"It is as if they had gone to the edge of an abyss..."

Several weeks ago, the Pew Forum released a new study examining the state of religious knowledge in the United States. It's not good news. It shows that people of all faiths, especially Catholics (and among them, especially Hispanic Catholics whose numbers are swelling) are woefully uneducated about the basic tenants of their traditions. Even atheists and agnostics knew more about faith traditions than believers! And especially among the younger generations of Americans, more and more people describe themselves as belonging to no church or faith community. A significant number of these have left the nation's largest faith community: the Catholic Church.

Of course there have already been a bevy of responses and commentaries on the study. All of the articles I've read have seen the study's statistical data as a confirmation of what we have actually known anecdotally for  quite some time. When these articles differ, they tend to disagree about the reasons for these disastrous numbers.

As you might imagine, there are many who blame the Church's unwillingness to adopt the author's preferred liberalizing reform. The problem with this analysis is that it ignores the Pew Forum's other astonishing finding: the death of mainline Protestantism in the United States. The very Protestant traditions that dominated the commanding heights of American society nearly since its founding are all but completely gone, replaced by Evangelical Protestantism.

The reason these startling numbers pose a problem for those who advocate a liberalizing trend in the Catholic Church, is that the primary cause of the death of Mainline Protestantism is its embrace in the last century of Liberal theology!

So Fr. Steve Grunow has correctly suggested: "If we are looking for possible reasons for the decline of Catholicism in the United States and its possible remedies, it might be a good idea to begin with a serious appraisal of the kind of theological ethos that came to dominate the Church in America for several decades."

Sadly, any such intellectually serious examination leads to the undeniable conclusion that "the ethos of Catholic leadership has been for decades that of assimilation and accommodation to the American experience." So, we must further ask ourselves, is it really "all that shocking that so many Catholics would 'drift' or find the category of 'none' to best describe their religious and spiritual identity? Given that the Catholic Church in the United States has so emphasized the importance of assimilation and accommodation to the American cultural experience, is it any wonder that so many Catholics would find Protestantism appealing? They are simply coming to terms with the fact that Protestantism is a better fit for an American than that of the 'ancient regime' of the Catholic Church."

I've referenced and linked to Fr. Robert Barron on this blog before. He is by now a nationally famous preacher and commentator. I am proud to call him a friend and I'm grateful for the many ways he's inspired and supported me and countless other young religious and priests. He had this phenomenally accessible and accurate commentary on the study, and on what he sees as the root causes of its troubling findings:



I really couldn't agree with this more. And yet, I fear that there are many who fail to recognize this self-evident truth.

Fr. Barron says at the end of the video, "we need a new generation of priests, brothers, sisters, teachers, catechists etc. who know and love this tradition, who know it from the inside and are passionate to communicate it." Through my work in campus ministry, and especially since I entered formation for religious life, I have met so many young men and women who make up this new generation. They are deeply in love with the Church's rich and diverse tradition, they seek out mentors and teachers who will assist them in unlocking the Church's theological, liturgical, artistic and musical treasures, and they are zealous for bringing these riches to bear for their peers as answers to the longings of the modern age.

These young people would, for example, take to heart this advice given to seminarians by the Holy Father, as a remedy to the "beige Catholicism" decried by Fr. Barron:

I urge you to retain an appreciation for popular piety, which is different in every culture yet always remains very similar, for the human heart is ultimately one and the same. Certainly, popular piety tends towards the irrational, and can at times be somewhat superficial. Yet it would be quite wrong to dismiss it. Through that piety, the faith has entered human hearts and become part of the common patrimony of sentiments and customs, shaping the life and emotions of the community. Popular piety is thus one of the Church’s great treasures. The faith has taken on flesh and blood. Certainly popular piety always needs to be purified and refocused, yet it is worthy of our love and it truly makes us into the "People of God."

And yet, in the same time since I entered formation for religious life, I have also seen how terribly misunderstood, dismissed, and even mocked and villainized such young people are in certain circles of the Church's life - especially in broad swaths of the Catholic academy and most sadly in religious life itself!

Archbishop Augustine DiNoia, OP currently serves in Rome in the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. Not long ago, he gave an address to the provincial chapter of his Dominican community here in Washington DC. In it, he notes that his community has been blessed with a remarkable influx of new seminarians - but that these seminarians, because they are like the young people I described above, pose a challenge to older generations of religious who came of age in a different Church and world.

He describes what issues comprise the generational divide that leads to the misunderstanding, dismissal, and mocking I have described and which must be combated. I am so convinced that Archbishop DiNoia's observations are accurate and prescient to the discussion raised by the Pew Forum study, I'm going to quote him here at length:

"There is something new afoot among the young men being who are today being drawn to the priesthood and religious life . . .  I have noticed it over the past few years, but it seems more pronounced or at least more evident to me in the people born in the mid- to late 80s and early 90s. My sense is that these 20- and 30-somethings have been radicalized by their experience . . . in a way that we were not. 



I am not certain how they would articulate their experience for themselves. It is as if they had gone to the edge of an abyss and pulled back from it. Whereas we tended to experience modernity (and then post-modernity) as a kind of adventure that never or rarely touched the core of our faith, these 20- to 30- somethings have experienced the moral relativism and eclectic religiosity of the ambient culture-and possibly of their own personal experience- and recognized it as a chaotic but radical alternative to Christianity with which no compromise is possible.

It may be hard for us to comprehend, but these young people do not share the cultural optimism that many of us learned to take for granted in the post-conciliar period, even if with deepening unease and disillusionment as the years of the late twentieth century wore on.

The Second Vatican Council, even for those untroubled by the hermeneutics of discontinuity, was nonetheless seen as an affirmation of modern culture. There was the perception that the Church had previously adopted an overly negative view of the culture, creating a Catholic culture that was insulated from the wider culture. But now the Church seemed to be promoting an embrace of that culture and an affirmation of its humanistic values and its social advocacy. 


In hindsight, we see the terrible irony of this move, as it coincided precisely with increasingly radical departures from the Christian worldview throughout western culture, as the sexual revolution gathered momentum, as abortion came to be legalized in more and more societies, and as a media-driven materialistic consumerism spread widely in the West and elsewhere. With these and other developments, the already fragile social, cultural and, in some countries, political legitimation and reinforcement of Christian values in the wider society began to unravel. 


The Church now finds herself at odds with many powerful trends in western culture. What is more, "In the powerful yet soft secularising totalitarianism of distinctively modern culture, our greatest enemy is...the Church's ‘own internal secularisation' which, when it occurs, does so through the ‘...largely unconscious' adoption of the ‘ideas and practices' of seemingly ‘benign adversaries.'" There are many signs of this invasion of modern cultural assumptions.


The disenchantment of the liturgy is one of the most striking instances of this development, and one to which young people are particularly sensitive (as witnessed by their enthusiasm for the 1962 Missal). But there are many other signs of internal secularization: the erosion of belief in the uniqueness of Christ as savior, and of the Church as the indispensable means of salvation; the widespread embrace of contraception by Catholic couples; sexual immorality on the part of priests and religious; the displacement of the missionary impulse by social advocacy; the collapse of recognizable religious life among many communities of religious women in the U.S.; and so on. In the broadly influential strategy of the hermeneutics of discontinuity and rupture, many of these developments were promoted as if they had been warranted by the Second Vatican Council itself.


No one understood these developments more clearly than Pope John Paul II, as we saw in his brilliant de-construction of the underlying premises of what he called the culture of death and in his endeavor to reclaim the legacy of the council. Over their more than twenty years of close collaboration, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger shared with Pope John Paul deep misgivings about post-conciliar cultural optimism as well as a sober assessment of the cultural drift of the final half of the twentieth century, and, now as Pope Benedict XVI, he has taken up and reasserted these very themes. Perhaps because both popes strove to appeal directly to young people, 20- and 30-somethings - often in sharp contrast to their elders - exhibit an almost uncanny attunement to the message of these two pontificates . . . 


. . . The young men who are being drawn to (religious life) today - from God-knows-what kinds of personal and social experiences - know that the post-modern culture of authenticity leads to moral chaos, personally and socially, and they want no part of it. They see - probably by a pure grace of the Holy Spirit, for their family backgrounds and catechetical training surely cannot explain it! - that human authenticity is possible only by living in conformity to Christ . . . 


. . . It is not only the practical moral relativism of our time that the 20- to 30-somethings reject. They are also acutely sensitive to the eclectic religiosity, with its doctrinal and theological relativism, that they perceive as a dominant feature of popular culture. It represents, in the eyes of some observers, the triumph of Protestant liberalism, whose core values of "individualism, pluralism, emancipation, tolerance, free critical inquiry, and the authority of human experience" have come to permeate American culture. 


These young men are attracted by clarity . . . They are repelled as much by the theological muddles that obscure the distinctiveness of the Catholic faith as they are by the moral relativism that thwarts many of their peers "from ever being able to decide what they must believe is really true, right and good. . ." 


. . . In the end, it seems to me that these young people are drawn to what Benedict XVI has called "the intellectual charity" and "pastoral yearning" that inspire apostolic zeal . . .


To be honest with you, I am not certain that we - who did not so much leave modern culture behind when we entered religious life as discover and embrace it - are entirely ready for the kind of radical rejection of the ambient culture, on the one hand, and, on the other, a radical commitment to the Catholic alternative way of life that we recognize in these young men.


Viewed in this perspective, these new vocations pose a great challenge to us: Will these young men find with us the fervent apostolic life that they are seeking, or will they find just a modified version of the popular culture that they have left behind? Will they find the apostolic zeal, the warm intellectual charity, the strong communal and liturgical life, the fidelity to the Church, and the radical commitment to Christ that they are seeking?


I believe Archbishop DiNoia has both respectfully explained the existence of the current generational differences in our Church, and indicated what's at stake in failing to understand the current cultural context and the young vocations being produced within it. If, as I maintain, Fr. Barron is right about our need for a new generation of priests, brothers, sisters, teachers and catechists who will counteract the sad state of the Church in this country through a dynamic re- engagement with the rich intellectual, artistic, musical and liturgical tradition of the Church, then the challenges Archbishop DiNoia offers at the end of his article are the essential place to start.