Young Adults and the Catholic Church: Is there a future?

Voice of the Faithful 10th Year Conference Plenary Address offered by Jamie L. Manson Saturday, September 15, 2012

When I speak about whether the institutional Roman Catholic Church matters to young adults, I find it is helpful to begin by talking about the radical change in culture that has happened over the past three generations. Though it may sound like an exaggeration, today young adults are living in a cultural milieu that is without precedent. To explain this, I like to relate it to my own family. My maternal grandparents were born in the early 1920s. They were both born in Italy and they came over to New York as small children. My mother was born in 1950, and I was born in 1977. And when you look at the different worlds in which these three generations were raised, the comparisons are pretty astonishing. My grandparents grew up in the traditional model of family the village model. This is how most human being lived up until the late 1960s. They lived in a world where individuality wasn't nearly as important as community. Their families, their extended families, their communities gave them their identity. Their religious traditions were handed onto them; they were told who they were. That was my grandparents' world: they were assigned very strict gender roles. There was no way my grandmother was going to go on for higher education. From the moment she was born, her life was really already prescribed. She was supposed to find an Italian husband and she was going to have children and be a housewife, and that was it. My grandfather was going to get a job and he had to marry an Italian woman (that his family approved of), and he was going to provide. These roles were not alterable. The minute my grandparents got married, they moved in with their extended family. Even when they bought their own home, they lived within a block or two of their parents and their siblings and their families. They lived in community, in a village. That's the way human beings have always been socialized up until very recently. And really, outside of the U.S. and many countries in Europe, most of the world still lives in this communal model. My mother was born in 1950, so she grew up during the great time of change in the 1960s. Her life began in a world where gender roles were very strict. But by the time she reached her teens, the womens struggle for equality was in full swing and the birth control pill started to become available. These developments quickly led to the loosening of gender roles Greater numbers of women began to seek higher education. Eventually women could live independently of men. Men and women no longer absolutely depended on one another for their very survival, the way they did in my grandparents time. They married for love. Our culture began to shift from the communal model to the individual model. Today, young adults are born into this individualistic culture, that culture in which community necessarily doesn't tell them who they are. Community doesn't tell them what to believe. Individuals have the right to decide what they believe in, what their values are, and how they are going to live their lives. This kind of individuality is unprecedented in human history.

We cannot overestimate the impact that our new, individualistic culture has had on the Church. The church has always thrived in a communal culture. Communities relied on the church to give them their religious identity, their religious beliefs, even their political beliefs. The church and the community defined an individuals identity. And the needs of the individual were never superior to the needs of the community. But now most young adults in the U.S. are raised in an individualistic worldview. Some of them have grown up being told by their parents that they did not have to go to church. They are told that they can choose their religion when they get older. I cant imagine my grandparents bein g given this message. They did as they were told. They did what the community expected of them. They werent told to choose the religion that made them happy. Young people today decide and define what their values and beliefs are. So this individualism is a very radical departure from the past. And it is one of the key reasons why we're not seeing young people in church and why it's so hard it is to get young people into church. Young people are growing up surrounded by a spiritual marketplace. Everything from the traditional religions, to yoga, to Zen meditation, to New Age thought, to Oprahs book club, is competing for their time and money, all with the promise of helping them find the meaning of life. And young people get to shop around to figure our what their beliefs will be. This culture has placed tremendous stress on traditional religions like the Roman Catholic Church, which never in its history had to try to woo new members. It never had to reach out and make itself desirable. Why? Because in the past people went to church ultimately because the fate of their souls depended on it. That's what my mother grew up learning. Because she grew up in a communal model of society, the church still had that kind of power; that deeply influential power over morality and religious beliefs. This postmodern requirement that churches attract young people and retain young people is the heart of the struggle. And it doesnt just affect the Roman Catholic Church. The mainline Protestant churches are having the same exact struggles. Their numbers are dying off rapidly. Even Evangelicals are having trouble retaining young adults. Once they go to college, they tend to lose their grip on them. This is significant because Evangelicals have phenomenal success with youth ministry. So even the more absolutist types of religions are struggling to figure out how to attract and retain large numbers of young adults. Traditional religions never had to do this before. They never had to compete in a spiritual marketplace. There is also a significant change in the way in which we communicate in our post-communal, individualistic culture. And technology has only exacerbated this. We dont share communal meals together the way we used to, which means were not physically present to one another as much. Our communication is very fractured. We used to talk over the phone. And though the voice was disembodied, there was still some intimacy in hearing someone's voice. But now we communicate with email, and now even more so with text messaging, which is a remarkably fragmented way to communicate. It doesn't really require any intimacy. It just requires 150 characters of me telling you where I am or what I want, and then you responding to that. This has created a breakdown

in our presence to one another. We can be in contact with one another in a variety of ways and at any moment of the day, but our communication, which comes from the root word meaning to become one with, is eroding. Now, there are great benefits to the individualistic culture and its personal freedoms. Its generally free of the patriarchal structure than typically characterizes the communal system. It's a culture that is based on equality and equal opportunity. But as wonderful as this is, there are a lot of losses that happen in this kind of culture. As free and contactable as young adults are, ironically, they are very hungry for presence and community. In many ways, the deprivation is even greater than it was in previous generations. They are facing a serious lack of intimacy in their lives. And there is another significant difference with young adults. They want to be asked what they are looking for spiritually. Previous generations didn't say, "Well, this is what I want out of church" when they were young. Catholicism is, in so many ways, a passive religion. Catholics traditionally have, and in many cases continue to, take whatever the church will give them. The idea of asking a Catholic what do you want out of church? is a very big culture shift. In my years of work with the poor and homeless, I found that the most successful church outreach programs that work with the marginalized are those that go out to the community and ask, "What can we do for you? How can we serve you?" I think the same model works with young adults because, true to their culture and their sense of entitlement, they will tell you what they like and what they don't like. Interestingly, whenever I ask young adults what they are looking for spiritually, I almost always get the same answer across the board: we want to just sit with a small group and talk. Why? Because sitting and talking with a small group offers them not only what is lacking for them in church, but also in our culture: community, intimacy, and presence. Ironically, thats really what our whole tradition is about. Isnt this what a true Eucharistic community is supposed to offer us? If you speak to young adult Catholics who don't go to church and ask them what they love about Catholicism, most likely they will answer, "I love the community, I love the social justice tradition." Some even like the liturgy. But they're not being fed. That's the issue. And, its obvious that this isnt just a young adult problem. Many, many Catholics of all ages feel they are not being fed by the church. But the difference, I think, with young adults is, they were never fed by the tradition. The whole purpose of this conference is to discuss what happened ten years ago in the Roman Catholic Church. The sex abuse crisis. Its important to reflect on how this crisis impacts todays young adults. Those who are in their twenties right now, ten years ago were in their early adolescence and early teens. So here they are as children, adolescents and teens hearing about bishops who were aiding and abetting abusers of children, adolescents, and teens. How can young people have any trust in an institution like that? This is the image of the church that they have known from childhood. How can they possibly believe in any kind of spiritual safety from this church when all theyve heard about is children their age being violated by this church? How can they possible see this church as having any moral credibility when they never saw it from the start?

For todays young adult Catholics, there is no trust and no nostalgia for the tradition, or the forms of t he tradition, most especially the priesthood and the episcopacy. There's not that nostalgia that older generations might have who remember growing up in a parish, who remember the community, who remember receiving the sacraments together. Todays young adults experience of church was tainted from the beginning. Of course, there is that minority of young adults who do love the church. You see them whenever the Pope comes to town: they chant; they camp out waiting for the Pontiff to cruise by; the media lavishes them with attention. You would think they represented the majority of young adult Catholics in this country. They do not. Studies suggest that only ten percent of young adults identify themselves as highly orthodox. Now, what we all know about highly orthodox Catholics, of all ages, is even though they're small in numbers, they are very loud, well organized and well oiled. This helps them get more attention than they deserve, and gives the impression that they are the majority. What's unfortunate to me about these highly orthodox young adult Catholics is that I believe what the Roman Catholic Church is offering them is a refuge. One of the best things religion has offered human beings throughout history is refuge a sense of safety, a sense of security, a sense of being held. I recently heard Robert Putnam, the Harvard sociologist who co-wrote the book American Grace, say in a lecture, Thank God for the Roman Catholic Church, because what it did for immigrants no one else could have done. If we didn't have a Roman Catholic Church in the late 19th and 20th centuries, we would've had to have invented it. Why? Because the Roman Catholic Church created the great welcome center for immigrants. It gave them the refuge. They came to America, to this place where they didnt know the language, where they didnt know the culture, where Americans were treating them very disrespectfully. But in church they found people who shared their ethnicity; they experienced rituals that were very familiar to them. It gave them a sense of home and a sense of safety. That was the wonderful thing that the Catholic Church did for immigrants. But the generations born from immigrants have been Americanized, and as that happens, people have tended to fall away from the church. The church still provides a refuge for Latino Catholics. But as Latino Catholics adopt the American culture, studies show that they, too, begin to fall away from the church. So, other than immigrants, to whom does the church offer refuge now? It offers a welcoming place for people who are very countercultural; people who are afraid of social change. Who are the people who are clinging to the Catholic Church now? People who do not want to see women's equality in the church, people who do not want to see gays and lesbians treated with dignity and full inclusion. People who are in denial about the sex abuse crisis and who have made such idols of the magisterium and the hierarchy, they would never dream of the need for accountability on the part of the bishops. That is, by and large, who the Roman Catholic hierarchy is attracting now young folks who are afraid of the world. Folks who need an unquestioning and unquestionable authority figure who will give them a force field of absolute, unchangeable truth.

So the hierarchy is providing this new, strange kind of refuge to young adults who are afraid of a culture in flux, afraid of uncertainty, afraid of a world that feels increasingly rootless. Now, people argue that Jesus was countercultural. What's wrong with being countercultural? Well, Jesus was also completely immersed in the world: meeting people where they were; present to those who were on the margins of religious institutions; welcoming anyone to the table. That's not what this hierarchy is doing. They are creating a church of exclusivity, a church of orthodoxy tests. A church that is starting to look a lot more like a sect. And yet, generally speaking, young adults tend to have a very different response to the hierarchy than older generations do. Rather than speak out, criticize, and demand accountability from the leadership, they seem more inclined to distance themselves from church authority, if not ignore them altogether, then to spend time and energy trying to change it. This disposition is very much a product of the individualistic culture that I discussed earlier. Rather than making sacrifices and taking on challenges for the good of the community, this generation is more oriented toward setting out to create something new, something uniquely suited towards them and their needs and the needs of their friends. But that doesnt mean that they dont need mentors or models of community to look to for inspiration and wisdom. So how do we connect the generations? One of the hardest steps toward attracting young people into the church is asking them what they need spiritually and religiously. Its a tough question to ask because, as Catholics, few, if any, church leaders ever asked us such question. But what is important to remember is that todays young adults were raised in the therapeutic culture where we talk about our feelings and where our needs for fulfillment and realization are of paramount importance. So, if you ask young people what they need out of church or out of a community, you might be surprised how readily they will answer you! But it is also equally important for older Catholics to name what elements of the church are important to them, what is still meaningful about being a Catholic. The sex abuse scandal has cast a dark shadow on even the word Catholic. What keeps us in the fight for the soul of the church? If we cannot name this ourselves, what will we impart on the next generation, for whom the word Catholic has become so tainted, most especially by the scandal of sex abuse. When we start to think about what young adults need, what can this Church offer them, we have to think about the which treasures of Catholicism are worth, as Matthew Fox says, rescuing from the burning building that is the institutional church.

I think most older Catholics would agree with most young adults that the traditions of social justice and community are worth rescuing. But I want to suggest one more thing that is uniquely Catholic that I think would be very life-giving for young adults: the sacramental tradition.

I didn't know much about the Catholic sacramental tradition until I had to step outside of it. I grew up on Long Island where, it seemed, everyone was either Catholic or Jewish. I dont think I even met a Protestant until I was in my twenties when I started as a student at Yale Divinity School. I went from this Italian Catholic upbringing in New York to this Fairfield county, ivy-league school with forty different kinds of Protestants. I started to see women ministers, women training for ordination. And I started to go to a lot of Protestant liturgies. Divinity school is an intense experience. They are small communities where students do everything together you eat together, you worship together, you take classes together. Its extreme ecumenism. I had studied theology for four years as an undergraduate. But in my theology classes at Yale, I studied Protestant theologians with some very Protestant classmates. I noticed that when many of them talked about God, they spoke of God as holy other. God, for them, seemed outside the realm of day to day human experience. Their theological discourse centered on ideas about justification and sanctification. Language that was quite new to me. I had come out of a Catholic high school and college where I learned about the God of Dorothy Day, I learned about the God of Oscar Romero, the God whose face we see in the poor. I learned about that God that's we see in brokenness, the God emerges in the gutter. I learned about the God of the mystics; the omnipresent God of Teilhard de Chardin. The God who is everywhere. And suddenly I wasnt hearing about that God in my Divinity School classes. I went into a crisis. I thought I mustnt have any gift for theology. I thought I had a calling. So I made an appointment with a professor named Margaret Farley to help me understand my struggles and discern my future. And she said, "Jamie, don't worry. Don't leave Yale. You're just a Catholic. You have a sacramental view of the world." She explained that, as a Catholics, certain beliefs were just ingrained. Understandings of God and the world that no one even had to teach me explicitly. I had the belief that God created nature and nature is good. And God is reaching out to us through all the things in the created order. All things that are finite are capable of the infinite. These are very Catholic idea that go all the way back to the Reformation. In old, traditional Protestantism you don't hear this much in the mainline tradition, but you still hear this in the evangelical tradition human beings were seen as wholly depraved. The human person, is beyond redemption. So that human person had to die to the old self, and then God, through God's grace would make you new, would make you reborn in Christ. And believe it or not, even though the Roman Catholic institution may be giving us a different impression these days, that is not Catholic theology. In Catholic theology, human beings are a mess, and we're born into a very messy world, but there's intrinsic goodness in us. Because we're created by God, and everything that God creates is good. And so in Catholicism, there's this very dynamic relationship between God and the human person, where God is constantly breaking through and offering us grace, and we as human beings are free to take that opportunity of grace and be transformed into greater wholeness. That's a rich Catholic idea.

I think this whole idea of sacramental lens, a sacramental view of the world, is so life-giving, and can be so life giving for young adults if we start to communicate it to them to ever-richer ways. If we begin to help them see that church, that Eucharist, doesn't happen just within the walls of the church, that if you really believe this Catholic idea, the sacramental view of the world, God is reaching out to us in all of nature. I think young adults will understand this, because so many young adults are doing the traditional work of the church, and many of them don't even know it. A lot of young adults, many of them Catholic, feel very drawn to social justice work where they can serve poor and marginalized. They work in the environmental movement. What could be more sacramental than the green movement? They're organizing labor unions. What could be more consistent with the Catholic social justice tradition? And they're doing all this great work of honoring the dignity of human persons, honoring them as sacrament, and they don't even know it. They don't even have the language for that. That to me is one of the great losses as people fall away from the Catholic Church. This profound idea that God is breaking through to us, even in broken and desolate places, is so life giving. And I fear that it is one of the treasures that might be lost. So my vision for a future for the Church is that we will empower young people to see that God works through all of us sacramentally, and not only through all of us, but God works through the poor, God works through the broken. That all of our work can be an instrument of Gods grace. I see a real potential for the early church model to work among young adults. Small, intentional communities can take on a new life because young people are so hungry for presence and community. This would be a marvelous first step in helping young people understand the life-giving depth of the sacramental worldview. It takes time. Not all people are fertile ground for religious or for spiritual life to grow. Part of the challenge with young adults is that the adolescent stage only seems to be getting longer and longer. When my grandfather was 18, he was ready to have a job, have a family, go to war. This is not true of most 18-year-olds anymore. They're not ready for that responsibility. They're not in a place where they take on that responsibility at the young an age, and so adolescence is getting more and more prolonged. The ground gets more fertile as young people enter their 30s or even 40s, when they start to figure out who they are, what they need, and what they're hungry for. When I worked in a Catholic parish as Director of Faith Formation I ran the RCIA program. I had thirtysomethings come to me and say, "I didn't grow up with any religious tradition and I'm having a baby," or "My wife is having a baby." And they would tell me I don't know what I believe. I don't even know how to make meaning of this life, and I need basis for my values." They were looking for presence; they were looking for community; they were looking for something that would help them make meaning of their lives. That is what the church is supposed to do. This is what we are called to do, with or without the hierarchy: to honor and incarnate what is good and true about the Catholic tradition for which we fight so hard.

For ten years now, Voice of the Faithful has shown all generations what it means to embody our baptismal calling to be prophets. Though many young adult Catholics may not choose to be prophets in the arena of church reform in the future, your legacy is no less inspiring. Your integrity and the risks you took to speak life-saving truth to a religious behemoth has been an important model for young adults to grow up with. And those young adults who will return to church so that their own children can receive religious education and the sacraments will benefit from the training programs, background checks, procedures and policies and heighten awareness that were the result of your advocacy on behalf of them and their children. And, so, on behalf of young adults who have benefitted from your work or who will be in a safer, more accountable church because of you, I say thank you and happy anniversary.