Figured that since the Pope was in country, I'd pull out this post that's been kicking around in the hopper. Oh, I got a hopper. A big hopper.
In a late-February article in the Wall Street Journal, Christine B. Whelan made note of a study showing that today's young Catholics are trying to marry tradition and modernity (sub req). Not surprisingly, the results are mixed at best.
The study, based on an online survey of more than 1,000 adult Catholics, "paints a mixed picture," said Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, chairman of the Subcommittee on Marriage and Family Life of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which commissioned the report. Catholic youth may have a more conservative outlook on life than their parents' generation but also an individualized idea of who should set the rules, said Christian Smith, professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame. "Most younger Catholics have defined their inner self as the authority, and many freely distance themselves from church practices they don't believe in."
Even the concept of "Catholic guilt" seems to have disappeared for younger generations: Catholic youth report no feelings of guilt overall, or about premarital sex or pornography, according to Mr. Smith's forthcoming article in the Review of Religious Research.
The Georgetown study shows that some 69% of Catholics age 18 to 25 believe "marriage is whatever two people want it to be," while just over half of their parents' and grandparents' generation agreed with that statement. This comes as no surprise to researchers following American family trends. With looser social norms dictating appropriate behaviors for husbands and wives, each couple -- regardless of religious affiliation -- must settle on their own rules of conduct, argues Stephanie Coontz, author of "Marriage, a History." But when more issues must be negotiated, she notes, there are more points where negotiations can break down.
While research on other Christian denominations shows similar individualized attitudes about the role of faith in everyday life, the generational differences are more pronounced among Catholics. "Catholic teenagers are the most distanced from the church authorities," reports Mr. Smith, a fact he attributes to "largely ineffective" modern Catholic religious education.
Nail meet head. I don't know exactly when the decline of modern Catholic religious education began, but I do know that the several years of it that I had (fourth grade through high school) definitely meet the "largely ineffective" standard. The education itself was largely fine, it was just the Catholic part of it that fell short.
The tradition and history of the Church was for the most part ignored. We learned little of the intellectual, philosophical, and theological musings of the Church Fathers. We learned about Christianity in a general sense, but not much (or at least not enough) about the doctrine, dogma, and teachings of the Catholic Church. We learned about the rules and regulations, but not what their true purpose was and how they fit into the broader understanding of our faith.
From what I've read and heard from other Catholics, this sort of squishy, feel-good Catholic-lite teaching that I received was not the exception, but rather the rule in the confused, wayward post-Vatican II years. A couple of generations of Catholics had no real foundation of faith when they reached adulthood and were often poorly equipped to deal with the pressures, temptations, and appeal of the secular world.
To be sure, some caution is advisable when interpreting generational differences measured at different stages of life: The millennials are just at the beginning of adulthood, so their optimistic and individual-focused opinions may change with their circumstances. "Some of this is useful idealism and some of it is just inexperience," said Mark Regnerus, associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Still, the cultural shift can't be ignored, Mr. Regnerus said. "We've been swamped by messages of romantic individualism. Those ideas can lead people to marry, but can lead you out of the marriage just as fast when things get tough."
It's not as if most young Catholics knowingly abandon their values and tradition and succumb to the secular culture. It's usually a much more gradual process where they don't even realize that they are drifting further and further from the roots of their faith. When you hear the same themes again and again in the popular culture, you being to see them as normal and eventually accept them as such. The only way to prevent this sort of values drift is to have a steady hand on the wheel and a good compass to keep you on course. Unfortunately, the Church is not doing a good job equipping her young people for the task.
In March, another article appeared in the WSJ that looked at The Changing Faiths of America (sub req)
The Pew survey found that the Roman Catholic Church, which estimates its U.S. membership at 67 million, has lost more adherents than any other denomination. While nearly 1 in 3 U.S. adults was raised in the Catholic Church, fewer than 1 in 4 now describes himself or herself as Catholic. The church's U.S. membership remains steady because half of all immigrants are Catholic, Pew says.
Christian Smith, a sociologist at the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic institution, says he believes many adult Catholics leave the church because a decline in the number of nuns and priests has resulted in poorer religious instruction of baby boomers and their children.
Bingo. Again one of the root causes of Catholics bailing has been inadequate religious teaching, this time connected to the dearth of vocations. However, the problem is not just that there aren't enough teachers. It's also with what has (or hasn't) been taught.
In the April 21st edition of National Review, Michael Novak wrote about the Pope's visit to America and had more on the state of the Church (sub req):
American Catholicism may be one of the two or three most vital national Catholic Churches in the world. Its network of more than 200 Catholic colleges and universities is unrivaled (Germany has only one), even though, over the last four decades, many have become visibly less “Catholic.” The level of practice among lay American Catholics is one of the highest anywhere, and their habits of giving among the most generous.
All the same, American Catholicism has sunk far below the vigor it showed just prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). Then, religious orders of sisters, brothers, and priests were bursting at the seams and rushing to build new convents and seminaries of unprecedented size. Now most of these orders are in severe decline, and many of their seminaries have been forced to close or are only fractionally used for their original purposes.
The number of sisters has shrunk from about 180,000 to 63,000. Thousands of priests have abandoned their ministries. The average age of both priests and nuns is far too high, and the number of new vocations (except in the most orthodox and self-disciplined communities) is below replacement level.
Thus, the record of the Catholic Church in America since the Second Vatican Council is not altogether impressive. A notable laxity has crept in, along with a loss of self-confidence in being Catholic. Even at Catholic universities, it is surprising (in most places) how little graduates know about their faith and its intellectual traditions. Since 1965, secular culture has in many places choked off Catholic culture both in thought and in practice.
The Catholic Church faces many challenges in America. One of the most serious is how to keep young Catholics from drifting away in the early years of adulthood. Teaching them the real history of the Church--its theology, traditions, and leaders--and what it really means to be Catholic won't magically make the problem go away, but it would be a heck of a lot better than what we've been doing the last forty years.
The good news is that we appear to have a Pontiff who gets it. In Friday's WSJ, David Gibson wrote an article on how The Pope Was Working To Bring Back Catholic Culture:
Thus it should come as no surprise that Benedict has made recovering a distinctive Catholic culture a principal theme of his first visit to the U.S., which concludes this weekend in New York. The theme has been evident in the liturgies, which stress Latin in the prayers and Roman styling in the vestments. But it has also been underscored in Benedict's remarks, calling for stronger Catholic education from parishes to universities and for a more powerful Catholic presence in the public square as a way of "cultivating a mindset, an intellectual 'culture'," as he said at Thursday's Mass in Washington, "which is genuinely Catholic." When asked during a Wednesday encounter with the nation's bishops how to redress a "a certain quiet attrition" by Catholics who drift away from practice, Benedict lamented "the passing away of a religious culture, sometimes disparagingly referred to as a 'ghetto,' which reinforced participation and identification with the Church."
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