturgy.” Then he attended a traditional Latin mass, where he found that the priest “expected my life to be changed without adding anything to the Mass in an attempt to bring this change about. This priest had perfect faith in the power of the liturgy, and it showed.” His conclusion: “The traditional Mass did more to change my life than any ‘relevant’ teen mass ever did.”
Now if the clergy/liturgists would just listen!
Ron,
Its up now at http://www.georgiabulletin.org/local/2007/09/20/letter/
More interesting, I think, is the letter young Mr. Milukas (who I don’t think I’ve met, even though we apparently attend mass at the same parish) was responding to.
http://www.georgiabulletin.org/local/2007/09/06/letter2/
Let me quote the most interesting part, to me:
“–What the pope and [Pamela Garrett] do not realize is that the beautiful Latin Mass is like theater or a nice opera. Do we really expect my kids’ generation to be drawn to that?”
It isn’t often you see people write into the local Catholic paper to go on record as doubting the validity of the Mass before 1970.
Thanks for the link, Amy!
Fr. Philip