Engaging, keeping new Catholic generations

National Catholic Reporter, March 30, 2001 by Arthur Jones

Defining vocation key to unrealized revival

Tradition is new -- new to two generations of post-Vatican II (1962-65) American Catholics, the GenXers and the Millennials. Organized religion is old. Spirituality is new. Catholic is in -- for some -- though even for these regular Mass attendance is not necessarily in. And don't trample on people of other religious traditions if you want to maintain the conversation with people under 40.

Can the institutional church, tripping over itself in its anxiety to hand over the faith, in fact, handle an open conversation with its younger Catholics when it has had little luck being open with their parents? It better, for despite many booming suburban parishes, U.S. Catholicism post-Vatican II, is risking a "Honey I've Shrunk the Church" future. Since Vatican II, the church has let the Baby Boom generation slip through its fingers, and reached for the GenX Catholics (born 1961-81) -- and missed.

Now the church faces Millennial youth (Catholics graduating from high school around the millennium) and doesn't know quite what's coming up. NCR decided to take a look at the current Catholic high school generation. Readers will see the extent to which catechists are attempting to meet today's teens where they are.

In the accompanying story beginning on page 34, five Jesuit prep schools tackle the issue of continuing their Ignatian mission, knowing the day will come when there'll be no Jesuits on the staff or faculty. The story that begins on page 38 about the Feb. 15 Los Angeles archdiocesan Religious Education Congress Youth Day reveals teens to be open about their Catholic identity -- yet Catholic on their own terms.

Millennial youth, in a nutshell, look and sound more like 1950s Catholics than anything since the `50s. But they're not. Researchers Thomas and Rita Tyson Walters, in a study for St. Meinrad's Seminary focusing on priestly vocations among Millennial youth, show that Catholic high school students graduating in the year 2000 were optimistic; consider themselves religious; are in danger of being theologically illiterate; are "teleliterate"; trust their parents; and find themselves in a church of mixed messages. And they are not thinking about becoming priests or sisters.

Walters, who describes himself as "a recent survivor of raising three GenXers," told NCR that Millennial youth "are a little more open to church teaching" than GenXers were. And anecdotal evidence at the Los Angeles archdiocesan Religious Education Congress Youth Day in Anaheim, Calif., bears that out. So does the fact that when Fr. Tony Ricard of New Orleans issued an end-of-liturgy altar call to 4,000 high schoolers to come forward if they were considering becoming a priest, sister or religious brother, more than 90 packed in around the altar.

When 10,000 archdiocesan youth willingly attend a one-day Congress, or 2 million young Catholic adults show up for a Rome World Youth Day, Catholicism appears to be engaging its younger generations. Likewise, many young Catholic adults are engaged at some level in their church. Many of the Anaheim teens were active in their parishes. College and high school volunteering for social service and social justice work has never been higher. One measure: In 1991, the Washington, D.C.-based St. Vincent Pallotti Center for Apostolic Development mailed out 35,000 copies of its annual "Connections: A directory of Volunteer Opportunities," and last year mailed 53,000 copies nationwide.

Masking a crisis

But probe deeper and the question is Whether all this activity, vital though it is, masks a crisis over how the laity might more integrally serve in the church, and indeed, what constitutes -- or prevents -- "vocation." And whether without places to serve as respected co-ministers, these energetic thousands will stay and move the American church into something approaching a Catholic revival. The scene is set for such a revival if the producers and stage managers can encourage the actors to fully play out their dynamic Christian parts, a dynamism that was dulled down in the Baby Boom generation and practically snuffed out for GenX generation.

What's at the heart of unrealized Catholic vitality, contends Dominican Fr. Paul J. Philibert, "is the lack of a viable theology of the priesthood of the laity." Lay Catholics, he said, "still have absolutely no understanding of what they are called to be and do `as priest.'" Consequently, said Philibert, the parishes, the local churches, which should be "schools of holiness, are locked into the most tedious kinds of liturgical franchise." Philibert, until last year executive director of the Notre Dame Institute for Church Life, is now prior of St. Dominic's Abbey in St. Louis and theology professor at the Aquinas Institute.

"It's a very desperate situation," said William Dinges of The Catholic University of America. "It's not a crisis of vocation -- to be called forth to ministry," he said. "It's a crisis surrounding the prerequisite of mandatory celibacy as a precondition of ordination. That's the crisis."