Franciscan at Home

There is probably a screen in the middle of your living room. There has been a screen in the middle of American living rooms since the 1950s. Its presence rearranged furniture and changed the focus of the ones sitting in those chairs—no longer looking at one another, but pointed at that screen.

There is probably a screen in the middle of your parish youth room or classroom, too. Maybe it is a large white screen built into the wall with a 4K projector, or an old console TV precariously perched atop a moving cart. It wasn’t always at the center, but over the past five-to-seven years it crept into the middle and redirected the focus as video-based catechesis has presented itself (perhaps unintentionally) as the solution to many challenges we face in ministry.

The sea change in the approach that American teens and young adults take in regard to Christian faith just in the last decade has been rapid, palpable, and sometimes stunning. We live in a time in which “nearly half of cradle Catholics who become ‘unaffiliated’ are gone by age eighteen. Nearly 80 percent are gone and 71 percent have already taken on an ‘unaffiliated’ identity by their early twenties.”

According to Jean Twenge, a professor of Psychology at San Diego State University, the experience of faith has been complicated even further by the staggering increase in social media usage among these same teens and young adults, which has been accompanied by a correlative increase in feelings of depression, joylessness, and uselessness—as well a significant increase in suicide attempts. One of the most notable attributes of this generation, which Twenge calls “the iGen generation,” is its marked aversion to practicing, or even identifying with, Christianity.

We have seen many of these same trends in the high school in which I have taught theology and operated as campus minister during the last twelve years, but our overwhelming experience is that underlying most teenagers’ sense of disconnect from Christ and/or their Catholic faith is a sense of pain and confusion caused by suffering in their lives. Even when they do not share these things openly, we know that our students have suffered through broken homes, health problems, various kinds of anxiety and depressive disorders, romantic breakups, betrayal from friends, drug and alcohol abuse, self-harm, and every other imaginable problem. Knowing that the students don’t always have the desire or, in some cases, the ability to share these things, we make it a priority to find a way for them to share it with the Lord.

What is the goal of catechesis? To make the faith the center of our lives. St. John Paul II made this clear: “Catechesis aims therefore at developing understanding of the mystery of Christ in the light of God's word, so that the whole of a person's humanity is impregnated by that word.” We come to know Christ so that he can shape the way that we live concretely and as a whole. Pope Benedict XVI said the same about Catholic education more broadly, claiming that it should “seek to foster that unity between faith, culture and life which is the fundamental goal of Christian education.” An important reason why catechists have to work for this goal is that education is the way in which we pass on an identity and way of life. Education forms culture, understood broadly as our way of life. Our children will either use their faith to navigate the challenges of the world or will subordinate their faith to a secular worldview. Catechists impart not just the content of the faith but seek to form a life that embodies that faith. If our children conform to the secular culture more than to the faith, this entails a breakdown of our catechetical and educational efforts. Christopher Dawson, more than any other Catholic thinker, has recognized the centrality of religion in culture and education’s role in forming culture. Dawson (1889-1970) was an English-Welsh convert to Catholicism and an historian who produced a vast synthesis of history, the human sciences, and theology stretching from prehistoric times to the crisis of the mid-twentieth century. The thread that united all of his works was the thesis that religion is the heart of culture. Tracing the role of religion throughout history, he noted that modern culture has a void in place of this heart, which it attempts to fill with other secular ideologies. Without a religious renewal, Dawson thought the material advances of technology would prove self-destructive for our culture, a prediction which partially came true in the World Wars.

It is a historic time to be a part of youth and young adult ministry. The upcoming Synod on “Young People, the Faith, and Vocational Discernment” is inspiring conversations across the world. Here in the United States, the Hispanic/Latino community has engaged in the Fifth Encuentro with an emphasis on young, second and third generation Hispanics/Latinos. Another important movement is “The National Dialogue of Catholic Pastoral Ministry for Youth and Young Adults”, which is a collaborative effort between the USCCB, The National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry, the USCCB National Advisory Team on Young Adult Ministry, and the National Catholic Network de Pastoral Juvenil Hispana (LaRED).

It is well documented that many young people no longer affiliate themselves with being Catholic, or any religion at all. Before we can propose what can be done about this, some attention must be given to who these young people are. To do so challenges not only our pre-conceived notions but also the vocabulary we use when we speak of young people or youth or young adults.
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It remains to be seen how the usage of these terms may evolve over the next couple years. Regardless of how the words are used, it is important we don’t fall into a common problem described by Tony Vasinda of ProjectYM: “In the US, we have typically defined ministry to young people based on their age but not where they are on their spiritual journey.” While this “age-based” approach can have benefits in fields such as education or psychology, it fails when it defines our pastoral practice towards young people. One could argue that the continual debate about the most appropriate age for the Sacrament of Confirmation is a symptom of this issue.

There are seventeen-year-olds who are committed disciples of Jesus Christ; there are twenty-five-year-olds who are only just starting to think about their relationship with the Catholic Church. How might the Church give language to those pastorally accompanying such young people to guide them towards spiritual maturity?

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When I had an opportunity to return to study in England after many years of active missionary life in East Africa, I took the opportunity to investigate the phenomenon of “school strikes” in Kenya in the hope of understanding what they were saying about moral decision making in adolescents. The school strike is a problem that has bedevilled Kenyan schools for many years, leading even to loss of lives and causing enormous damage to property. Many an education have been compromised by school strikes, which are basically student protests—often violent and destructive—against perceived injustices in the school system.

My own interest was primarily derived from a personal experience of a school strike that had taken place in the girls’ boarding school where I was working. Although no physical harm came to anyone, nor was there any damage to property, relationships between the staff and among the students themselves were strained, because many students were not even involved in the strike. It was difficult to simply return to a “business as usual” approach when there were so many unanswered questions surrounding the underlying reasons for the strike; the trust that had previously characterized our relationships had now been compromised. When asked afterwards—one by one in front of their parents—what grievance had provoked the strike, most of the girls had simply shrugged their shoulders and mumbled the word “influence.” Only some three or four felt they had some genuine reasons for protest but their influence had been strong enough to prevail over the majority.

As I investigated this phenomenon further with the participation of students from a number of other schools, layers of meaning were gradually uncovered. At surface level, a mistrust of authority emerged, expressed as outrage against the neglect and lack of concern for the welfare of the students demonstrated by school administrations in general. This was coupled with a sense of anonymity; one was known only by one’s peers but not by any significant adult within the school context. At a still deeper level, however, there emerged a much more preoccupying issue: a lack of a sense of life’s meaning and purpose that might guide moral decision making.

The most striking conclusion of the research was that, although most of the students were at least nominally Christian and many Catholic, very few of the students were influenced by their Christian faith. Their decisions were effectively pragmatic, a response to circumstances but without any reasoned consideration derived from principle.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s monumental fantasy novels, The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-55), have a great deal to teach about friendship. Many readers first encounter these works in adolescence, when our first encounters with friendship are forged—and, unfortunately, tested and maybe broken—by fallen humanity.

But even if we first came to Tolkien in adulthood, we can recognize the appeal of his stories to the notion of fellowship. The appeal lasts not only because the book presents shining images of stalwart friendships among its characters, but also because the book itself can be a friend in moments of friendlessness.

I’m not suggesting that the solace of a great book like The Lord of the Rings can ever replace the incarnate personhood of human beings that true friendship requires. But I think that the reason it seems like it can is that Tolkien gives us literary friendships that can seem more real than our “merely human” ones because of Tolkien’s Catholic conviction that there is a transcendent grace that lifts the “merely Hobbit” or “merely Elvish” friendships out of their mundane limitations.

Many Tolkien scholars have argued that Tolkien’s fantasy is successful because he can convince the reader that elves and rings of power and seeing-stones and wizards are real. But I think that the greatest literary magic of Tolkien is his ability—founded on his fervent belief—to convince the reader that friendships that cannot be broken by the fires of hell really exist.

Never has friendship been so needed, and yet perhaps never has it been so neglected. Long before Jesus Christ came into the world as the love of God made visible (cf. 1 Jn 4:9), the ancients were already convinced that friendship held a unique and irreplaceable position among the four loves. Aristotle, in fact, claimed that without friendship no one would even desire to live. In the wisdom writings of the Old Testament, the author of Sirach reflected on how rich a gift friendship is, asserting that “Faithful friends are a sturdy shelter; whoever finds one finds a treasure” (Sir 6:14). By the time of the coming of Christ, the human community, torn by the divisions from Adam and Eve’s first “no” to God and every subsequent turn from the Father, doubted the universality of human friendship and denied even the possibility of divine friendship. When Jesus assured his apostles that they were no longer servants but friends, hPicture of smiling women linking arms in friendshipe introduced a radical newness of possibility in love that needs to be re-proclaimed to and experienced by every generation with all its transformative power for human and divine friendship.

As a Clinical Child and Family Psychologist who works primarily in the field of catechesis, one particular interest of mine is the integration of what both faith and science tell us about the human person. In secular society, and even among some individuals in the Church, there is the misconception that science and faith are somehow incompatible. However, some of the greatest minds both in science and religion have disputed this assumption. For example, Albert Einstein famously said, “A legitimate conflict between science and religion cannot exist. Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”1 Similarly, in a letter to Director of the Vatican Observatory Reverend George V. Coyne, S.J., St. John Paul II wrote, “Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish… We need each other to be what we must be, what we are called to be.”2

Christians have viewed the field of psychology with skepticism from its very beginning. After all, Sigmund Freud, considered by many to be the founder of psychology, called religion “an illusion.”3 But as the field of psychology has grown and its methods have improved, many have found it to be more and more compatible with Christian thinking. In fact, what we find by science to be true about the human mind and human emotion would necessarily have to be compatible with our faith, since God himself created us to think and to feel.

Using what we know about how people think, feel, and behave can make us more effective in faith formation. The following is a discussion of five pressing questions in the field of catechesis that may be answered, at least in part, by research in the social sciences.

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