THE NEXT GENERATION: A DIAGNOSIS: We have seen the future and it's...

...Both the non-Latino and Latino samples turn out to be somewhat more educated, more white-collar, and more involved in church life than the average for Catholics aged twenty to thirty-nine...

...Almost as many agree that "there is something very special about being Catholic which you can't find in other religions...

...One is the belief that all's well as long as high percentages of young adults register agreement with a few core doctrines—though they reject the ecclesiastical teachings and the sacramental and communal participation that have conveyed and sustained those doctrines...

...Is this a case of being ecumenically correct...

...The final refuge is in the idea that what young adults may have lost in other dimensions of their faith they make up for in commitment to the poor and social justice...

...We stay also because we are educated enough to understand that we are the church...

...de N., and Juan L. Gonzales Jr...

...For Latinos, it comes as a long-overdue acknowledgment of their importance...

...In 1992,1 wrote a report for the New York Times on the preliminary findings that later became Vanishing Boundaries...

...In focus groups and interviews, virtually all respondents disparaged their own experience with religious education...

...Still higher percentages agree that "all the major world religions 16 are equally good ways of helping a person find ultimate truth...

...Who believed what...

...We stay for the radical message of love and forgiveness and community...

...Nonetheless, their final word runs more to alarm than to reassurance...

...A third is that today's young adults are merely a new species of "communal" or "cultural" Catholic...

...To their credit, the authors have highlighted findings that confounded their expectations and took them by surprise...

...Hence the title: Vanishing Boundaries...

...We are not supposed to pick and choose what we believe, but we know it is more essential to believe in the Incarnation than to believe that only men can be priests...

...Religious education for adults as well as for children (Chicago's Theology-on-Tap program has been widely adopted), social-justice programs, and retreats have engaged young adult Catholics by effectively responding to their intellectual questions, personal generosity, and spiritual hunger...

...Retreat experiences constituted the one really bright spot in these recollections...

...They also note that, to their surprise, about three quarters of the sample turned around and agreed with the statement, "The only absolute Truth for humankind is in the teachings of Jesus Christ...

...Decade by decade, the funds are running lower and lower, while the countermeasures remain halting and inadequate...

...Certainly everyone wants to believe that...

...Their knowledge of the language and symbolism of the tradition is more limited and sparse—as is their experience of Catholicism as a tight-knit culture system...

...14 The next generation: a diagnosis Peter Steinfels "In the not too distant past, the backbone of Catholic Church life, from parishes and organizations to ordained and professed religious, was people twenty-five to forty-five years old...

...I would not belong to any other organization whose practices I disagree with so much...

...We are able to discern which teachings are central...

...It is not a report card...

...Belief that Christ is really present in the Eucharist" virtually tied with "helping the poor" for second place...

...The study was set firmly in the context of the prolonged debate over the decline of mainline American Protestantism...

...On the one hand, they breathe in a culture of religious individualism...

...And we like the idea of something that can't be sold...

...Young adults were also overwhelmingly convinced that Catholics have a duty to oppose racism, close the gap between rich and poor, and preserve the environment—and again this was true across the board, indeed even more true of parish activists and the more theologically traditional than of others...

...Presbyterianism is decidedly word-oriented, and the translation of religion into a general ethics comes more easily...

...He was not sure about the new waves of Catholic, especially Latino, immigrants...

...Latinos will assimilate far more rapidly than European immigrants, especially to a popular culture that is quite ready to incorporate Latino elements in its voracious wooing of new consumers...

...There is little here that hasn't been said before...

...In a phone interview, I asked one of the authors, Dean R. Hoge, a Presbyterian himself but long a professor at The Catholic University of America and a prolific researcher of Catholic Peter Steinfels writes the "Beliefs" column for the New York Times...

...It is safe to say, then, that the study's findings are slightly rosier than the reality...

...Not surprisingly, almost twothirds don't consider going to Mass necessary to "be a good Catholic...

...Today's young adults are not communal Catholics, the authors write, but are the children of communal Catholics...

...The results are published in Young Adult Catholics...

...The essential teachings of the church stand in stark contrast to a cynical, consumer culture...

...A book like this provides a statistical reality check...

...That may not be true for the 10 percent whom the authors label "core Catholics...

...The countercultural stances of other groups and institutions get sucked up into marketing every few months, but the church remains separate from all that...

...But when the time comes, no statutory change or adjustment of rates, whether modest or drastic, will be able to compensate for the deficit...

...Even when these young adults were at odds with the church and disconnected from parish life, the high percentage "who called themselves Catholic surprised us," the authors write...

...Young Adult Catholics is such a mix of good news and bad news, reassuring findings and alarming findings that the authors themselves often seem hard pressed to reach a clear judgment...

...This is not, after all, news that most of us want to hear, and we have found a variety of ways to deflect it...

...At the same time, virtually all young adult Catholics said that they wanted their children to receive some religious instruction...

...17 The authors' attention to Latino Catholics is praiseworthy and rewarding...

...Now he has done the research, this time working with three other scholars, William D. Dinges, a professor of religious studies at Catholic University, and two sociologists, Mary Johnson, S.N.D...

...We stay because we were raised with a high level of practice and taught the rough rudiments of theology at Catholic schools and universities...

...The church appears to have done a remarkable job in restoring awareness of that dimension of the Gospel...

...The implications are portentous," the authors write...

...Not that they are overwhelmingly rosy to begin with...

...The more interesting question is, Why do we stay...

...The authors hypothesize that assimilation will come much more slowly for Latinos than for earlier immigrant groups, a conclusion that seems to rest on one part wishful thinking by scholars protective of Latino identity and three parts unwillingness by political liberals to admit the openness of American society and economy to outsiders...

...The authors wisely keep in mind the cultural mood favoring pluralism and frowning on anything smacking of religious exclusivity...

...But animated by a palpable enthusiasm and respect for the young adults with whom the authors have worked, the book reasserts a sense of struggling, generous individuals easily lost in aggregated statistics like those I have summarized...

...But the study's own data suggest, on the contrary, that the surge of Latinos will change relatively little...

...Called Vanishing Boundaries (Westminster John Knox Press), the book tracked down a representative sample of baby boomers who had been confirmed as mainline Presbyterians, and it traced their consequent religious histories: Who had left and for how long...

...preaching that is intelligent, heartfelt, and skillful...

...Over the course of two thousand years, Mary has become a virgin and professors have had to sign loyalty oaths, but the story hasn't changed...

...Another area of near unanimity was religious education...

...That was not the only surprise...

...On most levels of the church today, the leadership is still held by that same group—not the same age group, but the same people now twenty to thirty years older...

...Sacramentalism apparently remains central to young adults' Catholicism...

...For all its religious, political, and personal meanings, the Eucharist is why I'll never leave my flawed church...

...In a number of core Catholic teachings, these young adults appear largely orthodox...

...For non-Latino church leaders, it promises fresh recruits, reinforcements to fill in what seem to be the thinning ranks of the old immigrants' descendants...

...At the same time, because only about 60 to 70 percent of non-Latino youth and 30 to 40 percent of Latinos were confirmed during the 1970s and '80s, the young adults of this study do not represent all current young adult Catholics...

...Given a list of beliefs and practices and asked "how essential is each...to your vision [emphasis in the original question] of what the Catholic faith is," young Catholics ranked highest the "belief that God is present in the sacraments," with 65 percent labeling it as "essential...

...Who had returned to Presbyterian congregations...

...It is in regard to young adults' beliefs about the church itself that the findings are perhaps most significant and most difficult to interpret...

...The findings were fleshed out with focus groups, in-depth interviews, and several other national surveys...

...However labeled, the impression is that it lacks the capacity to energize congregational life, sustain social or political engagement, or pass the faith on to children...

...It is part of our identity, from plaid jumpers in childhood, to respect for celibate, learned men, to a take on fighting poverty that is not charity but justice for fellow humans...

...19...

...We stay out of loyalty to a vision of what the church could be...

...Even if we don't go to Mass every week, our worldview, our approach to politics, to work, to relationships, moves within a Catholic framework...

...For Catholics, a large group whose young are for the most part marrying fellow Christians, the consequences are not so clear...

...There are three or four reasons why we continue to call ourselves Catholic, even as we disagree with Vatican teachings on women priests, on birth control, on dissent, on homosexuality...

...The Basic Guide to Young Adult Ministry is what its title indicates, a manual filled with lists of dos and don'ts, examples and anecdotes...

...Church and family had simply not answered the question, why be a Presbyterian...

...The young Catholics still here stay because we assent to the community consuming God together, to the message that we are all connected, to the idea that the divine is present in all of us, and to the belief that this assent nourishes us...

...In practice, only one out of five attends church weekly, probably fewer than the percentage who scarcely ever darken the church steps...

...At least 80 percent expressed belief in "a divine judgment after death...

...Or even why be a Christian...

...But he was doubtful...

...Like Catholics of any generation, we like the story...

...Yet it seems that remarkably little thought has been given to this development from the viewpoint of Catholic identity and continuity rather than the viewpoint of easing marital and child-rearing tensions...

...We stay because in remaining we add a drop of liberal thought into this sea of conservative practices...

...My guess, however, is quite the opposite: The pace of change will accelerate...

...If many young adults now believe that Catholicism is simply another denomination, that it 'doesn't really matter whether you're Catholic or not,' that there is nothing unique or distinctive about Catholicism, or that all that really counts is a generic Christian lifestyle, Catholicism's institutional vitality, public witness, and capacity to retain its young are in jeopardy...

...Nancy Ammerman, another sociologist of religion, has more recently called it "Golden Rule Christianity...

...And the story of Christ and his church still resonates...

...Only 10 percent of Catholic adults under forty have actually ceased to consider themselves Catholic, and no more Latinos than non-Latinos...

...matters, whether he thought these discouraging findings would apply to the coming generation of Roman Catholics as well...

...How should one evaluate these responses...

...And yes, there are distinctive and quite attractive aspects, primarily familybased, to Latino Catholicism, as there have been to every immigrant group's religiosity...

...Indeed, among those who did stay Presbyterian as well as those who did not, many had reduced their faith to a kind of generic being good to family and friends without insisting on strong convictions or obligatory practices...

...Young Adult Catholics warns us against four of the more consoling ways we arm ourselves against the seriousness of the situation...

...Yet what is perhaps their central conclusion I find almost completely unconvincing: "In time," they write, "the surge of Latinos will change everything...

...But what is that something...

...They are overwhelmingly in favor of "more empowerment of laity and women," regardless of their theological views, their Mass attendance, or their involvement in parish life...

...However, when the sample was asked not just about the duties of Catholics but about the church itself, somewhat more than half agreed that it "should stick to religion and not be involved in economic or political issues...

...Although young Catholics are different, in other words, many are not that different...

...on the other hand, they are no longer tied to the Catholic community by their most important friendships or even their spouses...

...If we leave, we accept defeat...

...Over eight hundred of these young adults who had been confirmed years earlier were tracked down and interviewed by phone in either English or Spanish...

...Many of us stay in the church because we appreciate its countercultural stance...

...lines similar to those of Vanishing Boundaries...

...The Catholic Church's relationship with its young adults is not unlike that...

...But nothing suggests that these aspects will prove any more or less resistant than nonLatino forms of Catholicism to the pressures of education, upward mobility, and secularization, or any more or less resourceful in coping with the internal problems of the American church...

...The struggle is a fight to reform this church of ours...

...Focusing on confirmands has the advantage of using a group that had a common starting point: some roughly similar degree of documented church involvement during adolescence...

...But finally, what keeps us Catholic is what makes us Catholic: the Eucharist...

...For anyone harboring a suspicion that his or her favorite anecdote may not necessarily sum up the condition of 20 million young adults, a study like this is invaluable...

...When it comes to generalizing about young people—and who doesn't generalize about young people, including young people themselves?— most of us fall back on our own personal history or the histories of our siblings, children, nieces, nephews, friends, or students...

...On the contrary, the young Presbyterians had imbibed the notion that strong claims in support of distinctive religious beliefs and practices were irrelevant if not even intolerant...

...Over 90 percent affirmed the divinity of Jesus...

...Eileen Markey is an American journalist living in London...

...At least in principle, one wants to add...

...At least half these confirmed Catholics agree that "all the great religions of the world are equally true and good...

...So we stay...

...Asked about the claim that the Catholic Church "is the one true church," less than half the non-Latinos and less than two-thirds of the Latinos agree...

...Who had gone elsewhere and why...

...Not only the classic struggle to know and serve God...

...At least yes for the post-immigration Catholics whose demography approached that of Presbyterians and who shared similar values about higher education, broadening cultural experiences, and the benefits of pluralism...

...Young Adult Catholics concludes on a sobering note...

...John C. Cusick and Katherine F. DeVries, Chicago Young Adult Ministry Office n 1994, three sociologists published one of the best—because one of the most rigorous—studies of generational change in American religion...

...Hoge did not rule out the possibility, not before someone had done the research...

...Not all of Young Adult Catholics is surprising, not all of it is good news, and some of it raises more questions than it answers...

...A random sample of American Catholics who would be between ages twenty and thirty-nine as of 1997 was constructed from confirmation records in parishes chosen to be representative in terms of region, class, ethnicity, and rural, suburban, and city location...

...And this sample, remember, is probably more religious than other young adult Catholics...

...But the authors warn that this concern about social justice appears to float free of religious identity and be more theoretical than actual...

...The authors deeply appreciate Andrew Greeley's notion of "communal Catholics" as pointing to those who remain profoundly Catholic even while becoming detached from the institutional church, but Greeley's concept, they add, assumed an absorption of communal experience and cultural tradition...

...marriages and baptisms that are prepared, celebrated, and then followed up with the kind of ample pastoral attention that has characterized the R.C.I.A...

...But we also can't leave...

...Of considerable importance is one other finding, that half of the married non-Latino Catholics under forty married non-Catholics...

...Would Roman Catholic liturgy and sacrament provide an element of identity not so available to his Presbyterian baby boomers...

...But much larger percentages are distanced from parish life and church institutions, have little sense of church authority, and are not sufficiently versed in the distinctive symbols, narratives, and vocabulary of Catholicism to articulate to themselves a coherent Catholic identity...

...The Presbyterian problem—and by extension the mainline Protestant problem—was not, the study showed, driving adult members out of church but failing to bring their sons and daughters in...

...John C. Cusick and Katherine F. DeVries, the director and associate director of the Chicago Young Adult Ministry Office, have written a very different kind of book but one that clearly reflects the same reality—and the same urgency...

...It is an assessment of how much needs to be done—quickly—and where church leaders might best begin...

...His answer: yes...

...If these young adults, ten or fifteen years after their confirmation, are largely remaining Catholic, their Catholicism can look increasingly attenuated...

...On the one hand, there is that "kind of glue holding them closer to their church" that the authors find so striking...

...Retention, in other words, not rejection...

...The research was designed on "where-are-they-now...

...As a member of a largely Latino parish, I am not denying the obvious: the more Latino Catholics, the more Masses in Spanish, and the more Virgenes de Guadalupe instead of Infants of Prague or Anthonys of Padua...

...What this study underlines are the many striking similarities, not differences, between Latinos and nonLatinos, including the high rate of intermarriage by the third generation and the minuscule percentage of the Latino sample who chose to be interviewed in Spanish...

...A flashing yellow light," is the way one author has described this study...

...As for Vatican II, more than 40 percent of the non-Latinos and 70 percent of the Latinos had never heard of the council, and of those who had heard of it only about half said they had ever read about or discussed any "of its ideas...

...For many of my peers, being Catholic means being in struggle...

...Three out of four of the non-Latino Catholics and four out of five of the Latinos cannot imagine themselves "being anything other than Catholic...

...For Jews, as a small group within a largely Christian population, the lesson of history, at least so far, is that intermarriage means assimilation and disappearance...

...Here is a finding of farreaching importance to the church," say the authors...

...This is my church, and reactionary Vatican pronouncements aren't going to get me to leave...

...Having carefully designed 15 their research to get a more accurate reading than is usual on young Latino adults, the researchers found that, contrary to other reports, Latinos among their sample did not seem to be leaving the Catholic Church at a higher rate than the non-Latinos...

...One turned out to be that Catholics are indeed different...

...It is not an indictment...

...Young Adult Catholics simply makes it harder to ignore...

...The figure was a quarter for Latinos/Latinas...

...No similar ambiguity marks young adult Catholics' attitudes toward enlarging the roles of women and lay people in the church and facilitating wider discussion of "doctrinal issues such as divorce, remarriage, and human sexuality...

...A discovery a decade ago that half the marriages of young Jews were to non-Jews set off a shock wave in the Jewish community...

...We feel a sense of ownership for the church...

...It will simply be too late...

...Of course, the bookkeeping of belief and commitment is less clear, the time of reckoning harder to predict, and the whole process more gradual...

...Moreover, the Catholic identity they do possess appears to be less and less central in their lives...

...Should be...

...I pressed him...

...The authors called this stance "lay liberalism...

...On another question, about 90 percent "strongly agree or moderately agree" that "in Mass the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Christ...

...Stated in market terms: there is a vast market for child religious education programs, and it is clearly in the Catholic community's interest to serve this need effectively...

...There is much talk, some of it inaccurate or alarmist, about this or that date when Social Security or Medicare funds will run out and a whole system will tilt into crisis...

...A second is that 18 marriage and childrearing can be relied upon to bring young adults back into church life—though marriage is coming later, disconnectedness is lasting longer, increasing numbers are marrying non-Catholics and doing so outside the church...

...From Cusick and DeVries as well as from Young Adult Catholics, one can easily discern the importance of building on that residual sacramentalism: Sunday liturgies that are genuinely communal (for example, the music works) and meaningful (for example, the ritual has been explained and the enactment fits the meaning...

...The ultimate point is not to justify optimism or pessimism—although it is to increase urgency...

...But it should not be ignored...