Arvo Part: Visionary but not vegetarian

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

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

...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...

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

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

...Who believed what...

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

...The popular British composer John Tavener, like Part much involved with Eastern Orthodoxy, has been criticized for sugary-sounding works...

...He often composes "with no more than basic scales," the anonymous academic noted, but the results transcend mere simplicity...

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

...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...

...20...

...Should be...

...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...

...Part's music, included on the soundtrack of the recent film The Thin Red Line, about the 1942 Battle of Guadalcanal, was lauded by one critic who stated that it nudged the audience "onto a higher plane of awareness...

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

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

...But what is that something...

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

...19 Benjamin Iury A SINGLE MOTE, A SILENT BEAT The spare beauty of Aruo Part At age sixty-six, the Estonian-born composer Arvo Part continues to defy categories...

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

...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...

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

...There is utter Northern desolation in the unadorned vocal setting of Jesus on the Cross declaring to Mary, "Mulier, eccefilius tuus" ("Woman, behold thy son...

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

...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...

...With new works, seemingly constant revisions and rearrangements of older works, and superb new recordings like the Johannes-Passion, Part's stature as modern master becomes increaslingly clear...

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

...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...

...His answer: yes...

...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...

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

...Lasting just over one hour—concise as Passions go—Part's setting in Latin of Saint John's text has the role of the Evangelist sung by a vocal quartet, movingly making a communal event of the Gospel narration...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

...But he was doubtful...

...A longtime resident of Berlin, Part premiered a well-received new work in February, "Littlemore Tractus," to commemorate the bicentenary of John Henry Newman with a ten-minute setting for choir and organ of a text Newman preached at Littlemore 170 years ago...

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

...As a devout Orthodox Christian, Part's leaving Estonia in 1981 for the relative freedom of West Germany allowed him to create major choral works of explicitly religious inspiration, such as a "Te Deum" (1984-6), "Miserere" (1992), and Johannes-Passion (1982), which has just received a brilliant new recording on Finlandia Records (8573-87182-2...

...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...

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

...Some outstanding chamber pieces, including "Fratres" (on Telarc CD-80387) and "Tabula Rasa," (on EMI Classics for Pleasure 2221), both from 1977, resulted...

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

...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...

...So we stay...

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

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

...As one critic put it, Part's works have "one underlying theme: the numinous...

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

...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...

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

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

...It is not an indictment...

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

...Of course, I am in monasteries more often than in concert halls—but then again, you have no idea how many times I am in concert halls...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

...A new minimal style limited itself to one tone—or combinations of two and three chords—as the basic musical content of a work...

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

...This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

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

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

...Set with austere simplicity and economy, the chorus represents crowds of soldiers, guards, and priests as well as individual characters like Saint Peter...

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

...Part states, "I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played...

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

...Filled with meaningful pauses as well as melodies that hearken back to early church chanting, Part's music reinvents what is familiar by a deep and personal involvement in past traditions...

...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...

...I pressed him...

...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...

...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...

...In a new compilation album from Virgin Classics, Classical Dreams: Music to Inspire, Part's 1990 "Summa" for strings has a noble, openhearted spirit, and does not sound difficult or unfamiliar like other, more modernist new music...

...In his earlier years, when Estonia was still under Soviet rule, some of his works with overt religious content, like the 1968 choral work "Credo," were banned by the government...

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

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

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

...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...

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

...Both sound like music with links to the Early Middle Ages, balancing silence with sound in an emotional, sweet-sounding way...

...Still, a recent prospective biographer recounts that Part gave him, as a parting gift, the Russian Orthodox Archimandrite Sophrony's biography of his spiritual master, Saint Siluoan the Athonite...

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

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

...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...

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

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

...I work with very few elements—with one voice, two voices...

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

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

...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...

...I am not even a vegetarian...

...But Part has, according to a statement welcoming him five years ago as honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, "created a body of religious and secular music that simultaneously moves the heart and impresses itself on the mind through its purity of craftsmanship...

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

...Despite the composer's emaciated appearance, with beard and tonsure-like baldness, Part rejects any projection of sacredness upon his person, rather than his music...

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

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

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

...The young composer reacted by immersing himself in the study of old Franco-Flemish choral music from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, by such composers as Machaut, Ockeghem, Obrecht, and Josquin...

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

...After some years of what he later called "despair and search," he emerged in 1976 with a new and extremely spare approach to composition...

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

...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 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...

...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...

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

...Some American minimalists like Philip Glass, despite commercial success, seem to write music on automatic pilot, undemanding and lulling for both composer and listener alike...

...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...

...Don't be confused by cheap tabloid information...

...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...

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

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

...Part's work was not always acclaimed...

...As he told the British press, "I am not a prophet, not a cardinal, not a monk...

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

...followed by the consolation of a triumphal chorus, "You who have suffered for us, have mercy upon us...

...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...

...Amen...

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

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

...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...

...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 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...

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

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