Young Catholics: when labels don't fit

Commonweal, Nov 19, 2004 by Cathleen Kaveny

In her book The New Faithful, Colleen Carroll asserts that young Catholics take a more conservative approach to matters of faith than their elders do. According to James Davidson and Dean Hoge, that assertion is not supported by the empirical data produced in their study and earlier studies they have conducted.

One could respond to this apparent contradiction by picking a "side" and sticking to it. So-called conservative Catholics might continue to cite Carroll, while so-called Catholic liberals might point to the Davidson/Hoge data. That response would be a shame, because it would forfeit a valuable opportunity to discuss the challenges involved in handing on the faith to the next generation.

Davidson and Hoge say that "millennial" Catholics (born between 1978 and 1985) are not markedly different from the post-Vatican II generation (born between 1961 and 1977). That leaves open the question of how different the attitudes of those who grew up after the Second Vatican Council are from those who grew up before or during it. In my view, that is the crucial dividing line. I am a post-Vatican II Catholic; my students are millennial Catholics; although different in some important ways, our respective experiences of growing up in the church have more in common with each other than either does with the experience of those whose faith formation took place in the pre-Vatican II church.

I see six basic differences between younger Catholics and earlier age cohorts. First, we learned early and well that we were children of the triune God, who loved us very much, and who was truly present to us in the sacraments. The specter of a vengeful, legalistic divine judge does not haunt us the way it seems to haunt some older Catholics. Second, we really didn't learn much doctrine. The emphasis in our catechesis was on engaging our emotions, not on challenging our intellects. Third, the coherent Catholic culture of the pre-Vatican II church had broken up by the time we came along. We do not have the Catholic-in-our-bones sensibility that characterizes both liberals and conservatives of earlier generations. Fourth, the end of the Catholic ghetto means that most young Catholics do not feel a need to prove themselves to the outside world. Fifth, our earliest experiences of the church were marked by tumult and controversy, not by stability. The church itself seems much more fragile to us than it does to our elders. Sixth, and finally, the tensions between magisterial teaching and American culture have only grown with time. Consequently, negotiating one's dual identities as a young Catholic and a young American has also become more difficult.

What does all of this have to do with the use of the labels "liberal" and "conservative"? First, it puts them in their appropriate context. For example, older conservatives should not necessarily delight, and older liberals should not necessarily despair, if some Catholics in college or graduate school thirst for knowledge of the tradition, or enthusiastically pursue new uses for aspects of the tradition that were discarded in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. Given their situation, it is understandable that young Catholics will seek to acquire the basic knowledge, even the basic lore, that their grandparents take for granted. Speaking from experience, it is deeply unsettling to find oneself unable to participate in the common prayers said at the wake of a beloved relative, simply because no one had thought it important to pass them on to the next generation. But such a thirst for knowledge about the tradition, for a tangible connection with one's communal past, does not necessarily mean that one is opposed ab initio to arguments made for its development, particularly if they are made in terms of values and virtues internal to the tradition itself. To put it bluntly, one can appreciate the value of the Latin Mass, devotions to the saints, and the penitential practice of fasting, even while viewing, with sympathy and admiration, John Noonan's arguments for the development of Catholic moral doctrine on both contraception and the death penalty.

Second, their study suggests that we look beneath the ideological stances that divide a particular generation to find the common experiences that unite it. In teaching millennials at Notre Dame, for example, I have encountered many young students fitting Colleen Carroll's "new conservative" profile, and also many students who seem to be more open to the currents in contemporary culture. Despite their superficial differences, a certain subgroup of each category bears a worrisome resemblance to each other on certain points. At the risk of gross generalization, if not oversimplification, I will attempt to flesh out my worries.

Let me call one segment of the more liberal group the compartmentalizers. For them, the various segments of their life are neatly divided. "Faith" is relegated to the realm of campus ministry; it takes place in their dorm Masses, in their retreats, and in their social-justice projects. They try very hard to be good people, understood in general terms. They even try to live by some of the church's more well-known and difficult basic rules, sometimes not quite knowing why. They pray. God claims their piety, and their morality--but not their intellect. "Reason," in contrast, is the essential tool for dealing with their life in the classroom Monday through Friday (or more accurately, Thursday lunchtime). Each class is its own hermetically sealed intellectual universe; they try to figure out the rules of that universe in order to do well on the test, in order to graduate with honors, and in order to get a job that will make them successful in the eyes of the world.