Young people are not the problem

Thursday, March 22nd, 2018

If the recent conference at the University of Notre Dame — where speakers postulated reasons for young people’s disassociation from the Catholic Church — represents the approach going into the upcoming Synod of Bishops on young people, we would beg church officials to postpone the gathering.

What we heard was a familiar litany, placing blame for missing young people on:

Technology — specifically youths’ obsession with smartphones — which supposedly robs them of the contemplative mind and makes them “suckers for irrelevancy.”
An aversion to “orthodoxy,” a term the user brandished with the certainty that his strain of orthodoxy is the immutable version of the truth.
The “dumbing down of our faith.”
The pervasiveness of pornography and relativism, of course.
And a new danger — the “bland toleration” of diversity, a curious addition.

According to this analysis, it is the young people, not the church, who are in crisis.

By this analysis, the very institution that young people find so wanting that they have nothing to do with it nonetheless knows all of the questions and has all of the answers.

This analysis imagines a “kairos moment” when scales fall from young eyes that no longer gaze at screens nor at pervasive porn as they become aware of their deficiencies and their state of crisis.

What a self-satisfying assessment. And what a relief. It isn’t that healthy young people might be repulsed by the way that church leaders mishandled the sex abuse crisis for decades.

Nor is it the money scandals or callousness toward gay and lesbian Catholics or the bishop-driven one-issue politics that has reduced religion and faith to a bumper sticker in the culture wars.

No, they say, the problem lies with young people who have acquired culturally influenced defects.

The cultural critique has value, of course, and the disaffection of young people from all manner of institutional involvement — from the local symphony orchestra to the Rotary Club — needs continued examination to figure out how institutions can be relevant to young people.

While dwindling numbers of Catholics are no doubt due to some extent to these social forces, there is much more to consider in the case of the church.

Before becoming too convinced that the reason for the disaffection lies with everything and everyone else, church leaders need to seriously examine how their own shortcomings and failures have contributed to young people leaving the church.

It is reasonable to understand that teens and young adults, living in a civil culture that increasingly accepts their LGBT friends and family members, find unacceptable the intolerance and outright discrimination of some Catholic officials and organizations.

It is understandable that a young person would rather not be part of an institution that preaches God’s mercy but shows little mercy toward divorced and remarried parents.

Young people, especially young women, who know how their mothers and grandmothers struggled to gain equality in the wider culture, don’t care to become involved in an institution where women are marginalized. Continue reading