Special section: Re-Generating Catholicism:
Barbara, John A Coleman, Michael J Hunt, Michael O Garvey, Kathleen McGarvey Hidy, John Fontana, Lis & Egan, Ralph Whitehead, John Shea, John Cusick, Martha Dudich, Chuck Pfeffer, Maree Hartley, Margaret
INTRODUCTION Re-Generating Catholicism This special issue of Commonweal is supported by a special grant from the Catholic Communication Campaign and an anonymous donor. "Re-Generating...
...Currents of ethical and theological thought within the church manifest similar differences in perspective...
...The divine is close...
...youth ministers discussing drugs and sex...
...The Catholic tradition on sexuality has always defined its moral parameters in terms of marriage...
...bishops and priests discussing sexuality in the shadow of lawsuits...
...Too much lies hidden in the "all other things being equal" phrase, which does not account for the impact of a future spouse's intensity of religious commitment on that of the respondent (such intensity has been shown to be as potent a predictor of religiosity as parental example and practice...
...Our conversation eventually touched on how she was going to deal with the coming baby, a husband in graduate school, and her consulting work...
...Furthermore, it is a spirit of inclusion which sees analogies rather than disjunctions between all beings...
...I still don't know whether I did the right thing...
...Out-converts are among those who are most liberal, most likely to divorce, and least likely to be practicing compared to Catholics who remain or those who convert into Catholicism...
...It is a time of great uncertainty and there is both danger and opportunity in the quest for identity: the danger of getting lost or trapped and the opportunity of finding what psychologists call the true self...
...At that point the question disappears for another twelve months...
...11 percent for stay-put Catholics), those who leave say they now never attend church...
...In this 20-40 age sample, 55.4 percent had some college and 24 percent had either completed college or had postgraduate education up to twenty years of schooling...
...And Catholic college students know a lack of confidence when they see it...
...There is someone who can provide guidance or a sense of connection and helps to further along the process of finding meaning...
...God didn't happen...
...Therefore, everyone in her or his own way is responsible for the catholicity of the operation...
...I don't think you have to believe that the hierarchy always speaks with authority, or that there are seven sacraments, or that your relationship with God is defined by genital sexuality, or that only men can be priests...
...Currently 70 percent of Americans work in the service sector and the number is growing...
...In Why Work, Maccoby reports on his study of job motivation among thirty-five hundred employees in a wide variety of industries...
...The "organization man" of the '50s has gone the way of the dinosaur...
...Then as people settle down and get rooted and get married, they come back to the church and everything's fine again...
...Given this pervading secularism, why is our chapel filled with students at Mass that first Sunday and all the other Sunday nights of the academic year...
...There was a lot of disruption in the staff because of this woman, a lot of reduplication of paper work...
...As a result, parents say, their children are less likely to get added guidance from other responsible adults: neighbors, friends, other parents...
...and every single act must be procreative, in the sense that the outcome of procreation must not be artificially prevented...
...In order to be such witnesses we have to keep in touch with each other, love, live, and bear with each other, and, most importantly, die for each other...
...Well, we might say, the Eucharist does...
...This is a popular ecclesiological move...
...But, in very significant percentages (25 vs...
...Contemporary Catholicism is a series of gatherings...
...Among the millions of Catholic males who were called upon to defend Volk and Vaterland in ways that make us shudder today, Zahn could learn of no more than seven who refused...
...Before 1940, few nonmanagerial workers received paid vacations...
...If they're sure that there will be a community of other young adults with similar life experiences, they will get in the car and go...
...Those who see that with the eyes of faith know that the Good News, the encounter with Jesus, the eucharistic gathering, the body of Christ are the deepest reality, but to make these things real in ourselves and in the church, demands a response, a choice each one must make...
...Actually, I never read it...
...37 percent for cradle Catholics...
...While we can understand where they're coming from, we can't necessarily change it...
...It can pull you down the economic ladder, possibly to get stuck there...
...She wanted to help create more open, ethical, and less covert, manipulative working situations...
...There's finally a point where we come to realize that there's got to be more to all of this...
...Add to this list the group of your choice...
...Try hard...
...Parents aren't recognized for the contributions they're making, they feel, and they certainly aren't rewarded...
...Bringing religious and ethical questions into the workplace requires a solid understanding of modern economic life...
...Young Catholics hunger for the companionship, support, and formation that lay groups offer...
...It's the sickness question, the death question, the love question, the rites of passage question, that is brokered and negotiated through the church...
...First, it is important to understand that young working adults have very little control over external changes such as mergers and transfers...
...What they criticize is Sunday: the preaching, the hospitality, the music...
...With less contact with other parents, they have less chance to compare notes, trade advice, help each other, and establish a common identity and shared values...
...American Catholic Laity finds that younger and better-educated Catholics are more insistent on their right to participate in church policy-making, more likely to claim their right to co-determine church policies on sexual morality, and are more permissive in setting boundaries about the definition of a good Catholic...
...basically evil...
...Since the 1960s, the U.S...
...Wood and I have done so...
...Moreover, mixed marriages, especially in younger age groups, are increasing in America...
...Basically, we need a radical despair of contemporary culture...
...There must be something to it...
...Many, but not all, of them are younger adults who are less willing to take church credibility for granted...
...Within the universe of parent households, there has also been a change, of course...
...By ignoring the workplace Catholic organizations and parishes are missing ministerial opportunities...
...Parishes remain the first point of contact for most young adults...
...Although marriages as human realities sometimes fail, a tragedy that church teaching on "indissolubility" may not have met satisfactorily, the asset of the tradition is that it holds up an ideal of permanency...
...The ingredients of these conversations are people's experience, cultural perspectives, and the retrieval of the tradition...
...Then they may come back and say, "It was helpful before, let's try it out now...
...Hence, my second September question...
...One way of regenerating Catholicism is to listen carefully to those who will be doing the "generating...
...That is not a reason for complacency, but it definitely is food for thought...
...If it was rewritten today we would call it Will Our Faith Have Children...
...They continue to struggle within the church to find room and a voice for moderate reformulations of-and possibly a few exceptions to-the Catholic view that sex belongs in indissoluble marriage and leads to parenthood...
...Similarly, the number of paid holidays more than quadrupled between 1940 and 1970, growing from an average of two to nine days annually" (Sar Levitan and Clifford Johnson, The Survival of Work...
...a seminary faculty trying to define priesthood within a multi-ministerial church...
...Hoge notes that "in every case the attitudes of better-educated, older Catholics resemble the attitudes of younger adult Catholics...
...This is one reason why many couples with children want a second income and so incur an added cost, the cost of child care...
...New York KATE DEVRIES is the associate director of young adult ministry in the Archdiocese of Chicago...
...Whom do we lose...
...My law school classmate sits across from me, visibly at ease with our conversation...
...In the sample only the 60-plus age group were in a majority in choosing the more traditional direction on this and many other questions...
...They ensure the mission, they do not take ownership of it...
...Accordingly, it's harder now for these connections to occur...
...Margaret: Moments of tragedy...
...At Notre Dame, KATHLEEN McGARVEY HIDY, a graduate of Columbia University Law School, is an attorney presently clerking for a federal judge in Cincinnati, Ohio...
...It may be refreshing to rename the participants at the meetings of the Catholic world...
...Rather it is a matter of women being socialized or socially encouraged to take intimacy more seriously...
...Second, impersonalization and bureaucratic administration often make ethical calculation a very solitary and ultimately individualistic process...
...and, as all of these data suggest, this development also has serious implications for our culture...
...In their twenties, young adults are making their first set of critical adult decisions...
...MICHAEL J. HUNT, a Paulist priest, is the Catholic chaplain at Tufts University...
...Roman Catholicism is not a resource to which they turn (at least not consciously) for guidance on sex or any other issue...
...If they are the living carriers of the Catholic identity of the health-care facility, what will happen to that identity when the brothers do not constitute a significant presence...
...The mass media and the academic community are so dependent on each other for information and verification that neither is fully able to hear or see a world larger than and very different from the one assumed in secularist theory...
...How do we hand on an intellectual tradition, a mystical tradition, a symbolic and sacramental tradition, a prophetic and politically engaged tradition, a tradition of valuing community, in a culture like our own...
...What are they going to make me do to get this baby baptized...
...He knows how to handle it on the level of skills, but he is unsure "whether it is all worth it...
...That it's healthy to imagine ourselves doing great deeds as long as we don't get carried away...
...Catholic heroes and heroines who had done all sorts of astonishing and glorious things...
...Regrettably, the American bishops, on the whole, have relinquished their roles as credible, effective teachers for many young Catholics...
...The question is: Can the church live without them...
...This was down from 35 percent attendance for the comparable age group in 1972, but higher than that decade's low point of 24 percent in 1976...
...Only 42 percent of young adult Catholics say they are unlikely to leave the church, compared to 50 percent of middle-aged Catholics, and 80 percent of older Catholics...
...different and perhaps incompatible agendas...
...This is why, even in these later modern and postmodern times, I am still hopeful that we will finds ways to hand on our faith, this ancient, mysterious, argumentative, and life-giving Catholic faith, which is God's gracious gift to us...
...Of the three values, it is certainly love which is the sine qua non, the primary value in the triad...
...Participation rates reveal much the same pattern: 29 percent of young Catholics attend Mass weekly compared to 43 percent of 30- to 54-year-olds, and 63 percent of people 55 and over...
...Will this be the year that no students show up for Mass...
...In the last fifty years dramatic changes have taken place in the way corporations do business, in the people who comprise the work force, in the types of work done, and in attitudes about work...
...Opus Dei is merely the most prominent of the many conservative Catholic lay societies that seem to appeal more and more to my generation...
...It seems to me that locating Catholic identity at this depth is a testimony to the reality of Spirit...
...This search begins when they leave home and move into the world of work...
...These new options for women make life choices for couples more complex than those faced by earlier generations...
...The affective and interpersonal dimensions of sex, along with the occasions it offers for intimacy and reciprocal pleasure, have become far more important...
...a faith and work group discussing how to fire workers in a "Christian" way...
...Whose prayer did God answer...
...Even this high-powered analyzer of organizational behavior was not clear about her future course...
...We can't do any of these things without dying to ourselves and we can't die to ourselves without Jesus, who came so that we might live no longer for ourselves but for him...
...2. How do today's young Catholics compare with those of a decade ago...
...Any collection of sermons, from any age of church history, will illustrate how much this disparity between ideal and practice consumed the attention of preachers...
...But not everyone will see these deficiencies...
...As one single mother put it: "My house is either too full or too empty...
...Where they will find people like themselves...
...During the last few years, we've asked several dozen middle-class parents to describe what it's like to be a parent today...
...Some people choose to raise children...
...Odysseus entrusted his son Telemachus to his counselor, Mentor, while Odysseus was away at war...
...De gustibus...
...People are staying in school longer and, once embarked on a career, many will return to school at some point to continue their education or retrain for another job...
...their divorce-separation rate is significantly higher than the sample Catholic population...
...You'll ask them, "'Well, what was Sunday Mass like...
...All told, these parents say, the culture today just won't give us enough credit...
...The tradition can encourage respect and appreciation for sexuality as mutual physical pleasure, as intimacy, and as parenthood (or at least receptivity to it...
...Like Chris, Marie tells me that being Catholic has little to do with following church teachings...
...Re-Generating Catholicism: This special issue of Commonweal is prelude to a meeting that will convene leaders of Catholic organizations and young adults in Chicago, October 5-7 (see sidebar for further information), to look at those generational differences and plot a course for bridging them...
...Chris: "I don't think I'm a salad-bar Catholic...
...We tend to be more supportive of (and reliant on) our local National Public Radio affiliates than our local Catholic schools...
...Parenthood also established you as a full member of the emerging consumer society...
...But these all washed out when we controlled for marital status, partially reconfirming the marital religious rebound effect, i.e., those in the younger cohort who were married looked more like the older group than like their own...
...When people ask who are present at these meetings, the usual response is "to break it down" according to church status or church roles...
...Now all these folks, from the archbishop of Armagh and sometime primate of all Ireland to the bead-munching old lady to this distracted Hoosier suburbanite have had to work out their salvation in fear and trembling within and over against distinctive families and communities and cultures...
...For starters, as I've learned from listening to them, they are clearly not all doing the same thing...
...Kate: A lot of young adults who have tried to return to the church are being told...
...In their thirties they often find themselves re-evaluating their initial decisions, particularly decisions about work...
...They see the church as a way to God, maybe even God's way to them, but they do not see the church as an end in itself and they are not very curious about its organizational or institutional aspects...
...I have serious doubts that that's a valid assumption anymore...
...The astonishing fact of life young and not-so-young Catholics live with is that the dialogue of faith-which allows an old church to be born anew in each generation and in every age-has to a great extent ceased and been replaced by a growing factionalism within the church, distinguished by a rise in spiritual subcultures particularly among the young...
...It is deeper than mind and action, but it directs and energizes both of them...
...Some people choose to raise tropical fish...
...There has been a relative decline in parent households-a household with one or more parent and one or more of their own children under eighteen...
...These basic relationships are the woman-man and the parent-child relationships...
...As Catholics, of course, we hate to lose anybody-the James Joyce quote again...
...But they need support to do it well...
...The peculiarly American pluralism, affluence, and relativism which our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were obliged to regard with suspicion and contempt don't seem so scary to us...
...Today, they're a diverse minority...
...Re-Generating Catholicism" is being published in conjunction with a meeting cosponsored by: The Crossroads Center, Old St...
...Perhaps the version of Catholicism we have made available to them is of an inferior and inadequate quality...
...Your fathers visited as they washed the car...
...We seem to believe that we have an abiding city here...
...Again, while about 40 percent of cradle Catholics report attending church two to three times a month (or more), out-converts report a 30 percent rate of attendance in some other church...
...As education improves and income increases, the relationship between work and leisure becomes ever more entangled...
...I do not see a lot of people raising their hands...
...Augustine says, '"Our hearts are restless, God, until they rest in Thee...
...What about the question of mixed marriages...
...Inappropriate...
...Obviously a faithful commitment between parents is the best context for the nurture of children...
...That's always a good one...
...For Catholics in America, where it seems to be the established religion, secularism has become especially difficult to fight because so many of us seem to believe the lie...
...Frequently such students will describe their parents as nonpracticing Catholics who required them to attend some form of religious education until confirmation and then the whole issue was dropped...
...Patrick's Church in Chicago...
...The responsibility of the marriageable to choose their own partners rather than relying on parental negotiations or social and religious similarity, along with the high incidence of divorce, has led to premarital sex and "trial marriages," which many see as prudent exploratory arrangements...
...They openly assert that church teaching on sex as formulated primarily by celibate male clergy should be declared irrelevant to modem needs...
...To my ears he handled this situation with great sensitivity, compassion, and skill...
...The laity, too, share blame...
...Intimacy adds to the fulfillment of both men's and women's sexuality...
...There are few resources-Catholic movements or organizations, downtown parishes, work-centered support groups-given to paying attention to the often contradictory realms in which these young adults live...
...And they'll criticize the preaching which says that they might be looking for some wisdom or inspiration...
...A young CEO, around thirty-five, told a story about a woman who was ambivalent about admitting her husband into a nursing home...
...The parents we spoke with fondly recall the village of their own childhood...
...Grabbing a drive-through meal leaves time for soccer practice...
...How to feel about manhood and womanhood...
...She had dedicated five years of her life to this company and was still reeling from the shock of losing her job...
...Like Michael Hunt, I am one of those who fear that one day Catholicism will mean: "There goes everybody...
...Understandably, young Catholics increasingly find havens in lay communities that offer clear, decisive, if one-sided interpretations of Catholicity...
...Perhaps in carrying out its old responsibilities in new ways, the church could help develop such mentors...
...This pastoral strategy might be seen as an answer to the provocative question that Jurgen Moltmann asks: "Does the community have a mission or does the mission have a community...
...A commitment to the call of the gospel is the sole credential for membership in the Catholic community...
...Some of my intuitions came together upon hearing a Ugandan bishop observe that, in his culture, marriage was a progressive reality, which did not come into being in an instant during a single ceremony, but which developed through a process of negotiation, visiting, and gift-giving among bride, groom, and their families...
...They will explain that going to church was one of the things that fell away when their parents divorced, or when their family moved, or when they went away to residential secondary school...
...I stumbled upon a kind of "San Andreas fault" in the Catholic community...
...Thank them for coming...
...The mean education index for Catholic converts is 12.3 vs...
...The best current data on comparative religious "switching" (Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion, Rutgers University Press, 1987) shows that Roman Catholicism gains 9.1 percent from conversions while losing 14.5 percent, for a net loss of 5.3 percent...
...Yet, except for the 55-plus age group, what is striking is the great similarity across the spectrum in the direction of the American Catholic laity's thought and attitudes about change in the church...
...May be we have not asked enough of our own young people...
...But when push comes to shove it's their work lives that take first place...
...There was a book a number of years ago called Will Our Children Have Faith...
...Maybe our young are leaving the church because they are selfish and callow, seduced by the materialism, the consumerism, the secularism of our culture...
...Parenthood is defined as a wholly private role, detached from any conception of the public good...
...On the basis of its claimed success in neutralizing the archaic antagonisms and divisiveness of religious differences, it asserts a kind of moral authority essential to the common good of what it likes to call a pluralistic society...
...thank you...
...there are some things I just won't touch...
...He has also served at Wayne State University, Boston University, and the University of California, Berkeley...
...Catholic identity is ultimately located in a spirit, an ethos, a sensibility, a structure of imagination...
...They're finding it harder to save for college...
...They live on the business side of the world...
...21.2 percent...
...The meaning also had a civic dimension: To raise the next generation of Americans was to contribute to the public good and serve the national interest...
...As at least a few of the following articles point out, some of those differences give cause for hope...
...As a Manufacturers Hanover Trust ad recently cautioned them: "If you want a bundle of joy, you'll need a bundle of money...
...Of course, there are stumbling blocks: not the least, all of us...
...To recapitulate, the Catholic tradition yields a set of moral attitudes toward sexuality, even before the point of dealing with concrete moral dilemmas or moral norms and prohibitions...
...Or what beeps them as a part of minis...
...Much the same pattern can be found in Dean Hoge's research when he compares the attitudes of priests, lay adults, and Catholic college students toward Catholic parish life and leadership, and the priest shortage...
...For example, in the use of contraception, procreation is temporarily set aside, but it still can be realized in the total relationship of the couple...
...We can continue to raise up and sustain a community which encounters him, but only when we become much more uneasy with our surroundings and habits and boorish longings...
...It serves us right either because our teachings are vague and compromised and accommodating (the claim from the Right), or because our teachings are archaic and oppressive and irrelevant (the claim from the Left...
...Perhaps the best thing we can do in helping them return is to direct them to places where they will he more welcomed at this time in their life...
...And then we go to a place where we can be with others who are asking these same questions...
...Today, however, parents can't make such compelling claims on the community's resources...
...Now only 13 percent of families fit that description...
...Contemporary experience and thought raise challenges to this specific presentation of the teaching that should not be underestimated...
...When measures of "religiousness" other than compliance with church teaching on sexuality are introduced, it becomes difficult (in my view, false) to contend that college students are a totally secularized group for whom transcendent values have disappeared...
...That this little cluster of appetites and ambitions and fears is all we are and all we ever were and all we can ever hope to be...
...She left the office saying, "After the baby, it's going to get interesting...
...The primary carriers do not usurp this fundamental identity, they facilitate it...
...Bogged down by apathy and often illiterate in much of their faith, lay men and women cannot articulate for themselves-let alone for the "next" generation-what their Catholic heritage means at the close of the twentieth century...
...I can't imagine Jesus asking those questions...
...From my experience, I have learned the danger of reading too much theological significance into the nonattendance of many such students...
...But in this culture, where religion is perceived as an issue of voluntary association, where everybody must decide for himself or herself, we should expect to lose the firm commitment of many young adults for some period of time, and we should expect to lose (and also to gain) some members-to and from more conservative and more liberal forms of faith, and to and from various kinds of unbelief...
...Their reasons for attending range from the most traditional sense of "obligation" (a minuscule minority), to those who stop in once or twice a year out of sentiment, minimal loyalty, or passing curiosity, to those who have just started dating a practicing Catholic, to those who are fully formed and mature Vatican II types (alas, another minority, but not so minuscule...
...The good shepherd went after the one because he noticed one was missing...
...The most creative ministerial efforts attempt to change the young woman's question, "We do not want to make you do something in order for you to get something...
...Send a note...
...Why haven't our dioceses (or regional clusters of them) imitated this example...
...Diversity within a greater unity, a prized insight for a Trinitarian faith, may no longer be an accurate portrayal of the church which encompasses conflicting and, in some instances irreconcilable visions of Catholicism as seen by its rank and file...
...I'd always assumed that our family had been Catholic since before the time of Moses...
...Two comments about young converts to Catholicism...
...Every piece must be engineered to fall into place just in time to meet the rigid arrival and departure times of child-care centers, schools, and workplaces...
...After a while you become immune...
...a family life conference wondering what to do with birth control...
...Augustine and Aquinas saw procreation in marriage as the only reason fully justifying sexual intercourse, and saw both procreation and marriage as especially important insofar as they contribute to the species, the society, and the kinship network or extended family...
...He was an audit manager for a large corporation in suburban Chicago...
...Because the task of young adulthood is to find a vision, to commit oneself to a philosophy of life, to find a meaningful form of work, this question of "versions" of Catholicism is very important here...
...Try a planning session of a baptismal preparation team tiptoeing around the question of new parents and weekly Mass attendance...
...What draws them...
...Is it going to build on the existing dynamics of their lives or is it going to add its own sets of institutional demands...
...Admittedly, I created my list of interviewees myself...
...There must also be a pastoral spirit that invites this choice of faith and there must be a community that tutors and nourishes it...
...Seventy percent of those who leave are or have been married...
...Even Unitarians do as much, and nobody knows what they believe in...
...2) sex as intimacy or love...
...Otherwise, as a wily old retreat master used to say, we might miss being crucified, and that would be a pity...
...Rather it provides their deepest energy and their overall direction...
...I do not think he is alone...
...Maree: Some of us are meeting them without trying to say, "Well...
...Young workers clearly understand that the employment contract is changing: the "corporate parent" isn't there to take care of them for life...
...If they don't feel a place of belonging, they find themselves in other churches where they do feel wel-come...
...Others are a cause for puzzlement and confusion, and still others prompt the bottom-line inquiry: What can those Catholics old enough to have experienced the council, and who still live, sometimes uneasily, sometimes happily, in the Catholic tradition say to those who must appropriate and live in this tradition in the next century...
...What is it about us that doesn't allow us to be as successful in our own leadership as they have become in their own lives...
...She permanently readmitted her husband...
...John: How do we develop a healthy attitude towards our own young people...
...The designations of the players will determine how they will contribute to one another and to the common task...
...Does the parish say to the young, "How can we help you with the demands of relationships, family, and work...
...The same could not be said about my peers at Notre Dame or, as I have found, the wider family of church...
...What if we looked at ourselves as young adults and older adults...
...is the isolation of the unmarried sexual couple from the social support and accountability that accompanies formal marriage...
...I think with a more open, accepting attitude toward everyone, we could make a lot of progress...
...John McDermott said it best in his address to the National Convocation of the Laity in 1986: "Our work is God's work in the world...
...They don't really always admit it and maybe the percentage is very low but I seem to find that everything in their life is changing and while they might go to Sunday Mass and criticize everything, there's something very comforting about daily Mass which has never changed for them...
...Such distinctions allow them to appreciate what a professor knows about his or her field and to withhold judgment or assent to what the same professor might think about God, religion, or morality...
...Baby boomers see their elders forced into early retirement as firms reorganize, or decide their skills are obsolete...
...What do you think is the biggest influence on the lives of young adults...
...But a non-dualistic view of sex requires that we premise a sexual morality on the goodness of sexual acts and sexual pleasure...
...Let me conclude with a not totally scientific postscript...
...What happens when there are fewer and fewer brothers...
...Our culture is prone to cynicism about the trustworthiness of human relationships...
...At a freshman orientation session, I heard a professor explain to the incoming students that they were probably as yet unaware of the crucial differences of race and class among themselves but they were about to receive the kind of first-rate education that would make them fully aware of those differences and their consequences...
...of church teaching on many of these points...
...I think that message pertains to three dimensions of sexuality: 1) sex as a physical drive for pleasure...
...John: What pushes younger people toward the church is something innate in all of us...
...They do matter, of course...
...Some view this situation as deplorable...
...Today universal means not just geographical, but different types of people...
...Yet he is not sure these are the "right" values...
...Let me make several observations about this...
...The wrongness and harm of defining all or most nonprocreative sexual pleasure as "sinful" is evident...
...My list was drawn from a cast of hundreds, and along the way I have met and shared conversation with countless Catholics of all ages...
...The emergence of a politically active fundamentalist movement, the complexity of the various kinds and levels of efforts against abortion, the very large amount of philanthropy for religious organizations, and the sacredness of certain symbols are only some immediate examples of what secularists fail to observe or grasp...
...Parents used to sing in a chorus...
...Young adult Catholic divorce rates do not vary much from the national pattern, or when compared with an older cohort of Catholics...
...Someone who called himself the Way...
...these include jobs in transportation, government, retail and wholesale commerce, professional services, insurance, health, real estate, finance, telecommunications, and technology...
...Obviously, more conversations are needed...
...As the changes in modern life accelerate there is a growing need for young adults to find people and places that can provide opportunities for them to integrate their needs and ambitions...
...But in our culture the process is prolonged and very complicated...
...The consequences of these value choices, of course, are played out over a lifetime, along with family life and growing maturity...
...Chris is a boyish thirty-one...
...Young adults are trying to establish autonomy, strengthen their egos, define their identities, explore their sexuality, develop their competencies...
...Most may have heard of Vatican II, but few can name a document or major idea that came from that council...
...Although companionship and friendship of spouses were ideals, premodern authors, like the society around them, were unable to recognize the later ideal of "interpersonal union" both because they lacked our sense of the importance of individuals, and because women were considered inferior and subordinate to their male partners...
...If we want, we can call that faith...
...How does their basic identity that advertises them as Christian and Catholic influence the way they go about the business of health care...
...to Catholicism 44.9...
...It's not going to change their life...
...The people said, "The guy in the front because he did it the right way...
...Parents no longer shop on the same day, much less at the same time...
...Where they will find preaching that is intelligible...
...Like him I am surprised, over and over, that so many keep coming back...
...But it is the unity of sex, love, and parenthood in this broader sense that is probably the major message Roman Catholicism has to offer today's young adults, who more easily see that sex expresses love than that sexual love leads to permanent commitment, parenthood, and family...
...Single parents' schedules are driven in part by the terms of their custody arrangements...
...Young adults should be of special concern to Catholics since, with the exception of those young adults who belong to no church, we have the highest percentage of 18- to 34-year-olds of any religious group in America (see table I, p. 484...
...John: Somebody put it to me this way: "Where else do you go in the winter where you spend an hour inside and don't take off your coat...
...It is reassuring to think that our tradition can be a rich resource of hope and consolation in such moments, but there are some resources in the tradition-including the four Gospels- that also have something to say about criticism and autonomy, about a refusal of prudishness and legalism and an affirmation of the goodness of life...
...It would be salutary, then, to look at what we really do know about this age group...
...Yet the world of work is precisely where lay people spend most of their time...
...But at some point on our way to twentieth-century America, most of us returned to the "Romish Bloody paths" that had John of Armagh in such a snit...
...How do I get them to the level of spirit so they can see possibilities and feel free, so they can go against their culture if they want to...
...In their own parents' day, when communities were densely knit with young families, parents had no trouble winning local support for schools, sports programs, parks and playgrounds, summer recreation programs, extracurricular school activities-all geared to the needs of young families...
...We do not very successfully mine the pool of non-affiliates (over half of those born unchurched eventually join some church...
...Indeed, Catholics rank with Jews and Baptists as having the highest percentage (among both college and noncollege-educated members) who report that their spouse's current denomination is the same as their own (Wuthnow, Restructuring of American Religion...
...The job did not work out...
...It was eloquently said, and you could see uniformed brothers walking down halls and slipping into rooms, suffusing the medical atmosphere with the spirit of Catholicism...
...Before we despair over the future of Catholicism, we need to ask whether the dropout or defection rate among young Catholics is primarily a "cohort" or a "life-cycle" phenomenon...
...When we talk about young adult Catholics, we are usually talking about a crisis...
...no signs of a lawyer's paunch yet...
...Much wild speculation abounds, for example, that the church is losing large numbers of young Catholics to the evangelicals (not verified, as we shall see...
...John: I would say there is an emotional coldness...
...So how can faithfulness seem real...
...Change, as the cliche goes, is the one unchanging factor...
...Where our treasure is, there will our hearts be also...
...Perhaps many couples in our culture are making a similar statement about their growing trust in and love for each other...
...Why don't the churches, Gallup asked, tap into this gold mine by providing spiritually motivated volunteer programs...
...and to be more amenable to change in church norms, structure, and organization...
...On the block, consequently, parents find that they and their children are isolated...
...Given that assignment, it isn't so amazing that we prefer late-night TV...
...Their community supports and encourages this fundamental mission of creation...
...Do they find a job...
...As these parents define it, their prime responsibility is a moral responsibility, the responsibility to shape their children's values...
...This is a generation that watched war live on television, a generation that has seen every human problem put before them almost every day through some form of television and yet these are situations without answers...
...Young converts into Catholicism are more likely to describe themselves as moderate or slightly conservative (and less likely to choose the liberal label) than either cradle Catholics or those who leave...
...At the same time, the inclusion of love and commitment as central along with parenthood has been sidetracked by acrimonious exchanges over contraception and other issues...
...But we don't have to win them over...
...My intention collided in not a few instances with my mechanical ineptitude at handling sophisticated technologies like tape recorders and, even worse, my lack of experience in the fine art of eliciting personal and revealing information from virtual strangers...
...ordinary, pastor, associate pastor, pastoral associate, DRE, youth minister, school principal, catechist is another way of dividing the players...
...In their sexual lives, as elsewhere, human beings are often confronted with moral conflicts, in which no choice is free of ambiguity...
...I fault this assumption, which rests on an unproved cohort explanation...
...Both views perhaps too readily credit the council for a generation gap and overlook the powerful pull of American culture in absorbing young, educated Catholics into the economic and social mainstream...
...In reality, secularism does not correctly understand the larger American society...
...When young people come up against the values of society that are different from the values in their bloodstream, at some point they sit back and ask: "Is this all there is...
...But in many situations they allow themselves to be overlooked...
...The "cohort" explanation argues that a specific age group undergoes a unique historical experience (for example, having come of age during the Great Depression) that precludes the ordinary life-cycle rebound, in this case, to religion...
...If we listen to the voices of young adults-be they, in other categories, laywomen, priests, sisters, liturgists, etc.-we may hear the future concerns of Catholicism...
...To what...
...One thinks also of ancient Israelite betrothal and marriage, reflected in Matthew's and Luke's stories of the premarital pregnancy of Mary...
...Media images aside, I doubt that many people really disagree with this point, however much some may be tempted to rationalize indiscriminate sexual behavior...
...It sees Catholicism not as a lump, "a separable something," but as leaven...
...3. A marital rebound effect: One of Young Catholics' major findings pointed to "a tendency for those who have drifted away from regular religious practice in their [early] 20s to drift back during their late 20s...
...The chief explanation for the Catholic age distribution is that, whether we work consciously at it or not, we do a better job than other religious groups in holding on to our young adults (at least, insofar as they retain residual loyalties and identification...
...The Incarnation means "man became God" and Catholics believe in the "transfiguration of the Mass...
...I was also directed to the 1989 study, American Catholic Laity by William D'Antonio, James Davidson, Dean Hoge, and Ruth Wallace (Sheed and Ward, 1989), and advised to do my own analysis of data on young Catholics contained in the 1988 NORC general social survey...
...They 're finding it harder to raise children on one income...
...In beginning my search, I asked four knowledgeable sociologist JOHN A. COLEMAN, S.J., is professor of religion and society at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley...
...It may well be of influence in some exotic contemporary societies (Islamic fundamentalism, for example), but in scientific and technological America religion is largely a thing of the past, a spent force...
...I steer the reader to American Mainline Religion...
...What pushes at people is the how come, the what does it mean, the where docs it fit...
...We lack comparable data on Hispanic 20-40 year olds...
...Their underlying values are always present and are implicitly operative...
...Sex as love...
...At least two-thirds of them had taken part in some religious activity besides Mass or private prayer (for example, reading a spiritual book, taking part in a retreat or in a religious discussion group...
...The evidence clearly points to the fact that one's choice of spouse and the quality of one's parish life are the two principal factors in predicting the religious life of the young married adult...
...Those among the Presbyterian baby boomers who have not yet returned, with marriage, seem more numerous in highly urban areas...
...He had three days to make the decision...
...In modern Western cultures, the value of procreative sex may be harder to "sell" than pleasurable sex and loving sex...
...CHUCK PFEFFER is director of the department of youth activities and has responsibilities for young adult ministry in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia MAREE HARTLEY is coordinator of young adult ministry in the Archdiocese of New York...
...One is the moral content of what parents do...
...These are the young adults who were raised in the sixties and seventies...
...Factions or cliques sprout up easily...
...John: When I was growing up, the biggest influence on me was the church...
...The structure of Catholic imagination perceives the world and God in intimate communion...
...Each generation has its own questions...
...This question of balance strikes at the heart of what young adults must struggle with...
...For the middle class, the whole period from eighteen to thirty may become a kind of experiment in possibility...
...One of these is parenthood, which leads us to the next point...
...Kate: Tragedy...
...But although the skeptics still consider themselves "Catholic," they differ from the "revisionists...
...Its civic rationale has also lapsed...
...Unquestionably, however, the most startling change in the workplace has been the increased presence and influence of women...
...Yet there is a real question whether this arrangement will continue...
...But they won't drive to their parish around the block to see what they might bring...
...Today's young adult Catholics are the great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of men and women who died in the nation's wars and slums, who bravely and patiently wore down the bigotry of the fearful and powerful, and who won for us by their sheer persistence the rights of the citizenship we enjoy...
...Those who answer "a Catholic birthrate higher than the national average" are dead wrong...
...They have gotten their education, they're in school or they're finishing school, and now they're working, and now all the business of life...
...A place to be made welcome...
...They seem to attach too much importance to their relationship with God to allow it to stand or fall over one issue or one action or one doctrine...
...So for people in the church to sit back and think, "Oh, they're gonna come back...
...What we are seeing here is a discordance between the real world and a particular reading of that world...
...Others celebrate those children-liberated from superstitions, scruples, and a questionable view of human nature-able to happily appropriate what is healthy and constructive in Catholicism...
...It is the value of the third that is the most necessary and the most difficult to communicate to today's young adults...
...To make all these choices, they require a prolonged period of suspended judgment, a time to be "open-minded," a little suspicious, and relatively uncommitted, especially in regard to "institutions...
...SISTER MARGARET O'BRIEN is director of young adult ministry for the Diocese of Rockville Centre...
...Marriage rebound effect looms large...
...11.9 for cradle Catholics who stay, and 11.8 for Catholics who leave for other denominations...
...As a result, the bundle of services for parents and children is getting scaled back...
...By developing a healthy attitude, an attitude of welcoming, not grilling, an attitude of gracious hospitality, not interrogation...
...Six were executed and one was placed in an insane asylum, and the church was silent...
...Just the bait the Maryknoll groupie needed...
...The Opus Dei supernumerary choked...
...Despite the fact that you could find Bavarian guards at Auschwitz, colonels in the Salvadoran army, and even North American realtors who were taught to genuflect, make visits, and approach the Eucharist with awe, the vanishing of the communal sensibility which underwrote those habits is certainly a loss...
...But that is going to be brokered in a relationship that they find shared with them in the local community...
...We have to surprise them with gracious-ness, with the sense that there is a place lor them here...
...detail how young adult Catholics see their work, to bring out its centrality and explain why an informed and vigorous response is necessary...
...Catholic vs...
...MARTHA DUDICH coordinates young adult ministry in the Diocess of Trenton, New Jersey...
...For the most part, I suppose, we do these things by modeling, by showing what they look like in practice, by loving, praying, forgiving, welcoming, by struggling for honesty and justice and freedom...
...In my experience, however, such definitive rejections are uncommon in this age group-as, for that matter, are definitive acceptances...
...Survey data, psychological findings, cultural and economic trends, and even "market analyses" can tell everyone a great deal, but finally not how or why these young adults should continue as bearers of the Catholic tradition...
...Then it becomes a question of how to sell the faith, of how to get our young people to buy it...
...but that moral analysis starts with a presumption in favor of the conduciveness of sex to shared parenthood...
...Skipping a shampoo leaves a few more minutes for a bedtime story...
...This young man is a skilled administrator, trained in the theory and practice of organizational development, especially as it relates to health care...
...With a present so bereft of significance and a future promising not much more than a dunning notice from our veterinarian, the glory had to be in the past...
...Collegiality, collaboration, and doing the work of the church in the world increasingly depend on the laity and ultimately on these young adult Catholics...
...During the postwar years, the culture celebrated parenthood...
...I would reiterate'an injunction of Young Catholics: "All organized evangelization efforts [to recapture lapsed Catholics] which do not aim at the family should be abandoned...
...Though this is to simplify, we may think of them as the traditionalists, the revisionists, the skeptics, and the alienated...
...a parish mission stalled REV...
...It is sometimes harder to motivate young adults and they show greater concern than their parents with leisure...
...With a little organizational pluck, the harvest is there for the reaping by some pastorally bold bishops, pastors, and worried parents...
...Martha: Other young adults, peers, colleagues, from a competitive standpoint, from an achieving standpoint, from a success standpoint...
...No, you haven't followed our rules so you can't conic in and play ball...
...As they look to the larger culture, they find very few allies who will help them to fulfill the responsibility and several outright adversaries, particularly the materialistic values of consumption and career...
...The appropriate moral context for complete sexual union is a commensurate level of interpersonal commitment...
...For all sorts of complicated reasons that we are constantly tut-tutted for being hysterical about, we destroy those children we don't feel like raising...
...Younger and older Catholics Be warned from the start: What you think you know about young adult Catholics is probably not true, especially if you think that we are worse at retaining them than other religious groups, such as the evangelicals...
...Clearly, marriage looms large as the key variable for recommitment...
...Yet official church teaching continues to tie respect for these values very much to the physical act of sexual intercourse, not to the overall or long-range relationship of the couple...
...Those married, in our sample, were much more likely than the unmarried to report feelings of closeness to God and powerful religious experience...
...In the postwar culture, it was inconceivable that "bachelors" and "old maids" might actually have chosen to be single and childless...
...Serra International White Foundation Anonymous Donor Contents ©1990 Commonweal Foundation 15 Dutch Street New York, N.Y...
...We did not find much variance from a decade ago on items measuring respondents' sense of being close to God or reports of having a powerful religious experience...
...Our analysis of the 1988 NORC data did uncover, however, some fascinating results when we compared those who were Catholic at age sixteen who switched out of the church vs...
...What is fundamental is the mission that comes from creation, and that is to engage in loving relationships and to work in solidarity, justice, and peace...
...Finally, few of us are inclined to formulate or announce general moral principles as formal guides for our own personal behavior...
...Being a native Chicagoan with a large extended family, he knew it would be difficult to leave...
...And my mother, the contemplative, asked me to pass the rolls...
...Is it a passivity that says, "they're out there, and when they come back, once they settle down, then we'll take care of them...
...divorced folks meeting in a church to be angry at the church...
...It's harder because they have less time...
...Another way is to listen to what young people say about what they see, not to ask them about themselves but to watch them react to "things Catholic...
...Hundreds of thousands of workers have lost their jobs...
...Today, both men and women finish school and go to work...
...To be sure, there is much we do not know because very little research has been done on this age group...
...As they get older, the rate should increase...
...Faith is open to endless kinds of explorations and the rest of us don't need to be frightened by that...
...On a Saturday or Sunday with other things going on, it just doesn't even become a priori...
...But Saint Martin is also a patron saint of draft resistance, and Zahn observes the paradox that "thousands-of German Catholics who as young boys had marched in the gay processions honoring the conscientious objector to Julian's war had grown into men who willingly responded to the call to march in Hitler's wars of conquest...
...We are in an era in which procreation has been reduced to an incidental meaning of sex, usually to be avoided, and certainly to be accepted only if freely chosen...
...This remark covers a lot of territory...
...But today, compared to Protestants, Catholics do relatively well in retaining young adults...
...Returning baby boomers seem to be trying to strike some kind of balance between the religion they knew as youngsters and attention to issues that concern them now...
...I am reminded of the young man, thirty-one years old, who came to my office...
...While Greeley shows that this religious vitality does not always fit the exact parameters of doctrinal correctness, I am sure that, had it been possible, similar studies of Catholics in the fourth or fourteenth centuries would not have yielded more doctrinal exactness...
...The simplest thing...
...So they practice without the belief behind the practice...
...The religious involvement of these students tends to give first place to their relationship with the divine and, for this bond, they rely on the methods with which they have already become familiar-Sunday Mass and some form of private prayer...
...I'm supposed to be with Secretary of State James Baker at one of those furtive Washington meetings to which I'm frequently summoned, indignantly saying that he's damn right I'm not his kind of patriot but that, yes, I will undertake this top-secret mission, because his cowboys would only screw it up, and that could result in the deaths of Romanian children, not to mention the fact that Kathleen Turner, on her own, couldn't possibly get through the first checkpoint...
...It entails persistence, repentance, and forgiveness...
...I'm making money...
...2. When compared to older Catholics, young adults are more likely to be unaccepting of church teaching on sexual issues...
...Now they tend to be soloists...
...John: But demonizing American culture is a stereotype the church uses...
...At times they find it to be rather sterile, formal, and cold...
...Today's culture is highly secular...
...He told me that he was moving to New Jersey...
...Not that they're not important...
...Our unconscious acceptance of this reading of young people as hopelessly nonreligious is a pastoral mistake that will exact a terrible cost for the whole community of faith...
...We could probably all agree that there are a lot of things wrong with our culture (though we should always remember to ask ourselves: Compared to what...
...Parenthood is embodied through the shared material conditions of family life, again through the genetic link, and through the fact that the physical relation of spousehood is that which gives rise to parenthood...
...What are the attitudes of young adult Catholic is the church...
...Some in the church look at the council's "children" and their hearts sink...
...Which is why I was so startled to read, in my dad's introductory note: "Here is proof of your direct descent from John Garvey, the Protestant archbishop of Armagh, who, in the interest of personal security and preferential advancement, abandoned the Roman church, died in 1594, and is buried in Christ Church, Dublin...
...Most important, however, the workplace is seen to be the arena in which we can become "more integrated and purposeful...
...Even though "alienated" Catholics are in a sense no longer a "constituency" for church teaching, it is significant that that teaching evokes so negative a response in a group whose size is far from negligible...
...After all, nothing very hopeful happened to Saint Francis until he could no longer stand the customary ways of making do in Assisi, but look what happened then...
...Twenty-six years of mandatory membership in an Irish Catholic family gives one nothing if not a wide circle of Catholic acquaintances, many of whom are relatives, and an even wider circle of contact with various religious devotions and spiritualities, all in some way "Catholic...
...Even for people who value this vision, it is not clear how it will be implemented...
...These attempts by the Catholic hierarchy are rare enough to make headlines...
...A reduc-tionistic definition of Catholicism is that it is a group of people meeting to draft an ultimatum to give to another group who are meeting to draft an ultimatum to give to them...
...But, like most people, students listen selectively...
...My interest in "faith-watching" among young Catholics took hold seven years ago while I was a junior at the University of Notre Dame...
...Laypeople, bishops, sisters, deacons, priests, brothers is one line-up...
...Parents who have got a pretty locked in understanding of what is necessary 111 order to go to Communion see many of their own young adults who they know are not churchgoers get up and go to Communion with Mom and Dad just like there is no problem at all...
...most were acquaintances, a few were friends, and one was a sibling who begged for anonymity lest guilt come by association...
...A world shaped and formed by television, rock music, by all of those things that have never spoken to the spirit side of their lives...
...or that younger Catholics are likely, as they age, to become less practicing than present-day older Catholics...
...Young people are wrestling with these changes, and they need guidance and support...
...Are the needs of young adults being met...
...We wait for the "tragedies," for loneliness, suffering, confusion, or death to make an opening for faith...
...Women now are pushing toward 50 percent of most law school classes, and the same percentages are showing up in business schools...
...This is not to say that it is always wrong to interfere with conception as an outcome...
...They find few places where they can even sit down with other parents and discuss what's important in life for them and their children, and why...
...Couples frequently give up time with each other to get more time with the kids...
...Nonetheless, the Catholic young betray their attraction to the good ol' days when Catholics were Catholics, men were men, etc...
...This system also has clear understandings about how children will be cared for within the families if the couple subsequently parts...
...The Body and Blood of Jesus can indeed cleave to our inmost beings and preserve us for life everlasting, but not unless we know and, yes, even fear, the bread and wine which are his Body and Blood...
...The other is the moral significance of what parents do...
...Those educated in Catholic schools are the most likely to return to religious practice in the first decade after a Catholic marriage...
...If they think they'll be in a place where they will be with other young adults, at a celebration that's worth traveling to, then I think they'll get in a car and go...
...She is bitter, she says, because the Catholic church has abandoned the lay experience for a doctrinaire high ground that leaves her, a practicing lesbian, without much welcome...
...A dual-income couple who earn $175,000 a year and agonize over the au pair shortage face different problems from a dual-income couple who bring home $30,000 and scour the supermarket bulletin board for babysitters...
...The informa-tion about New Jersey The connection to young adults in New Jersey...
...Though the provisional sexual relationships common in our culture may represent a valid insight about the development of commitment, they still lack the social forms which would make them accountable to the genuine personal and communal significances of sex...
...How much it shatters all our media images...
...Andrew Greeley notes:"The increase, more striking among Catholics [in their 30s], in regular church attendance does not represent the return of the totally alienated but, rather, more regular attendance by the already irregularly attending" (Religious Change in America...
...First, there has always been a wide gap between traditional ideals and proscriptions, on the one hand, and the actual behavior of people...
...It's just a phase" may be wrong...
...or a description ("people are...
...Some young adults don't have a connection with the other members of the assembly...
...Naming is the beginning of relating...
...It will not be located in their persons-instead, the identity will belong to the whole membership...
...At present, I do not have data to compare Catholic baby boomer returnees to these Presbyterian returnees...
...What con the church learn from young adults...
...There are, of course, other students who have decided on an explicit personal rejection of their Catholic beliefs...
...In the new church it is a place where we all hold hands and sing old Cat Stevens's songs...
...As the Catholic chaplain at a well-known New England university, I am constantly tasting, if not fully digesting, its highly secular academic diet...
...I need a social life and a religious life...
...In recent years under the inspiration of feminist concerns the categories which are sometimes suggested are quite simply but significantly-women and men...
...The mean age of a convert from another church to evangelicalism is 47.5...
...to be more permissive about the boundary definitions of what constitutes a good Catholic...
...In its early use, the term "secular" was employed to dis- tinguish something or someone from the "sacred," to indicate those parts of human experience which possess an autonomy of their own...
...They don't always recognize the value of a multigenerational experience...
...So they criticize the lack of hospitality...
...A better expression of this link, one we should aim to attain, lies in contemporary thought's repudiation of dualism, and its insistence that the body and the spirit or psyche form an integrated reality, not two uneasily aligned "components...
...CEOs of Catholic health-care facilities talking survival, market, and mission...
...Mergers and acquisitions, leveraged buy-outs, and restructuring or "downsizing" coupled with an increase in world competition and the movement of work and plants overseas into cheaper labor markets has caused tremendous upheaval...
...The moral department changed its name to Christian Life...
...But he connected that dimension of health care with the brothers...
...It is at such moments that I realize how much the secularist reading of college students has colored our perceptions, even those of pastoral ministers, leading them to think that not much can done for or with this group...
...It means there is a lack of information about basic Catholic history, beliefs, and practices...
...What is that message...
...The task of guiding the life of a child, they think, is more important than taking care of a flower or a tropical fish, and they want credit for doing it...
...They will notice things like empty ritual, phoniness, casual hypocrisy...
...While we are losing some of our best educated, we are also gaining better educated converts...
...1. Religious practice: Ten years ago, 29 percent of young Catholics attended church weekly...
...How do you reach out...
...We praise an immanent and transcendent God who is one God with three persons...
...If we could transcend the limits of such discussions, we might recover the essential message about sexuality which Roman Catholicism transmits...
...It is one of the things we would like to know more about our young Catholic adults...
...The Zeitgeist is always telling us to take it easy on ourselves, to remember that we're not such bad people after all, that there really isn't very much we can do about ourselves and the knowledge to which Wallace Stevens points in Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction "that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days...
...Greeley's studies and my more random observations, however, ought not be construed as an invitation to complacency...
...John: They've taught me that they do not accept a lot of formal religious things because they don't understand them...
...All of these considerations pose challenges to church teaching which, it must be admitted, the church has not adequately met...
...A high proportion of the sample of college students chose, on most items, the "more liberal" response, significantly more than adults past college age...
...In addition, in this culture we have a problem not just with handing on the faith, but with the handing on of anything...
...They wouldn't necessarily want to be raising their own kids in it today, if such a sociological miracle were possible, but they would like to belong to a modernized version of it...
...There, theologies and spiritualities collided, like shifting tectonic plates, leaving the Catholic community and its faithful shaken and sometimes damaged...
...Roughly two-thirds of each age group surveyed thought the church should have more democratic decision making at the parish and diocesan levels...
...The divide on these issues was not young vs...
...There I was conscious of a rift among Catholics of my generation-a rift I later learned cut far deeper and wider a swath than my campus experiences indicated...
...When young people enter the world of work, they begin to crack open some of the most important questions of their lives...
...Different factions and parties and subcultures will come to compete for their allegiance...
...Although at some time during the process the couple might have sexual relations and even bear children, there was actually no one "point" before which a marriage did not exist and after which it did...
...The 'brothers' (the sponsoring community), walking around the place, carry the Catholic identity...
...His lithe body makes him look more like the liturgical dancer he was...
...Margaret: I was talking to a young man recently at a volleyball tournament...
...Catholic identity cannot be constructed on anything less than the reality of divine presence...
...The other is the cumulative insights of sociologist Andrew Greeley...
...What is needed is some explicit reflection to connect what they do with who they are...
...It's difficult to gauge the integrity and worth of the cultural network which presented itself to John of Armagh as the whore of Babylon, to Aunt Letitia as a source of condiment, and to me as a distraction from an imaginary fling with a screen goddess...
...Sexuality" is now recognized as a basic dimension of the personality, and covers far more than genital acts designed for reproduction...
...If priests and religious are, in the eyes of many, the symbols of Catholic presence, who will be the new symbols...
...They observe the same phenomena as do the "revisionists"-the widespread acceptance of contraception, "living together," homosexuality, abortion...
...How disturbing the facts then...
...She wants her baby baptized and "they" are going to make her jump through some hoops...
...Because young adults spend so much time at work, the workplace inevitably becomes the springboard for examining important issues about identity and values...
...Unequal commitment between partners leads to manipulation, disappointment, and pain...
...I don't think the pre- and-post-Vatican II Catholic church I grew up in could do or has done much better...
...On the other hand, couples who are absolutely intolerant of the prospect of parenthood, perhaps resorting even to abortion as a means of birth control, do not give adequate moral recognition to the relation of sex, love, and procreation...
...When you least expected something, God happened...
...All the young Catholics I interviewed agree on one thing: more and more Catholics have less and less in common...
...To raise them was to do God's work and fulfill God's will...
...Whom are we gaining among young converts...
...One reason is that, along with many ecclesiastical pessimists, the secularists do not look as worship and prayer as indicators of religious behavior, but rather as doctrinal conformity...
...It is repeatedly surprised by religiously motivated movements and factors that are essential to understanding the American people...
...We used to make a reflexive sign of the cross when we went past a church, used to genuflect without thinking about it when we went in, used to "make visits," used to show up for Benediction of what we unblushingly called the Blessed Sacrament, used to use dimly understood Latin when we prayed publicly as a sort of verbal taking off of our shoes because we were on holy ground...
...56 percent) and in picking up young converts from other Christian churches (54 percent vs...
...The reason so many are instinctively prochoice on abortion has very little to do, I believe, with any positive attitude toward abortion itself...
...Sex as procreation...
...Pre-Vatican II Catholics raising children in the post-Vatican II church have had many occasions to reflect, often anxiously, on the first question...
...the task is to adjust our minds and hearts to this subtle and supple presence...
...Parents were the ones who got involved, filled the churches, attended town meetings, formed committees, undertook projects, and improved the community...
...Today this attitude might be revised into the recognition that the sexual drive has real limits as a guide to sexual relationships...
...our elementary schools certainly suffer from a quite justifiable hemorrhage of cheap labor-there are fewer and less docile women religious-but they suffer every bit as much from the reluctance of thirty-something Catholic parents to make the same financial sacrifices their parents did...
...The dominant "cultural message"-that sex is natural, enjoyable, good, and even recreational-has an obvious legitimacy in itself, and exponents of a Catholic Christian approach to sexuality should not appear grudging in their acceptance of the "joy of sex...
...But at church it's: Just passing through, I'll stand for an hour but even my manner of dress says, "I'm not sure I'm buying in...
...Young Catholics: 1980 and 1990 We are fortunate to have had, ten years ago, a very sophisticated and informative sociological portrait of young Catholics in Joan Fee, Andrew Greeley, William McCready, and Teresa Sullivan's Young Catholics, based on NORC data from the late 70s...
...She did not want to leave the city and was looking for a new job...
...to be more open to democratic participatory church patterns...
...More importantly, who wants to be a new carrier...
...What has often been missing is an accompanying spiritual sensitivity...
...But what's more important is, "You are here, thank God...
...I don't know whether it was worth it...
...We have always prided ourselves on the universality of the Catholic church...
...Though these elements tend to vacillate across a broad spectrum of practice and involvement, their presence marks the starting point for the church's understanding of its own future...
...And in any culture there are conflicting claims on the attention and loyalty of its young people...
...Martha: Why are you here...
...Those were very difficult limes tor Catholic schools and parishes...
...Whom do we gain and from where...
...At the same time, they hedge their bets, not wanting to be left outside completely, and give a certain presumption to the church's traditions and wisdom...
...I belonged to a theological faculty that was divided up into traditional categories of systematics-moral-Bible-history-ministry...
...They have not adopted wholesale complete sexual freedom...
...They are likely to see these practices as part of their overall efforts to be attentive to other important parts of their lives, including parents and family, friends at other schools, and campus groupings that provide social opportunities...
...We want to know how we can help you raise your child for faith and life...
...Archbishop Weakland and a notable few stand out in bold relief for their efforts to create an open and animated dialogue among the faithful in their dioceses...
...And they'll criticize bad music because somehow music can lift the soul and so I would wonder if part of what attracts them to church is that it is a place to wonder about your position in life...
...The stories told by the young adults in his study demonstrate that work choices among these so-called values are critical in developing moral and spiritual character...
...non-college graduates who leave the denomination in which they were raised College-educated Non-College Switchers Switchers Catholics 23 15 Lutherans 36 26 Episcopalian 41 35 Presbyterian 47 44 Baptists 33 25 Protestant Sects 50 33 Source: Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion, pp...
...Noncustodial parents, whose time with their children is usually limited to weekends or vacaBARBARA DAFOE WHITEHEAD works for Public Policy Associates, a Chicago-based consulting firm, specializing in work and family issues...
...Having said this much, it seems to me that our talk about young adult Catholics is often pointless and evasive...
...As a result, the mass media are not able to report effectively on the significance or origins of these phenomena, nor is much of academia able to teach students about their meaning...
...How do I get them to know life and faith go together...
...in the meantime, silence, more misunderstanding, and ultimately the painful breaking of the bonds that keep the family of Christ one in Spirit and one in love...
...My early September worry is based on an assumption, widely shared among academics, other religious ministers, and writers, that religion no longer plays an important role in our secularized culture, especially among the young, and that, where it does survive, it is only a highly personal and private matter...
...In my own family, with its motley collection of dissenters and daily communicants, tolerance always yielded to respect, respect succumbed to understanding, and understanding eventually became transmuted into a deeper appreciation for the many-angled love of God that desires us and pierces us each in a unique and wonderful way...
...That is the responsibility of older generations of lay men and women and dwindling numbers of clergy and religious who will pass on this tradition by living it honestly and faithfully...
...No Catholic parent of a certain age-or better, with children of a certain age-will fail to resonate with that insight into our history...
...But what is a contemporary meeting without someone being discriminated against...
...Yet I continuously hear that "everyone knows" that mixed marriages among young Catholics are dramatically on the increase...
...As they've discovered, it has since fallen into disrepair and disuse...
...religious educators struggling with how to pass on a tradition they themselves are in conflict with...
...Who will be the new primary carriers of the Catholic identity...
...4. How do Catholic baby boomers compare with mainline Protestants...
...The mentor is the person who helps guide our path in the world of work...
...The festival celebrates the extravagance of Saint Martin's charity, that El Greco painting scene in which Saint Martin chops his cape in half to clothe Christ in the beggar's guise...
...In which direction...
...In crude economic jargon, this is a lost business opportunity...
...This would be a parent-friendly presence that would, more than anything else, affirm and support what they see as the deeply moral dimension of the parent's role, a dimension that has two parts...
...In many ways the Catholic church has become the victim of its own success...
...Both are not only intersubjective, but also embodied relationships...
...THE EDITORS I was irked recently while watching Ted Koppel discussing abortion and Catholic politicians...
...The prospect of pregnancy and parenthood is not always intentional and dominant in the relationship, but it is nonetheless a latent and morally important possibility...
...The remarkable beauty of the Catholic faith lies in its resolution of profound paradoxes...
...Everything was topsy turvy in the church then...
...those who were non-Catholic at age sixteen who switched into Catholicism...
...They might choose to work complementary shifts rather than two 9-to-5 jobs, or one parent will work weekends, leaving the other at home with the children...
...Young Catholics in all walks of life have developed extensive knowledge and skills...
...But clearly the concerns of this phase of life do not find us Catholics at our best: What to make of human sexuality...
...but so often the church doesn't speak in them...
...We lose a group which is 52.2 percent female and 47.8 percent male...
...Those who leave are significantly less likely than cradle Catholics to accept the Bible as the word of God and more likely to call it a book of fables...
...That's about as negligible as a contribution gets...
...Married couples made up roughly 90 percent of such households in 1960, but make up roughly 70 percent today...
...For the "handing on" of things-ideas, meanings, symbols, stories, practices, judgments of value-is what we mean by "tradition," and we Americans live in an anti-tradition tradition, a tradition of being at odds with tradition...
...They have some tentatively defined allegiance to the Catholic church, and they show little or no sign of being the highly secularized people of the dominant myth...
...And it dawns on me that many of them arc the first product of post-Vatican II religious education...
...This sacramental perception unifies Catholic identity, providing a way to approach the earth, people, Christ, and the church...
...Naming is not incidental, and renaming can open up new possibilities...
...They're less likely to rub shoulders with other parents on the stoop and at the playground, the grocery store, the doctor's office, the school...
...Now we arc somebody...
...Drawing on his numerous surveys, Gallup found among the young both a strong interest in spirituality and a strong desire for service to society...
...This meaning had a spiritual dimension: It was then a commonplace sentiment to see children as a blessing from God...
...and MBA programs flourish on the campuses of Catholic colleges and universities, because it is obvious that Catholics are free and even obligated to become captains of infantry and industry...
...Dancing is what...
...Like many group-two Catholics, I have often considered the common practice of "living together" with some misgivings along with the feeling that there might be in it something to be learned about the nature of sexual commitment...
...The voice of this young adult suggests the future of Catholicism is tied to personal spiritual depth...
...What is required by intimacy and committed love...
...RALPH WHITEHEAD, JR., teaches journalism at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst...
...And our sense of universality today must include all ages...
...By 1980, that had increased to 12.7 years...
...By 1970, virtually all plant workers and office workers in metropolitan areas worked in establishments that provided paid vacations, with the average full-time worker receiving two full weeks...
...Chris and many other young Catholics I have talked with cling like branches to their vine: the centrality of the gospel "message" and the power of the church as "community...
...Second, they come because of what's going on in their own lives...
...They are the living mission statement...
...With many parents at work and kids in child care, the neighborhoods are emptier in the daytime...
...Based on what kind of evidence...
...our bishops shell out upwards of 34 million bucks on their corporate headquarters and talk about hiring Hill & Knowlton and the Wirthlin Group to clear up this abortion thing because that's how you do things downtown...
...These parents also find they have less grassroots political strength...
...They must often confront basic ethical and religious questions on their own...
...our theologians and religious seem increasingly reluctant to mention God in public but will "go whoring after relevance," calling a press conference at the drop of a hat to denounce this or that hierarchical abuse of authority...
...The Holy Cross Associates and the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and Outreach programs on college campuses have taken his advice, to excellent effect...
...Probably the one revelation of God in the Scripture that doesn't get enough air time is the God of surprises...
...The present moment provides the opportunity to include beliefs and behaviors in Catholic identity but to ground them in more fundamental sensibilities...
...tions, have a hard time establishing ties with the other families in their communities...
...And, by "doctrinal conformity," these strange bedfellows do not mean agreement on the divinity of Christ or the resurrection of the body, but rather acceptance of Catholic moral teaching, and particularly its teachings on sexual behavior...
...A breakthrough occurred in Vatican II's Gaudium et spes (1965) and in the encyclical Humanae vitae (1968), when love and procreation were ranked equally as the purposes of marriage...
...This sampling isn't scientifically valid, of course, but it gives rise to a view that's so consistent that it deserves to be credited: As these young adults see it, the role of a middle-class parent is much harder today than it was for their own parents...
...1 mean we're supposed to be promiscuous, aren't we...
...we can't manage to get out of the habit of flattening countries whose governments irritate us...
...Margaret: Young adult Catholics expect to be and want to be connected...
...Because of its longstanding appreciation for the moral stature of the parent's role, the church, with its conception of parenthood grounded in religious belief and practice, can offer that sense of higher purpose and spiritual nourishment that is so needed.ROUNDTABLE REV JOHN CUSICK direct young adult ministry in the Archdiocese of Chicago...
...Choose a vocation...
...The church has an interest in making widely available to young adults a reflective, articulate, and self-critical kind of Catholicism, a Catholicism that has room for different points of view, but a Catholicism that nevertheless has a teaching about human existence and the mystery of God, about sin and redemption and an immortal love revealed in Jesus Christ, a Catholicism that stands for something, even for something that might be worth living and dying for...
...They had good experiences through CYO or maybe through a Catholic school, or maybe they came to know some religious leader in their own parish...
...But the message is incomplete and inadequate...
...Martha: Are these young adults asking us whether they arc the last generation of Catholics...
...Engineering programs tend to be about five to ten years behind, but women are making headway even in that traditionally male-dominated profession...
...This theological vision is attractive...
...Whether in their studies, in their workplace, conflicts they might be having in relationships...
...According to one family legend, my eccentric great aunt Letitia, who would be the Protestant archbishop of Armagh's great times-however-many granddaughter, used to fusillade each helping of her mashed potatoes with rosary beads...
...What is happening in the Catholic world is a search for people explicitly to continue the Catholic enterprise...
...Catholics, however, do better in general than Protestants in retaining their college-educated members as table II demonstrates...
...He saw it as a clean division of labor...
...Ready to relegate the traditionalists to the lunatic fringe, they smile at the earnest and rather dogged reinterpretive efforts of the revisionists, wondering when they will realize the impossibility of making headway toward change within present structures...
...Last Thanksgiving, my thirty-eight-year-old aunt, a charismatic, chided our bishop (not supping with us) for allowing the Episcopalians to use our cathedral for the ordination of a new bishop...
...But a successful career in his field clearly called for some work overseas...
...But the ongoing concerns of love, work, and play remain central...
...First, although we lose more Catholics than we gain through conversions (in a ratio of 5 who leave for every 1.2 who join), we gain more in religious quality than we lose...
...There are many aspects to this foundational orientation...
...the accompanying pastoral strategies are struggling to be born...
...The sexual relations permitted before marriage occurred in a context of religiously and socially specified conditions...
...That, it was noted, made everyone else Christian Death...
...At least since the sixties, they have had serious doubts about whether the positions on contraception and divorce can really hold water...
...Maree: A desperate search for community...
...Less than a third agreed with church teaching on divorce, sexual morality, etc...
...Who am I? Why work...
...Affiliating with another church is likely to be a more definitive and irreversible step than remaining unaffiliated...
...What is a credible, convincing, and helpful expression of Christian sexual values today...
...They realize that it is wiser to depend on their own skills and knowledge rather than rely on a company or corporation for job security...
...Her one-line question with its not-so-veiled resentment suggests a major question for the church's future...
...We're not always sun: what their agen da is or why they've been away...
...10038 212-732-0800 Somewhere in the following pages, one of our authors cites a classic of religious education, Will Our Children Have Faith...
...Thus, working parents don't always identify with stay-at-home parents...
...If I mention that many students do practice and that Mass attendance is probably higher among students than in the average parish, I am met with a look of bafflement and wonder...
...Demographers estimate that by 1995, women will be a majority in the workplace...
...According to Fitzpatrick, Catholic marriages have shown a substantial increase among young New York Hispanics...
...His job was changing...
...Young Americans have to "decide for themselves" what they will value, what they will believe, where they will live and work, what (if anything) they will stand for, what they will do for a living...
...In the effort to accomplish this, people band together...
...And there are many single adult Catholics who may not have the opportunity or desire for marriage, but who yearn for intimacy and sexual expression, for which they may find occasions outside marriage...
...So many other religious traditions attract their young...
...Margaret: It's community that attracts young adults to the church...
...In fact, there is no better way to get an impressionistic picture of the Catholic world than to get around to a few meetings...
...indeed, they are more likely to convert to liberal or moderate Protestantism or to have no affiliation at all...
...Parents, teachers, legislators, clergy are routinely in this position, even when they know their own behavior may not be exemplary...
...College students today generally do not have this experience and do not see themselves as responsible for others...
...It is possible to grow up a Catholic, after all, and have no access to an intelligent and vital version of Catholicism...
...Marriage, family-and perhaps a parish-eventually come for many of them, but often only after several years of building careers and working their way up corporate ladders...
...The standard work on mixed marriages in America, Robert A. Johnson's, Religious Associative Patterns (Praeger, 1985), demonstrates that even though the opportunities for mixed marriage for Catholics have dramatically increased in the last fifty years because of higher social and economic status, the actual rates have not drastically changed...
...The parish should be a place where the important conversations go on...
...I'm not sure," and "I just don't really know" are the agnostic phrases they employ to discuss the right and wrong of what people used to think was absolutely clear...
...Kids, bring them back...
...They will band together with others in their age-group...
...Seeing sex as an expression of love seems to verge on the romantic, yet it is not all that foreign to most of our experiences and personal goals...
...That point is reinforced by American Catholic Laity, which was based on a national survey conducted by the Gallup Organization...
...I know that the people who want to bring back liturgical Latin are gristle-brained, thin-lipped, anal retentive sociopaths who also want to ban menstruating women from the sanctuary, but what gesture, verbal or otherwise, now reminds us that the Mass is not an ordinary public event...
...I've personally never thought a weak stomach was worth worrying about, nor a weak faith worth protecting...
...That, of course, leaves out the two most creative groups- the young children and adolescents...
...Two springs ago I set out with a taperecorder, a few questions, and a list of names to interview a number of young Catholics ranging in age from the early twenties to early thirties...
...This higher level of education creates in them expectations of greater rewards from their work, including more time off...
...Note that young Catholics who leave are not going mainly to evangelical groups...
...What can the word "sacred" mean to people who can't revere...
...He's back on Long Island...
...a weekend for engaged couples that has a session on budgeting but none on faith...
...They know that they should pay attention to civic and community issues, spend time with family and friends, and leave time for leisure...
...It is true, of course, that university students are often presented with a highly secularized view of the world...
...a study group on the women's pastoral wondering how dare they...
...Take off your coat and stay awhile...
...Work is the one overwhelming demand in their lives...
...In these quarters, unchurched and theologically illiterate young adults confirm all that is said to be wrong with the post-conciliar church...
...They go out in different directions: 32.6 percent to nonaffiliation, 20.7 percent to moderate Protestant denominations, 18.6 percent to liberal Protestantism, 18.5 percent to evangelical groups, 8.7 percent to nontraditional religions, 1.1 percent to Judaism...
...If you go to a basketball game, you take off your coat...
...These same men and women taught our grandmothers and grandfathers as they taught their children and their children taught us the customary ways of making do in America...
...More than a union of two individuals, marriage is set in the context of family, and especially of procreation...
...This is why, even in these later modern and postmodern times, I am still hopeful that we will finds ways to hand on our faith, this ancient, mysterious, argumentative, and life-giving Catholic faith, which is God's gracious gift to us.ion and organization of ministry in the church...
...The percentage with single mothers has grown fourfold and the percentage with single fathers, though it's still small, has doubled...
...In 1940, the average American went to school 8.7 years...
...The aim of this article is less to prescribe what "the church" should be doing about this situation than to describe in some JOHN FONTANA is director of the Crossroads Center for Faith and Work at Old St...
...Perhaps less focus on stringent and legalistic marriage preparation rules and more programs to help those already married three-to-five years is called for...
...Of course, the surgeon general's warning on a cigarette pack doesn't seem so scary to a teenage boy who wants to look tough either...
...Like most of us, they would not want to divide their social world into neat religious segments, nor would they make religious differences into rigid social divisions...
...332-33...
...To whom do we lose them...
...It also describes a mental jumble of mammoth proportions...
...Finally, the most educated young Catholics were also the most likely to leave...
...he lives in an Opus Dei-owned house with other laymen who, among other disciplines, have taken a vow of celibacy...
...That the church cared enough...
...But the behavior itself, while perhaps more common, is not new...
...When they periodically become less responsible in these, Mass is more likely to fall by the wayside...
...The same capacity for making distinctions equips them to be more trustful when the church talks about connecting with God through worship and prayer than when it seems to know God's will in specific circumstances...
...They also urge us to re-examine many of our common assumptions about the religious situation of the young people with whom we seek to communicate...
...I don't mean to be flippant, exactly, but as much as I worry, and I do worry a lot, about the vanishing of distinctively Catholic cultural forms in America, I wonder how well those forms served my forebears in other countries and times and how much, finally, they really matter...
...But by far the most celebrated manifestation of the Catholic spirit is sacramental...
...Twenty-five years after its closing session, the impact of Vatican II presses harder than ever-not only on the present but on the future...
...During such transitional periods, people naturally are searching for new possibilities in the world and within themselves...
...Today it teaches that both purposes must be present in "each and every act...
...If you're here, wel-come...
...Consequently, young adults may feel the pull of moral and spiritual needs without being able to identify them consciously, talk about them explicitly, or feel they can do much to meet those needs...
...For this 20-40 Catholic age sample we found 51.4 percent married, 10.8 percent divorced, 3.8 percent separated, and 34.1 percent never married...
...John: If the church takes a good look at its young adult population, it would realize that they are the target for the big word we've used for the last ten years-evangelization...
...So when my father recently sent me an incomprehensible flowchart tracing our ancestry back into the depths of sixteenth-century Ireland, I expected to be dazzled by litanies of Irish MICHAEL O. GARVEY, a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, works in the Public Relations and Information office at the University of Notre Dame...
...Why do proponents of the secularization theory-the media as well as academics-miss these realities...
...Note also that the percentage of those who join no church has declined from a decade ago...
...Physical desire and enjoyment taken alone as motives for sex make sex unfulfilling, lonely, and perhaps ultimately boring...
...Today and here, young adult Catholics are swept up in the historical forces of a much different time...
...God is not a distant reality who is reluctant to make contact...
...a spirit side to our lives...
...But on other indices-frequency of private prayer, reported interest in religion, sense of closeness to God-young Catholics in 1980 showed great openness to religion, the religious imagination, and images of hope...
...This is natural and ought to be anticipated...
...I was soon further dismayed to discover that five years before Great x 10 or so Grandpa Garvey died, he had written an eloquent denunciation of the Council of Trent, alerting the flock of "these Her Majesties Realms" to such papist decrees as "that Excommunication or a perpetual Curse light upon the Families of all those of the Mother Church who will not promote or assist by means of Money, or otherwise, Mary Queen of Scotland to the Crown of England and that under-hand they propose a Match for the Queen of some Catholick Roman King or Prince...
...That's why leadership is so important...
...Until the American hierarchy is capable of engaging in a mature, candid, and sustained conversation with the laity (and with the Vatican), their commissions and pastoral letters will be dismissed by young and not-so-young alike as ivory-tower conferences and treatises...
...My son just received his First Communion at a liturgy beside which Jerry Falwell's Old Time Gospel Hour would have looked and felt like Easter on Mount Athos...
...They seek out either conservative or mainline Protestant churches according to how congregations strike that balance...
...How do I get them to know that religion is about the best that is in them...
...They will readily talk of a certain Mass or a retreat in which they felt especially close to God, and to other people who shared the same spiritual experience...
...Catholic Charities trying to combine advocacy and service...
...Second, if anyone should complain about the traffic flow between evangelicals and Catholics, it is the evangelicals...
...Of course we are having a problem handing on the faith, but in the United States, we are having less of a problem than any other religious community...
...Holding a united front on these questions is perceived as essential to the continued strength of church authority...
...We act as if that's all it is...
...This emphasis on Spirit is not to the detriment of Catholic perspectives on the physical, psychological, sociological, and political dimensions of human life...
...Preliminary findings from this study (being conducted by Wade Clark Roof as principal investigator) can be found in an article by Kenneth Briggs, "Baby-Boomers: Boom or Bust for the Churches," in Progressions, a 1990 Lilly Endowment Report...
...Ironically, one of the most significant effects of the ideology of secularism may be that it strongly colors the church's own perception of one of its most important groups...
...A second group, the "revisionists," mostly grew to maturity before Vatican II, and remember vividly the revitalization the council brought...
...Then, if we are losing our best and our brightest, maybe it serves us right...
...The question is phrased, "Are we caring for the next generation...
...It can't be just clear the parking lot out and get the next crowd in for Mass...
...Table II: Percent of college vs...
...They have what we used to call sacramentals, very often some piece of music, which they will regularly use to remind themselves of these experiences...
...The conversation is about what people are interested in, how to love, work, and play in American society...
...And so we've created something that says if you're right, you'll be, listened to...
...From the secularist view, surveying all the religious options of modern America, is not Catholicism the most encumbered with the weight of the past, the one that has adapted most sparingly to the "realities" of modern life...
...But the eye-opener about young converts to Catholicism is where they come from-overwhelmingly from evangelical-fundamentalist groups (45.2 percent), next from liberal Protestantism (35.5 percent) and, finally, from the nonaffiliated (12.9 percent...
...It also requires that we look at these acts and their reproductive potential as an integrated whole or process...
...It's influencing what cars they drive, what they brush their teeth with, what kind of VCR they're buying, whether or not they're throwing out their albums and buying CDs...
...Are we supposed to genuflect and teach our kids to genuflect when we walk into church anymore...
...But what leaps less immediately from the tables is the overall agreement on directionality among all age groups (with relatively slight incremental percentage differences) on all the issues about greater democratization in the church, sexual morality, etc...
...The young CEO's question raised one issue...
...A more flexible and experientially adequate way to express this unity is not in terms of acts, but of relationships...
...More than anything else, these parents feel that the culture doesn't value parents as much as it did a generation ago...
...American Catholic Laity reports that only 37 percent of young adult Catholics (18-29 years of age) say the church is an important part of their lives, compared to 45 percent of 30- to 54-year-old Catholics, and 66 percent of those 55 years or older...
...Such debates have drained energies from the real task of reappropriating the essentials of Catholic teaching for the next generation...
...There is also the drive to succeed, to be somebody...
...Bedtime at 8. Chores on Saturday...
...She had been vice-president of human resources for a publishing company that had been acquired by a larger corporation and had moved from Chicago...
...And, indeed, it is here that nearly all analysis sets its focus...
...Since then, parenthood has lost its meaning...
...We can't fool them...
...This is how things are for young adults in our kind of culture...
...For better or for worse, fewer mothers spend the day at home and on the block and in the neighborhood...
...his perception raised another...
...They are much more likely (42 percent) than cradle Catholic (31 percent) to see people as evil rather than good...
...In other words, the surprising God worked...
...It claims this role on the basis of its capacity to describe reality as it is lived and experienced in our present demystified world with accuracy and insight...
...The CEO sat down with her, had a number of conversations, and finally helped her come to a firm and informed decision that she could live with...
...Table I: Percent distribution of religious groups by age Family 18-34 35-54 55+ Liberal Protestants 27% 34% 39% Moderate Protestants 31 32 38 Black Protestants 37 31 32 Conservative Protestants 35 34 31 Catholics 40 34 27 Jews 31 31 38 No religion 59 26 15 Source: American Mainline Religion, p. 153...
...The American Catholic church has never commissioned a full-scale national study of Catholic Hispanics...
...For further information about the meeting contact: Anne Demke Re-Generating Catholicism 700 W. Adams St...
...Often, a family's schedule has virtually no slack...
...Someone who was not only way out, but The Way Out...
...One result is that no one can avoid being confronted with it, and no one is without an opinion...
...Each year the question haunts me-until that first Sunday arrives and I find myself greeting a chapel filled with students...
...Joan Fee, Andrew Greeley, et al., Young Catholics, Sadlier, 1981...
...Although not all sexual couples give birth to children, the procreative potential of sex is always a part of that relationship...
...A partial reason for this is that younger Catholics have had more formal education than older Catholics...
...Andrew Greeley, as I understand him, says it's because they love the religion, because they enjoy being Catholics...
...Chuck: How many young adults would say they feel welcome at Sunday celebrations in their parishes...
...The loss of continuity in the family routine is also hard on the custodial parent...
...People will come in to bury a friend or a parent, to marry, to baptize their child or to be present at the baptism of the next generation...
...These kids often spend their summers outside of the neighborhood where they go to school...
...Maybe the secular pushes people to the spirit side...
...Such conversations do not suggest that their lack of practice is the result of secularization...
...One is the secularist ideology I have attempted to describe and which I find wanting and expe-rientially untrue...
...economy has evolved from manufacturing to service...
...A third group might be called the "skeptics...
...The resources of our tradition are not perceived to be so relevant to these issues...
...But most younger adults and virtually all teens today face a different battle: to carve out some sense of sexual direction in a peer and media culture which presents sex as a sophisticated recreational activity for which the only moral criterion is mutual consent...
...All the young Catholics I interviewed, some members of lay groups, some not, told me that these groups fill a void that run-of-the-mill parishes do not...
...They feel it's a greater economic risk to become a parent today...
...Similarly, couples so desperate to conceive that they are willing to set aside the unity of their spousal-sexual-parental bond by using donor sperm or a surrogate mother to create a reproductive union between one spouse and a third party are also less than faithful to the values which sexuality represents...
...In recent years I have become aware of the growing number of students who describe their families as nonpracticing but who themselves attend Mass regularly...
...These groups represent different responses to the exciting but tumultuous changes which beset the church as well as the culture in the 1960s...
...In some infertility therapies, sex itself is set aside as the means to conception, but certainly the relationship of the couple which is both loving and procreative is otherwise given sexual expression...
...This jumped to 49 percent if we included those who attended one, two, or three times a month...
...He questioned how happy he could be in a country with South Africa's social and political divisions...
...The faith which comes to us from the apostles-or from the apostles to our Mom and then to us-can transform us into new and true beings who can see and withstand and love the face of God, but only if we become dismayed at the sorts of pathetic and self-pitying beings we are now...
...In addition, the increasing demand for high-tech workers has created the need for a better educated work force...
...No wonder so many of our children, our feeble-minded, and our poor are at such risk . They're merely sacred...
...These parents are finding it harder to buy homes...
...It is also not clear what effect the graying of the Catholic clergy is having on the quality of parish life, a main ingredient for the return of young Catholics after marriage...
...It is one of the first things they find out about one another...
...The tenets (or assumptions) of secularism include two that are particularly attractive to people in a university setting, even those who are genuinely religious...
...Now I would say that the church would not rank in the top ten influences on American culture...
...John is a numerary of Opus Dei...
...Many want to be a significant part of the enterprise, but few want to be responsible for its Catholicity...
...We are all the church...
...Thus, parenthood isn't valued as a significant calling...
...Fifty-eight percent of converts are women...
...Indeed, it sometimes seems that both "conservatives" and "liberals" (terms that in practice refer to the traditionalists and the revisionists, since neither the skeptics nor the alienated see the relevant intra-ecclesial debates as worth the investment) become unduly distracted from more fundamental issues by battles over the morality of sexual acts: premarital, contraceptive, homosexual, etc...
...To understand behavior, values, institutions in our culture, in this view, there is no need to consider religion as a principal factor...
...Moreover, the culture gave parenthood a distinctive and powerful meaning...
...This changing of the question from "them and me" to "we" often means a revi-sioning of parish...
...At one moment she felt she could do what was necessary, at another moment she knew she could not...
...But they do have two things in common...
...In short, they face decisions that will shape a lifetime of work and relationships...
...But given the comparable educational levels in the two samples, Roof's assessment would likely fit the Catholic sample...
...That there is not, as we sometimes suspect, newness of life, perfect joy, a good reason to lay down our lives...
...Young adults often define themselves as much by their leisure activities as then-work...
...Unlike their grandparents and parents, many young adult Catholics do not "settle down" quickly, do not in rapid sequence finish school, find a job, get married, and join a parish...
...In Why Work, Michael Maccoby takes what most of us know: "we are in a period of values transformation, pushed along by changes in work and family structure," and applies it to the workplace: "the new social character no longer models itself on the paternal image at work and the maternal image at home...
...To mount a very hopeful or even interesting campaign against the world, the flesh, and the devil, we need a counterculture, and to develop a counterculture we need first of all to remind ourselves and each other that the culture in which we and our kids are embedded is as rapacious as it is goofy...
...They directed me to the data reported in Young Catholics (based on National Opinion Research Center [NORC] survey data, but now a decade old) and to a survey of attitudes among a national sample of Catholic college students reported by Dean Hoge in several places, including his book, The Future of Catholic Leadership (Sheed and Ward, 1987...
...They often become the "treat" parent, driving their kids around on the weekend in search of entertainment, fast food, and diversion...
...The Catholic students who never or rarely attend Mass usually cite other factors...
...John: Their families are Catholic and families have certain expectations, but in their twenties and thirties, the in-between years - in between confirma-tion and getting married -young adults often don't see what the church has to offer them...
...Our own families have told us, "Get ahead...
...Others explain that their parents are of different religions, and that religion was not given a place of importance, either out of indifference or as a modus vivendi...
...Kate: And that realization that life has got to be more than just a job...
...In the past, there has been in Christianity (in Augustine, for instance) a deep suspicion of sexual drives or sexual desire...
...She spoke about the complex, competitive, politicized environment of her Fortune 500 clients...
...R.O.T.C...
...And since they don't find this in the culture at large, with it value-neutral view of the parent's role, they will try to find it elsewhere...
...These three relationships come together in the ongoing relationship of a couple...
...But first, under three rubrics, let me cite some of Young Catholics' salient findings in 1980...
...I wondered...
...The kids weren't open to receiving a lot and we weren't sure what we were doing...
...Baby boomers are finding that it is not easy to be a parent and are now reassessing their own values toward tradition...
...It was the definitive credential of adulthood...
...In a recent meeting of CEOs of Catholic health-care facilities the topic was mission and management...
...1 don't think that they're going to challenge the system because what they want to know is, "Why have the system in the first place...
...We don't have to ask a lot of probing chubbish questions...
...Those of us who were teen-agers before Vatican II still carry on a struggle of "liberation" from a negative and restrictive picture of sexual dangers...
...While today's students were not around to experience the encyclical and the controversy that ensued, both had a great effect on their parents, their religion teachers, and their priests...
...They're criticizing elements that evoke what they might be looking for in life...
...As a study by the University of Michigan finds, most Americans have more leisure time today, but the parents of young children, particularly working mothers, now have less time...
...our ethicists burn the midnight oil to figure out new ways to justify what powerful people want to do because it is assumed that Catholics ought to become powerful people...
...The parents we interviewed say they constantly search to find more time for the children...
...Catholic birthrates both for those over and under age 45 stand more or less equal to the national average (black and conservative Protestants exceed the national birthrate...
...and third, images of God that were not "warm" or "close...
...Jesus said, "Wrong, the guy in the back because he did it the only way he knew how...
...What, exactly, are those very well-meaning people who have removed the tabernacle protecting us liturgical undergraduates from...
...Have you been married before...
...Table I emphasizes the relatively youthful make-up of Catholicism in contrast to other religious groups...
...The psychological and personal aspects of sexual union are complemented by the relation of the sexual couple to the family and society...
...But it doesn't look very much as if we believe that...
...Those I interviewed who belonged to a faith community like the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, a Newman Center, or Opus Dei attributed their continuing faith development to their involvement in these groups...
...It can help parents to find and make common cause with other parents, and can bring parents and children into regular contact with other loving and responsible grownups...
...When there's tragedy people run back to church...
...There's also a small percentage that want to help out in some way, a lot of them arc eucharis-tic ministers or lectors or they work with the CCD or with the teens...
...second, low parental religious practice...
...Martha: And how arrogant to assume that they'll come back rather than asking...
...Sometimes it hap-pens that you aren't just right or wrong...
...John, a twenty-three-year-old Opus Dei member, has met me for an early, and as it turns out eye-opening, breakfast...
...Certain basic human relationships come together through our sexuality and link us not only to our partners but to the wider community, through the social relationships of marriage and family...
...Most are religious, even prayerful people, but people for whom the church gathering has not been the place to express their faith...
...As she spoke, it became apparent that for the last five years this woman had spent virtually all her time working...
...How do you thank...
...The Catholic church, through its parishes and organizations, or through helping to form small groups in the workplace, could be such a place...
...John: In line with that, our job is frus truling because we are only as good as the people who head up the parishes...
...No, you're not registered parishioners...
...Chuck: There is an assumption that in late adolescence/early adulthood, there's a tendency to fall away from the church...
...D'Antonio and his associates report 43 percent are under 35 years of age...
...She does not lament what her students do not not know but struggles to get them to the "heart and depth" of Catholic faith...
...The feminist movement has sharply critiqued the distorted forms with which patriarchy has shaped both marriage and family, and has begun to reshape sexuality with a new appreciation of women's experiences of sex, spouse-hood, and motherhood...
...When people in leadership positions in the church ask about young adults, they often assume they must analyze their lives, diagnose their needs, and offer them services...
...Some of those things art: what is causing them anger and disapproval...
...Their impressive technical abilities need guidance from deeper values and convictions...
...Do younger Catholics differ from the elders on definitions of being a good Catholic...
...There is no good evidence indicating that today's young Catholics represent any less religious potential than those of a decade ago, although their parents who were young adults in the 1940s and 50s are right to be concerned about a lower level of religious practice than they experienced among their own peers...
...They distinguish what the professor wants them to give back on an exam from what is applicable to personal beliefs...
...They are also more likely than the stay-puts to rate themselves as extremely liberal or liberal...
...The young CEO had no sooner finished his story then the prescribed question was asked, "How do you think what you have done reflected your mission statement...
...In crunch situations these assumed values come to the surface and strongly influence the course of events...
...This was the most unexpected finding in our analysis of the 1988 young Catholic sample...
...We told them to be the best and the brightest and we have a hard time on Sunday putting the best and the brightest in from of them...
...She is twenty-two, a young Catholic adult who has, to put it mildly, an ambivalent attitude toward the insitutional church...
...a RCIA group with their necks stretched toward the Easter Vigil wondering how to "fit in" the Creed...
...It doesn't grant a spiritual dimension to parenthood...
...How do we hand on anything we love or care about...
...These statistics appear once, whereas the Donald and Ivana Trump fiasco is mentioned every single day...
...Roof notes that congregations which are attentive to young adult themes are "showing lots of ferment...
...How do von follow up...
...There's no drivenness, like nut going will be a sin, a mortal sin...
...It can be comforting...
...Margaret: The church can learn from young adults that faith and religion is not a package that you buy like a word processing package...
...I'm not saying that we all ought to march out to Idaho to join the survivalists, but concern for the interweaving of religion and culture can be overdone...
...Three or four different toddlers on the block will scatter with their parents to three or four different child-care arrangements...
...life-cycle" explanations is to compare today's young Catholics with those who were 20-40 a decade ago...
...Our sexuality is not simply an individualistic capacity but binds us with others in families, that is, in some of the most rewarding and most demanding of human relationships...
...Once they're in a place and willing to work, they're given responsibilities because there is such a need...
...never accomplished in a way that is neat...
...Within the adult world, it defined nonparents as nonpersons...
...and, of course, liturgies-all types of liturgies, in all types of places, with all types of people...
...I have finally learned that my invitations to appreciate the goodness and pervasiveness of sexuality sound not only redundant but even naive to audiences hungry for a solid answer to shallow or cynical versions of precisely that same message...
...Young Catholics, confused and divided over what their Catholic inheritance consists of, crave leadership and direction...
...Marie: "I find the Catholic church intractable on issues only tangentially related to fundamental beliefs...
...Arrival and departure times vary family by family...
...John: That's why we have in surprise people who conic with preconceptions...
...It is so easy for us middle-class Americans to fall into the market-model for thinking about the faith (or anything else...
...These values are mostly implicit, assumptions that are not directly reflected on...
...I had to soothe a lot of feathers...
...The drift back is part of a reintegration which occurs at the time of marriage...
...How does he balance compassion and care for the vacillating wife with staff disruption...
...Too little attention is paid to the topic of work in church literature and church programming...
...Now as those children move into young adulthood, 20-35 years of age, they have other occasions to reflect on the second, and even comtemplate a third: Will our faith have adults...
...He thinks that lack of institutional affiliation with any church more than defection to evangelicalism is the major issue among young Hispanics...
...The life choices made by lay people-in their jobs, families, neighborhoods, and in politics-are ultimately value choices, shaping communities and the nation...
...Traditionalists try to connect past teaching with the modern world by arguing that those who experience sexual intimacy and honestly examine it will agree that the relationship is a form of "mutual self-gift" (in a phrase of John Paul II), which intrinsically requires het-erosexuality, commitment, permanency, exclusivity, and procreation...
...Oprah Winfrey I'm not...
...You better not come near me," then we are just mere words and they know it...
...Build a career...
...Your mothers put the babies down for naps at about the same time in the afternoon and then had coffee together...
...And yet, contrary to these assumptions, the students themselves are very much aware of their religious identities, or lack thereof...
...Yet, he knew his future earnings and his advancement in the company would be harmed if he did not accept the move...
...In all its dimensions, sex is both a psychospiritual experience and an embodied one, and both aspects contribute to its moral character...
...On these particular topics Catholicism tends to be muddled and unhelpful...
...Eliot's kneeling "where prayer has been valid...
...In other words, how is the local church going to relate to the lives of people...
...So I wrote to him and I wished him good luck and I gave him Martha's address in New Jersey and I gave him Michael Mullen's address...
...Martha: Let me play devil's advocate: We hear from young adults that the church is aimed at youngsters, fami -lies, and old people, and there is no place for them...
...He has a deeper set of values that guide the way he implements his working knowledge and skills...
...One strategy suggested by psychologists is to develop mentors, a venerable tradition...
...There they find others who are willing to support them, struggle, question, and muddle through together...
...these do tend to fit the requirements of the secularist analysis...
...The Catholic sense, it has been claimed, stresses peoplehood, tradition, community, and rationality...
...The religious sense, however vague and unarticulated, remains and students see themselves as part of something greater than what is evident only to the senses, as responsible and accountable even in the privacy of their own thoughts and feelings, and as requiring a bond or connection with the divine...
...It was easy for young families to connect with other young families...
...What follows is an anecdotal, totally unscientific, and highly prejudicial exercise in eavesdropping...
...This tradition of being against tradition, this pluralism and need to choose, is aggravated by the pace of social change, the complexity of our society, and the strain of inter-generational relations...
...For the general Catholic population (all age groups), Catholics lose more than they gain in converts (net loss of about 5 percent...
...Rather than asking how we can make the faith more believable to our younger members, we should usually be asking why it is not more believable to ourselves...
...How about when they return...
...We divide among ourselves on how to interpret this phenomenon...
...As a result, Catholics now speak more tentatively and with much less confidence about the church's authority in matters of sexual morality...
...Our church has set up the finest private educational system in the world...
...Patrick's, Chicago, John Foniana, executive director, and The Young Adult Ministry Office of the Archdiocese of Chicago, the Rev...
...And that's true of all ages...
...Knowing that someone cared enough...
...What is new, at least in our society, is the unabashed celebration of such sexual activity by commercial and advertising interests, and its ensuing marketing in popular culture...
...She wants to know how bad it is going to be...
...But if traditional ethics does not have absolute credibility for these students, neither do any of the proposed alternatives...
...What makes them come back to the church...
...They live on the task side of the world...
...and 32.3 percent some college vs...
...3) sex as procreative...
...Sure we'll take a little time out for Sunday Mass, sitting through another irritating liturgy and another stupefying homily with a few other Irish, Italian, Polish, and Mexican families...
...Just before the commercial break a scroll appeared on the screen with this sight-bite: "By some estimates the Roman Catholic church has lost 25 percent of its members in recent years...
...How could married couples remain faithful...
...The processes of the world are shot through with divine encouragement and support...
...So what are all those college students up to when they fill the chapel for Sunday Mass...
...The failure to have such a program, for whatever excuse, comes close to irresponsible pastoral leadership...
...I was invit-ed...
...The good Episcopalians' practice of ordaining women made them wholly unsuitable candidates for the use of a Catholic cathedral, reasoned the charismatic...
...Since 1970 the percentage of women in the work force with children under the age of three has doubled...
...The two wage-earner family requires shared authority and tradeoffs between work and family structure...
...They believe in God and they pray...
...These Catholics, some parents of adolescents and young adults, see the church as their religio-cultural home, even as "mother" and "teacher," but they disagree that sexual and marital experience necessarily confirm all current church teaching...
...Okay, so the old way was wrong...
...In fact, the sight-bite was wrong...
...on what to do with reconciliation...
...The future of Catholicism will emerge from the interaction of their perceptions and the questions they ask about the present shape of things...
...Moreover, for purposes of comparison with Roof's Protestant baby boomers study, we also sampled a 20-40 age group and broke that sample into those born before 1963 (baby boomers) and those after (the baby busters...
...I think they keep coming back in spite of all the strangeness and goofiness in our provision and organization of ministry in the church...
...Since this is considerably different from mainline Protestant groups, whose population is aging, as well as evangelical-conservative Protestants, what explanation is there for a younger age distribution among Catholics...
...When compared to moderate and conservative Protestants who lose more of the better educated than they gain, in-conversion rates to Catholicism involve a kind of "upward switching" for the church...
...What amazing information...
...It's time that we realize that the target of evangelization ought to be our own...
...On the other side, they lack a huge asset that their parents drew on heavily during the roughly twenty-five years after World War II: a parent-friendly culture...
...Remember that marrying a Catholic explains about two-thirds of all conversions to Catholicism...
...Remember names...
...The meeting will take place October 5-7 at the Midland Hotel in Chicago...
...And this is precisely what is being done...
...On with the balancing act...
...Even if Joyce is off by four-fifths, this means Catholics will have to "break up into groups...
...When the subject is Catholic identity, it is not long before James Joyce is quoted: "Catholicism means here comes everybody...
...As a result, their moral musings are highly tentative, subjective, and devoid of any aspiration to guide or teach anyone else...
...Nor should we exaggerate...
...The issue may not be that the harvest is not ripe, but that the laborers and organizational response are few and weak...
...That doesn't even enter their heads...
...Roof's sample seeks a spirituality that helps make sense of their lives...
...People who are now young adults didn't come from the structured Catholic families of the forties and fifties...
...This is the first generation of American Catholics that has grown up in a relatively secular world...
...Unfortunately, cross-fertilization between groups rarely occurs...
...In sum, we are not losing our best and brightest and, surely, not our most committed and religious...
...It's good Catholic theology that in the secular, the sacred has chosen to root itself...
...It means a commitment to build a mutually satisfying sexual relationship, to mutual respect, to understanding and support...
...They often experiment with a variety of jobs and careers...
...This suspicion was no doubt based on sex's undeniable tendency to break social and moral restraints, and to seek fulfillment in self-centered, manipulative, and even violent ways...
...Get an education...
...We can't really complain about something which we permit, so we go along and get along, as our seminaries increasingly attract effeminate and unconvinced young men, our liturgies grow frivolous and shallow, our kids are socialized by television, and our consumerism outpaces our longing for the One Thing Necessary...
...in order to turn the title inside out and ask: Will our faith have children...
...John: "If you don't accept that what the magisterium of the church says is true, if you don't accept that they have the authority to do that, then in essence you are not really holding the Catholic faith...
...The traditionalists put conformity to magisterial teaching high on the list of Catholic identity markers...
...Young Catholics, 1990: When Richard Wood and I analyzed 1988 NORC data, time and money constraints precluded a full point-by-point comparison with the 18-29 year olds of a decade earlier...
...Although women seem to understand better than men that sexual intimacy naturally entails psychological intimacy, I doubt this difference is innate...
...A family's schedule becomes an intricate application of time-and-motion principles...
...Spousehood and parenthood are linked in the long-term commitment of the couple, sexually expressed...
...He does his part and the brothers do theirs...
...Maree: Anything that is screaming at them the loudest and preaching at them the loudest, is catching their attention...
...Did we ever...
...Since per-sonhood is the most distinctive quality of the human being, it is the most personal aspect of sexuality which is most morally important...
...We are a universal church comprised of diverse peoples...
...However, the shortcoming of "progressive marriage" as we see it in the U.S...
...An African proverb says: "It takes a village to raise a child...
...How do you invite...
...The deep associations and mutual reinforcements of sex, love, and parenthood are missing-partly because the church's teaching authority itself has narrowed their reciprocity to an experientially unintelligible focus on reproductive genital acts taken as separate events...
...Another way to test "cohort" vs...
...This happened twice...
...But this is never the relevant question...
...They give themselves lower grades as a religious person and are more likely, if married, not to want any more children...
...In other words, physical satisfaction or pleasure, interpersonal intimacy, and parenthood are not three separate "variables," or possible meanings of sex which we are morally free to combine or omit in different ways...
...Some mothers at home feel stranded, with no playmates for their children...
...Single parents live different lives from married parents...
...Look at the wonderful storv of the pharisee and the public an Jesus asked...
...While our dinner conversations and disagreements were spirited, they were never unloving...
...But we like ourselves just fine, thanks...
...More than getting a job, more than tying the knot, having a child was what made you a grown-up...
...They do not separate out going to church and not going to Communion...
...John: I think that they just do not see personal value in the church...
...Using sexual acts and relationships as an outlet for our physical drives or as a means of access to physical enjoyment is not bad, but it is limited...
...The credo of many of these young Catholics is that mother church knows best...
...Is this not a large part of the reason why young, single people are ignored or written off in our usual church ministries...
...In Uganda, the whole family has an investment in the growing relationship and expects the couple to make it work, persuading, admonishing, and supporting them as need be...
...Controversies over sexual morality are shaped by at least four constituencies, having LISA SOWLE CAHILL is professor of theology at Boston College and author of Between the Sexes: Foundations for a Christian Ethics of Sexuality (Paulist...
...Raskob Foundation for Catholic Activities, Inc...
...Though we do better than any other religious group in retaining people under 45, the commitment and belief of young Catholics do not seem to be as strong as that of older Catholics...
...Since at least the 1960s, interpersonal values have moved to center stage in the Catholic picture of sex, just as more attention has been paid to the experience of actual sexual relationships...
...Finally, for comparative purposes, I was urged to check out the research-in-progress of Presbyterian young adults in their thirties, a study focusing on mainline Protestant baby boomers...
...Chicago, IL 60606 Phone:312-782-6171 The meeting is funded by: ACTA Foundation Catholic Communication Campaign Corporate Health Advisors, Inc...
...They were involved in Newman, Catholic campus ministry when they were away at school, and it's the next logical thing...
...By their thirties, it is not uncommon to see young adults become clinically depressed if they have not become their own person...
...It is meant to permeate and transform the whole of life...
...He shows that if we control for marriage age (which is higher) and the proportion of the population remaining unmarried (also higher), these two variables alone explain a blip in religious non-affiliation during the 1960s and 1970s, a blip that is now leveling off...
...How was he to choose between the competing values in his life...
...Liturgy and doctrine," he concluded, "are closely related and both are supposed to prefigure heaven...
...She bit...
...Also she took up more time than I had to give...
...This perennial task, we suggest, may have its greatest challenge in meeting this generation of young Catholics...
...We've got to be able to mine the goodness of that and direct people creatively beyond individualism, beyond just taking care of number one...
...That message will be heard only if it is addressed honestly to the real sexual experiences of young adult Catholics, and only if the messengers can listen to and even learn from their audience's response...
...Andrew Greeley, as I understand him, says it's because they love the religion, because they enjoy being Catholics...
...Though they might be in a different city or in a different town there are those prayers, the things that have happened, have always happened...
...It's harder for economic reasons...
...Especially when Mass attendance was measured by "several times a month," religious practice reached nearly 50 percent and was better than or comparable to that of their American Protestant or Canadian Catholic age-mates...
...The authors of American Catholic Laity argue that "all other things being equal, the religious attitudes and behavior patterns that young Catholics develop during their formative years [18-29 years of age] tend to persist in their middle years and when they are older...
...Marie, twenty-five, sits on the new spring grass and squints from the April sun...
...Half the nation's households were parent households in 1960, but only a third are now...
...How to choose work or plan a career...
...This point carries a particular weight because the parents place these considerations on a balance sheet...
...So one essential part of preaching the good news will be the effort to liberate people from inadequate ideas and habits of the imagination...
...This is one reason why these parents feel they're under more stress than their own parents were...
...But the choices are not simple, and today they are made more complicated than ever by the rapidly changing context within which careers (or vocations) are pursued...
...He finished his story with a question to the group...
...Selective eavesdropping suggests the future of Catholicism will be tied up with a concern about values and work, with the question of who will be the primary carriers of the Catholic identity, with how to find, express, and communicate the spiritual reality at the heart of Catholicism, and with how parish life will cooperate with the essential concerns of life in American culture and society...
...We Catholics, when you shuck right down to the corn, are just about indistinguishable from all the other nice people in North American society...
...Protestant boomers Wade Clark Roof's study of 1,400 Presbyterian baby-boomers found that 41 percent of those originally confirmed in that church remained connected to the church, 21 percent returned after drop-ping-out, one third stayed out...
...Parents and kids no longer dominate entire blocks...
...It's always been a functional thing...
...In other words, the African form of gradual marriage carries with it at every stage an increasing level of personal, familial, and social weight and responsibility...
...2. Defection rates: Ten years ago, defection rates ran 15 percent for young adult Catholics as a whole and 22 percent for those recently married...
...Is parish ministry going to be perceived as in league with the concerns of people or as placing one more burden on them...
...Third, the traditional restraints have not wholly disappeared...
...We've become increasingly unable to form a community of sufficient conviction to question or even mildly startle modernity because we have such a stake in it...
...Even in their early twenties, 48 percent of Protestants and 47 percent of Catholics attend church at least once a month (Catholics are significantly less likely than Protestants, in this age group, to reply "never" when asked about church attendance...
...The clue here seems to be that higher education is related to proclivity to convert, in either direction...
...It was steady: Supper time at 5:30...
...We live in a tradition rich in paradoxes that can elicit hope in the midst of ambiguities and frustrations...
...When we compared the baby boomers (26-40) with the baby busters (20-25), at first we found a number of statistically significant correlations on some items relating to religious practice and attitudes toward sexual morality, political tolerance, and worldview (for example, "Human nature is basically good vs...
...The great percentage of young converts to Catholicism are married (61.3 percent), 12.9 percent are divorced, 26 percent have never married (much higher than cradle Catholics, perhaps again a sign that conversion into Catholicism comes mainly through marriage to a Catholic...
...Margaret: There is no compulsion in attend Mass and to receive the sacraments...
...These parents look back fondly on the rhythm of family life in their own childhood...
...Teachers and parents used to be partners, these parents say, but the relationship today isn't as friendly as it once was and, at times, it becomes adversarial...
...That quip may not be fair, but it does acknowledge the plurality and suggest a bit of the antagonism at work...
...Church sexual teachings, when considered at all, are written off as obsolete, oppressive, and outrageous...
...They are more likely to lose adherents to Catholicism than vice versa...
...And 60 percent of these married couples pray together...
...or if she dye, to set up Mary Queen of Scotland, or some other Romish Prince, for the advancement of the Mother Church...
...Procreation as the primary purpose of sex was maintained as late as 1930 (in Pius XI's encyclical Casti connubii...
...Yet I have learned from them that there is an innate hunger for meaning...
...Those who leave are slightly better educated than stay-put cradle Catholics in the sample...
...I lack a doctoral degree in liturgy, but will somebody please explain to me why the tabernacle (if we're allowed to call it that any more) is about as easy to find in most Catholic churches now as the bathroom...
...John: The level of their participation in the Mass and sacraments sends many of their parents right up the wall...
...I'm not supposed to be in this particular situation, jogging around this particular Indiana subdivision, listening to Motown oldies on the Walkman earphones and thinking about the eye infection that our dog picked up somewhere...
...At the same time, these young parents feel constantly reminded of the comparative economic advantage that's enjoyed by then-childless contemporaries, such as singles without children and couples without children...
...Yet the trend for young Catholics to contract mixed marriages in comparison to previous generations of Catholics is relatively weak, especially when compared to the more dramatic increase in interdenominational marriage patterns among Protestants of all ages...
...The shift in jobs has brought a shift in organizational behavior...
...There is a rumble among people who teach the Catholic faith in high schools and colleges that students "don't know much...
...We're asking a question here that is not theirs...
...All young adult Catholics must face this question-of whether or not the version of Catholicism in which they were raised is really an adequate version of the tradition and the church has to help them ask and answer this question...
...Catholicism has often been equated with beliefs and behaviors...
...We will lose some of our members to these other points of view...
...The evangelicals, however, do better than Catholics in gaining converts from the ranks of young unchurched Americans...
...We can conclude, then, in summary form: 1- When compared to older Catholics, young adults are less practicing and less "committed" to the church as an institution...
...about the difficult tasks of being a young consultant in a shifting, often irrational milieu...
...The question to the group was, "Recall a time when you made a decision which you think reflected the mission statement of your facility...
...That is, a child can't be raised well solely by two parents, let alone just one, but has to be raised by a family that's embedded in a larger community of loving and responsible grownups...
...Those of us who oppose the killing of the unborn, the execution of criminals, the annihilation of cities, and the use of food as a weapon say that we oppose these things because we believe that human life is sacred, but the word "sacred" seems a quaint and old-fashioned usage...
...Few authentic and credible voices lead us to that place where orthodoxy and Spirit embrace...
...Come and join us...
...This is certainly a positive way to go about it...
...In the 1950s, the typical family of breadwinner-father and homemaker-mother represented over 50 percent of the population...
...they are attuned to the forces of the external world and the inner dynamics of growth...
...Within the universe of married couples, there has been a similar growth in diversity, as the look-alike couple of the 1950s and 1960s, with its bread-winning husband and homemaking wife, has been joined by the couple who works one-and-a-half jobs and the couple who works two jobs and even the couple who works three or four jobs...
...It was the ticket of admission to community life...
...In these circumstances, the spiritual and psychological challenge facing young adults is enormous...
...He wanted a response from the group...
...She views the situation from a "them" and "me" point of view...
...What kind of a life do I want...
...Students from Catholic backgrounds where Mass attendance was not a familiar pattern are far less likely to make it so at the university...
...Of the 26 million married women currently in the work force, 20 percent earn more than their husbands...
...Or should we have the attitude that they are number one...
...Maree: Let's look at those young adults who go to daily Mass...
...It tells us the very opposite thing, in fact: That we are supposed to be jogging around and around the same tediously pleasant Indiana subdivision wired into easy listening and worrying about the dog's eye infection...
...Funky as the feast of Saint Martin might be, and nostalgic as anyone wants to get about it, this distinctively Catholic contribution to a national culture couldn't even help Rhenish Catholics become martyrs...
...They gravitate toward sacraments, especially the Eucharist...
...But marriage, friendship, the encounter with a stranger, and the notion of responsibility for others are pretty provisional and stinting as enshrined in American custom and law, and if we young adult Catholics can't astonish-perhaps even scare a little-our fellow Americans with the Kingdom's understanding of such relationships, we might as well buy the kids more access to cable TV, procure them safer dope and better condoms, and go jogging around the suburbs until the coronary comes...
...Some people choose to raise flowers...
...People begin to feel a need to articulate moral principles when they have a sense of responsibility for others, for some portion of the common good...
...Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann called secularism a lie about the world...
...She was thirty-three...
...Over half (57 percent) of those leaving did not join another church, while 25 percent joined a new age religion, and the remainder joined other Christian churches...
...As these parents describe them, moreover, their schedules rarely mesh with the schedules of other families on their block or in their community...
...Or a place that somehow tells you that there's more that goes on than meets the eye...
...They must pass through a stage that is questioning, critical, distancing, maybe rebellious...
...It's the media...
...the Mormons give a couple years of their life right back to their church...
...Catholics actually do slightly better than evangelicals in retaining members under 45 (59 percent vs...
...On the other hand, some have grown up with very positive experiences of the church...
...It was obvious to me why this man, even at a young age, was a CEO...
...In unusual or difficult circumstances, the other two (sexual intercourse and procreation) can be subordinated to the love relationship of the couple as long as they are still given significant practical recognition...
...When they are doing well with studies, schedules, and other responsibilities, they also attend Mass...
...The fourth group, the "alienated," no longer feel any special tie to the Catholic church or any necessity to justify, struggle with, or refute its teachings...
...31.9 percent...
...This is ROBERT J. EGAN, S.J., is the assistant to the academic vice president and teaches theology and spirituality at Gonzaga University in Spokane...
...Parents aren't necessarily there to play in the block's Softball game, if there is one, or lead a Brownie troop, if there is one, or teach a group of kids how to make paper dolls or model cars...
...One Catholic Christian value of sexuality is permanence: the love relationship established sexually between a woman and a man should be long-term and not transient...
...Wouldn't it be wonderful if we said, "The Lord be with you...
...What passes among them as a moral principle is most often a statement of fact ("everybody does...
...If there it a Lutheran school, it's all taught by people who have gone through Lutheran college...
...How do we hand on the inspirations for our committed service and the causes of our joy...
...What impresses me," says Roof, "is that many of these people are looking for faith that is related to the modern world...
...American Catholics are incredibly successful people...
...John: Young adults arc teaching the official church a very painful lesson: that they can live rather well without us...
...When she left my office at the Crossroads Center several hours later, she knew that it was not just a new job she needed: "I realize that my life is out of balance...
...When I meet women or men who serve in other church ministries and identify myself as a campus minister, I am often met with a gesture of some sympathy because "college students today are so alienated or secularistic, and it must be very hard to work with them...
...How the participants are named is important...
...Some of them are attracted to fundamentalist Christian groups by the clarity and simplicity of their offer of certain truth and salvation...
...I cite these statistics to signal my intent to sum up what we know statistically about young adult Catholics, information that sometimes goes against the grain of what we think we know...
...They are detrimental to Catholic affiliation, as they are to all denominational groups...
...I believe it does just that...
...Increasingly that useful distinction has been lost to view, giving way to an ideology which seeks to monitor all public and academic life in an authoritative manner...
...Religious non-affiliation rates, in his view, are less a cohort phenomenon than a reflection of the fact that today the young have a longer moratorium than their parents on marriage, family, and institutional commitments-including commitment to the church...
...Their kids move back and forth, from mother to father, one neighborhood to the other, with one schedule for some weekends, and a different schedule for the others...
...To cite one example: When asked to choose between a priority of recruiting more priests or of "think[ing] of new ways to structure parish leadership to include more deacons, sisters and lay persons," 74 percent of the college students, 62 percent of lay adults under 39, and 52 percent of adults 40-54 preferred the ministerial restructuring option over the option to recruit more priests...
...Far from being envied for their freedom or independence or devotion to career, childless adults were the objects of pity and condescension and even discrimination...
...To a degree, there is nothing new about the prevalence of sexual activity or experimentation in this age group...
...They have the freedom, the resources, the mobility, the exposure to pluralism, to make these issues into choices, even if these multiplied possibilities may cause anxiety and can become debilitating...
...Maybe young adults now having children are asking that question too...
...or does it say, "Here is what you must do to get whatever service you may want...
...By "life-cycle," sociologists mean that sitting loose with institutional commitments may represent a temporary phenomenon among young adults with a rebound to the church upon marriage and starting a family...
...What about young Catholics...
...Or perhaps, in some way, we ourselves are to blame...
...The church is a community and a mystery...
...As a result, I always approach the days preceding the first Sunday of the fall semester with foreboding...
...Margaret: A Gallup poll recently reported in the New York Times that 90 percent of married couples remain faithful...
...Why have they left...
...The rest of the faith, young Catholics like Chris contend, is more or less packaging and they prefer their spiritual gifts unwrapped, thank you...
...But also go after them...
...What distinguishes our community from theirs...
...Secularism, as an ideology, reads the data of our behavior with purported objectivity and claims to see in those data little or no evidence of significant religiously influenced behavior...
...The responsibility of young adult Catholics today is what the responsibility of Catholics young and old has always been: to be witnesses in the world of God's kingdom, which is in, but not of, the world...
...They try to stretch the day at both ends by waking the kids earlier and sending them to bed later than pediatricians and teachers might like...
...We no longer tolerate a sexual ethics that sees the body as "bad," and to be repressed, while only our spiritual side is "holy...
...Now he will do anything for me...
...Why won't young people today go into religious life or into any form of church leadership...
...They also raise questions which I cannot pursue here, though I have advocated modifications (a group-two goal...
...They are just as likely as cradle Catholics to see the human person as more good than evil...
...It is a kind of amnesia on principle...
...We can say that there's room and welcome...
...John C. Cusick, director...
...My sense is that it stems from a distaste for the seemingly absolute certitude of the prolife side, especially its confident willingness to try to make its view legally binding on all...
...It just docs not speak to them...
...It has an affinity for both/and rather than either/or statements...
...There are two competing claimants for my understanding of the students with whom I work...
...John: Sometimes what attracts young Catholics to church can be found in their criticism...
...Okay not wrong, but what...
...There is," as Robert Imbelli wrote recently in Commonweal [April 6], "simply no Christian faith without the density of real presence...
...This century's legacy to the next may well be a peculiarly uncatholic church...
...They want some decision-making procedures that can affirm and challenge their instincts...
...Referring to what segment of the Catholic population...
...Kate: Thai's especially true when you have people that have had good experiences when they were little, or in Newman or CYO...
...But they are not criticizing the word of God or Scripture or Holy Communion...
...In Religious Change in America (Harvard University Press, 1989), Andrew Greeley offers evidence for a life-cycle explanation that also accounts for the longer period of time during which young adults remain "away...
...But conversations with them often reveal a fairly intact, if not fully developed, belief system...
...But those who convert are currently much more practicing than Catholics who leave...
...I'm supposed to be tenderly explaining to a tearful Meryl Streep that our relationship wouldn't really be free if it required the fracture of a marital vow, and that deep down inside, she knows she would love me less if I were to abandon my wife and children, however briefly, for some South American joyride...
...A generation ago, the dominance of a virtual monoculture of parenthood was excessive...
...you've got to believe what the church believes...
...The major variables associated with leaving the church are, in their order of importance: first, a mixed marriage, especially if the non-Catholic spouse is either very devout or very lukewarm about religion-this accounted for 42 percent of the defections...
...Take the business consultant, a young woman, pregnant with her first child, who came to talk about organization ethics...
...Sex with little or no commitment shortchanges sex's potential for intimacy...
...They are in search of ah identity that their culture, their families, their roles, their work no longer fully provide, an identity that enables them to give some shape to their own lives...
...almost always, it is about how well my Unitarian and Jewish colleagues and I work together for common religion...
...Honest...
...Of course, in any culture, adolescents must struggle to come loose from their family environments, to achieve sufficient autonomy to go out into the world and build their own lives...
...The mean education and occupational prestige index of Catholic converts is somewhat higher than that of Catholics who leave for another denomination (but not higher than that of Catholics who leave, but do not join another church...
...Others see it as unprecedented opportunity...
...This all seems pretty obvious, but a lot of talk about young adult Catholics seems to ignore it...
...Second, rightly or wrongly, the Catholic church has a very real credibility problem on the issue of sexual morality...
...For young adult Catholics, 18-29 years of age, dis-affiliation rates run about 15 percent in general and rise to 22 percent in the early married years...
...My immediate family boasts one charismatic, a contemplative (my mother), two ex-seminarians, a supernumerary in Opus Dei, a Pascalian (my husband), a Maryknoll groupie, and one frustrated layman plagued with an affliction called "clerical namedropping," a form of clergy envy, who seeks therapy through reading passages of Greeley aloud at the dinner table...
...On one side, they're saddled with liabilities that their parents didn't have: a tougher economy, added claims on the hours in the day, a different social fabric, a new divergence of local interests...
...pastors and principals resorting to petitionary prayer over the school budget...
...Are they gone for good or are they going through a phase...
...That's been true, if frequently lost from sight, from the beginning...
...But according to the best evidence, we can not expect this behavior to continue once they get married and start families...
...Prior to the beginning of the program, this professor had engaged me in a very knowledgeable conversation about religion and theological developments, so naturally I noted her omission of any reference in her presentation to the differences stemming from the religious identity of the freshmen...
...The Catholic "message" is that the interdependence of sex's pleasurable, intimate, and parental aspects can anchor our sexuality in some of the most enduring and rewarding human relationships...
...Spousehood is embodied through the shared material conditions of economic and domestic life, and through sexuality, which can give rise to a shared physical relation to the child...
...And we'll admirably sponsor and participate in the work of soup kitchens and homeless centers and AIDS hospices and Catholic Worker houses and battered women shelters and recycling programs and third-world development projects, but that's just good citizenship...
...If these conversations are done in community, there is a better chance that some life-giving wisdom will be arrived at...
...JOHN SHEA is professor of systematic theology at the University of St...
...At the same time, when the circumstances are welcoming, they often do discover the campus church community as such a place...
...Having said this, however, one also realizes that human circumstances sometimes arise in which not all three values (sex itself, commitment or love, and parenthood) can be realized simultaneously...
...But a little self-reproach, a little repentance, a little fasting, a little silence, and a little prayer might begin to do marvelous things to the crumbling old cultural forms and the forms that have yet to rise...
...But of what sort...
...we will be able to say to our own young people, "You are important here...
...the threats of AIDS and marital breakdown...
...Am I doing the right work...
...Finally, a decade late, we might finally heed George Gallup's plea at the beginning of the 1980s...
...Where the God of surprises says...
...The fact is, the proportion of Catholics currently living in mixed marriages (about 20 percent) remains stable...
...What I am is a vegetarian Catholic...
...The divorced, in our sample, reported significantly less "closeness to God" or accepting that human nature is basically good...
...50 percent of evangelical converts under 45...
...It is college students' perceived disregard of the church's teachings on sexuality that gives credence and comfort to proponents of secularization, even as it feeds the alarm and despair of ecclesiastical pessimists...
...Many of the questions and criticisms of young adults push in this direction...
...Every move must be carefully designed...
...Isn't it time we start spending more time understanding the sacramentality of work...
...John Coleman's data suggest that these familiar rhetorical strategies may be based on false impressions...
...And why is it almost always the Catholic worship services that show these large numbers...
...Therefore, and this is the second assumption, religious beliefs are best kept private...
...Although such messages are often ecumenically garbed, their aim is not the unity of religious organizations but a reduction of religion into an amalgam so bland no one will have to pay attention...
...He answered, "I don't know...
...When a shoe is lost, or a cold car engine fails to turn over, or a baby fills his diaper just after you've zipped him into his snowsuit, or the traffic jams up, or the staff meeting runs late, then the entire schedule can collapse...
...Married, with two small children, he was offered a promotion if he transferred to a company in South Africa...
...It's the group of people who have experienced the greatest success, young adults, that is looking for quality leadership from their own church and we can't give it to them...
...Gordon Zahn, in his disturbing and magisterial German Catholics and Hitler's Wars, writes about the colorful Rhineland festival in which throngs of costumed children annually follow an equestrian representing Saint Martin of Tours, "the glory of Gaul and a light to the Western church of the fourth century," begging treats from delighted onlookers much as our own kids do at Halloween...
...This may involve aesthetic judgments and social and political attitudes, as well as moral and religious commitments...
...They're at a disadvantage at work, they say, since many of their bosses and fellow workers suspect parents of letting children divide their loyalty, sap their energy, and disrupt their concentration...
...Her dad nearly lost his job as a telegrapher with the Erie Railroad for refusing to let his work schedule interfere with Sunday Mass and devotions, and her nephew's passionate faith so suffused my own upbringing that I couldn't figure out how to leave the Catholic church if I wanted to...
...A place to be inspired...
...Church on Sunday morning, followed by dinner at 2. And it was shared: You went in for your supper when the other kids on the block went in for theirs...
...Somewhere along the line the quest for meaning, the quest for faith, needs to be translated into religion...
...As these parents see it, their role doesn't stand on the same moral plane as raising zinnias or neon terras...
...His studies and analysis maintain that a pervasive religious sensibility exists in American society, especially among young people...
...Even at Notre Dame, I heard students defend the wisdom of avoiding modern atheistic philosophers lest their fare prove too tempting...
...However justified divorce may sometimes be, the very high incidence of divorce seems to be due to cultural forgetfulness that the commitment to marital partnership requires both ongoing personal dedication and strong social supports...
...In-converts have higher median educations than cradle Catholics (25.9 percent college graduate vs...
...Many, in fact, will chart their patterns of Mass attendance according to the ups and downs of their general behavior...
...And do you know what my wife, children, and I heard a sermon about at Mass this very morning...
...At last, Catholics have everything immigrant generations worked for-except an immigrant church, vigorous, disciplined, trusted...
...And we're not necessarily saying that there isn't some grave mailer...
...Fordham sociologist Joseph Fitzpatrick, S.J., estimates a 20-25 percent defection rate among all Hispanic Catholics with no appreciable increase from a decade ago...
...Secularism is pretty powerful stuff...
...The Catholic community has many resources-symbolic, intellectual, liturgical, mystical-for alerting its younger members to the moral and intellectual deficiencies, for example, of individualism, of positivism, of unfettered capitalism, of secularism, of racism and sexism...
...We can meet them where they're at and welcome them...
...But sexual intimacy can express and augment psychological intimacy, affection, reciprocal understanding and encouragement, partnership, companionship, compassion, and even commitment...
...Each phase of life has its own tasks and challenges...
...Are you in the state of grace...
...Chuck: It's also a place for some young people to make sense of the turmoil they're experiencing...
...One need not have sympathy for the practice to recognize the presence of some innate (I would say moral) mechanism that must be turned off by chemical means before these individuals feel free to act contrary to traditional norms...
...That is, every act must be part of a permanently committed, heterosexual, love relationship...
...They stand behind the idea that Vatican positions on matters like premarital sex, birth control, abortion, homosexuality, and divorce can brook no "dissent...
...This is one of the results of demographic change...
...What our culture most needs to hear is an effective critique of individualist, materialist, and transient sexual relationships-not lists of specific transgressions which are "against church teaching...
...Chris and Marie each belonged to lay faith communities-one to a traveling liturgical dance troupe and the other to a Catholic student house...
...As Kenneth Briggs notes in reporting this data: "Those who go back to [any] church look for two things in particular: religious education for their children and some kind of religious experience that helps make sense of their own lives...
...With the help of Richard Wood of the sociology department at Berkeley, I did so...
...In fact, they point to a formidable challenge for the church's ministry...
...I chuckled when I read that, but only a little...
...We believe and act on our belief that one specific human being, Jesus, is the son of Mary and the Son of God and that he has conquered the world and is present among us as this particular fragment of bread and this particular cup of wine, giving himself to us as food until he comes again in glory...
...Chuck: So many go to church and no one talks to anybody else and maybe there's a beautiful handshake and a kiss of peace but there's not a real warmth or joy...
...I stick closely to these sources in trying to answer the following questions: 1. How do younger Catholics today compare with older Catholics...
...What do you think attracts young adults to the church...
...By whose estimate...
...Judging by the family schedules we collected, working parents ought to be hired as scheduling consultants by the airlines...
...It is a holding fast to the truth of our ultimate grounding in God...
...The first holds that religious differences have a potential for divisive, even explosive harm...
...By analyzing NORC's 1988 data, we can compare that group of 18-29 year olds with today's...
...As my annual fall worries attest, I am not immune from this influence, even though I know from repeated experience that among college students today religious sensibility, a sense of the divine, a desire for a close relationship with God in worship and in prayer, and an allegiance, albeit without sharp definition, to the Catholic tradition and community of faith, are all present...
...This shift raising love to a level with procreation represented the influence of philosophical "personalism," and the emergent awareness of women's equality...
...1 saw him again a few weeks ago...
...friends where I might find the best statistics on American Catholicism and the most solid sociological information about young Catholics, aged 20-40...
...Fewer back porches have tricycles, fewer houses have swing sets...
...Mary of the Lake, Mundelein, Illinois...
...To be Catholic is to believe such and such and to do this and that...
...New and legitimate interests are competing for local tax dollars: elder programs, fuel assistance, toxic waste cleanup, homeless shelters...
...Thus, when I receive a compliment or recognition from academics, it is rarely about my specific ministry as a Catholic chaplain or about the strength of the community that gathers with me...
...In 1960, parents were a virtually uniform majority...
...The widespread abuse of alcohol and other drugs among students is best understood, from their own testimony, as often desperate efforts to lower and minimize natural inhibitions about sexual activity...
...Many lesbian and gay persons see their sexuality as a gift to be valued both for personal identity and in relationships...
...These efforts to downplay religious differences stand in marked contrast to the contemporary emphasis placed on other differences, those rising out of race, class, and gender...
...middle-age and older, but under and over 55...
...Whoever these new primary carriers are, they will not possess the Catholic identity in the old, clerical fashion...
...I think there's a new interest in resurrecting the church around young adults who are juggling family, marriage, and career...
...Unlike other animal species, humans have a deep capacity for friendship and interpersonal reciprocity, which, when expressed sexually, constitutes the most intense of human relationships...
...America in 1990 isn't exactly the Rhineland in 1939, but then it isn't exactly the wedding feast at Cana...
...Be somebody...
...This couldn't be...
...As do so many other victims of a hopelessly ordinary life, I often suspect that some serious mistake has been made...
...And then there are those people who have had their life unravel at an early age and have found someone within church circles to be some help to them with their family life, with their own personal life, and it's with these two groups that you sometimes sec the pull of loyalty...
...Does anybody care if I'm here...
...We have encouraged their success and asked very little in return...
...I would restate, then, another action recommendation of Young Catholics: " Every Catholic parish and diocese in the country should have a program aimed at young adults...
...They would love to pray with the pope, and perhaps receive his blessing, but they do not hang on his words or even read what he says...
...asking her what future there could really be for a couple like us...
...Sex as a physical drive...
...Delayed marriage for many young adults who pursue educational and vocational goals also means a longer period of sexual maturity and potential relationships before marriage...
...On this score, the church can act as an ally...
...The Catholic church is an experience, in parish life primarily and we can say all the right things...
...Much of the change occurs internally, yet these internal changes can be eclipsed by the demands of work and of the external world...
...Twenty-eight percent attended Mass nearly every week...
...Raising children is now viewed as a lifestyle choice, just one of a whole pastry tray of equally valuable, or equally worthless, lifestyle choices...
...And for them there is no problem...
...We are a sacramental church...
...School authorities, seeing themselves as dealing with "real" differences of race, gender, and class, do not want to allow these important issues to become more clouded or complicated by differences stemming from religious beliefs, which are seen as irrelevant or archaic...
...Age, to be sure, made a difference...
...He describes eight different "value" drives among these workers: survival, relatedness, pleasure, information, mastery, play, dignity, and meaning...
...A man and woman bring to their union links with and commitments to other persons, including their respective families and friends and, eventually, the children their union may produce...
...That the world's fullness is made and not found by us...
...Sex and love as fully embodied realities have an intrinsic moral connection to procreativity and to the shared creation and nurturing of new lives and new loves...
...But when students describe one another, religious identity and the degree of its practice are among the first characteristics they use to describe one another, along with home town and academic major...
...They like a good sermon but are patient with lesser quality, unless of the outrageous variety...
...She admitted him, then took him out...
...Since no one will believe these statistics (don't confuse our stereotypes with facts...
...Sometimes when you most expect it...
...It is rooted in the spirit of Vatican II which considers the whole church as the People of God before it mentions diverse ministries...
...There is also a sense of hospitality, festivity, and "at-homeness" with the earth and people...
...A dear cousin of mine who is trying to raise his children as Catholics wrote me a sympathetic letter recently, describing the godawful Newman Center on which their family relied...
...My experience bears out the reports of Andrew Greeley on the powerfully negative impact of Humanae vitae...
...This leads to sex's second dimension...
...Young converts are also more practicing than cradle Catholics (41.7 percent attend Mass at least two to three times a month vs...
...They shave time off one routine in order to free more time for another...
...Wood and I probed these statistics from the 1988 data...
...I don't believe that those of us in ministry should take much credit for this...
...When we come before that fragment of bread, is it such an anemic matter as T.S...
...3. How do those young adults who leave Catholicism compare with: (a) those who stay and (b) those who convert to Catholicism...
...This author would be best identified as a member of constituency two attempting to convince constituency three that there is something worthwhile about sex still to be mined in Catholic teaching-though I would have to concur in the quite legitimate impression that its practical value is not always easy to discover...
...Pretty much the same old discouraging news you can always expect a Zeitgeist to bring, horribly familiar to those fishermen, idlers, and ne'er-do-wells who one day in Palestine met someone who shared their anguish over a relentless and respectable death in a bleak prosperity...
...Why do colleagues at similar schools report the same phenomenon, with some differences and, of course, some exceptions...
...And a need to belong and the need In believe that there are others like themselves out there...
...Such a condition was an affliction, something to make the best of, possibly by volunteering to spend time with the children of neighbors or relatives...
...They are less concerned with doctrine than a spirituality for life...
...And if it's not a wel-coming community, if the attitude is "You belter have your act together...
...To teach them," as virtually all put it, "right from wrong...
...It is an attempt to continue and revitalize what a past tradition called the "lay vocation in the world...
...Ironically, what he was looking for was in the mission statement...
...So the parish provides many different ways of initiation and participation in those realities...
...Great mentors have already learned to navigate that world...
...We talk about the alienated, we talk about those who have been hurt and harmed...
...A young woman who teaches in a Catholic high school in the Boston area is one of the "opportunity" folks...
...Sex without commitment is unfaithful to the human potential of sexuality...
...Not an easy decision...
...The meaning of "love" in the sexual triad goes far beyond romantic affections...
...These young people didn't know the stability that existed before...
...The rituals have always been the same and that's important...
...we control (or think we do) recorded history's most enormous and complicated communications technology, but all we can get the damn thing to do is multiply our appetites and trivialize our dreams...
...In Christianity this support comes from ongoing communion with the realities revealed in the event of Jesus Christ...
...They call for church support of their efforts to live as faithful Christians and to gain protection of their civil rights...
...They tend to look on in disbelief as the church of their parents promotes teachings on sex which appear oblivious to the realities of human relationships, at least in the U.S...
...During my years as college professor (since 1976), lecturer, writer, and mother I have learned that the task of trying to make sense of Catholic teaching on sexuality has to be geared to dif-ferent audiences with different life experiences...
...I'm doing well in my work...
Vol. 117 • September 1990 • No. 15
