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Teenagers are flooding out of our churches.They used to come back later in life, but now they often do not.
Dialogue in the style of the Second Vatican Council, rather than laying down the law, is the way to evangelize them. The church is on their side, seeking to teach all men and women of good will how to be fully human through following in the steps of the Lord.
Recently I saw the Catholic Church at its best. It was the occasion of my youngest godson’s first communion.
I remember that day as one of those rare times in life which are purely and simply happy. But I am conscious that he will soon enter his teenage years, and that the sacrament of confirmation, offered at 13, is colloquially known as the “sacrament of exit.”
When I entered the Catholic Church in 1965, at the close of Vatican II, there were 2 million Sunday Massgoers in England and Wales.
Today, despite the influx of Catholic immigrants from Poland, Lithuania, the Philippines, and elsewhere, there are no more than a million.
I once challenged the late Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Basil Hume, about this decline.
If the church were a business firm, I said, he and his directors would all have been sacked, wouldn’t they?
It was not the church which had failed, the cardinal replied, but the culture which had succeeded. Shopping was the new religion.
Ever since the sexual and social revolution of the ’60s, it was inevitable that the hold of the Christian churches of the West would loosen. Continue reading
Image: St Thomas More Parish
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