It’s common to associate the mass exodus of young people from active participation in our faith with what we believe. That isn’t hard to do. The Church is certainly living through some challenging times. However, I think also we’re dealing with the effects of encouraging them to accept that what we believe doesn’t really matter anymore. A big part of that stems from our unabated embrace of vague interfaith experimentation that is confusing our young people while causing undue stress at a time in their lives when more stress is the last thing they need.
That’s a hard pill to swallow.
Sure, there are plenty of people who just walked away from the faith out of disinterest too. However, this rant is about those who do have an interest in living their faith, yet wrestle with what to do with it instead. They are the ones who are remarkably under-served and need our help the most.
I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that if you pick a few, run-of-the-mill Catholic high schools or universities out there today, there’s a good chance they’re having an identity crisis. I’ll up the ante and suggest that the majority of students who are there because they’re Catholic feel undeserved and even uncomfortable as Catholics in their own schools.
God only knows I was as an undergrad, and my most-recent experience in one of those places revealed that I’m not alone on that front today as well.
How we got to this point is complicated, but a big part of it involves financial concerns along with finding relevance in communities while they undergo profound change. Simply put, schools find ways to diversify in order to keep their doors open. We can blame a lot of that on our own disinterest, detachment and abandonment of the value of a Catholic education too, but that’s another conversation for another day.
Just as water seeks its lowest level, the natural progression of our collective reasoning was to become less-Catholic in terms of presence and influence on and around campus. We pulled back, partly because of a manpower shortage, and partly because we didn’t want to offend people or make them uncomfortable.
This coincided with a time when society threw its hands up in the air and told us that we can have it all if we just get along and focus on what unites us. Everything else was just sooo past-tense. This also happened while the Church was living through the scandal and its long aftermath that destroyed its perceived-credibility in the modern world.
Schools became more secular to attract a society that was becoming increasingly secularized. Yet, that also involved secularizing our own faith along with how the faith gets presented and lived-out on campus. That’s where we really screw things up. We really can’t have it both ways. Sure, we can push boundaries to a certain degree, but when push comes to shove, we either propagate the faith or we don’t.
So, if we’re running Catholic schools, they really do need to try and be Catholic. Not in some kind of abstract, theoretical sense, but in reality. It’s not enough to slip some platitudes on a mission statement or hang a couple of crucifixes in the hall in order to tick that box. People are paying top-dollar for a Catholic education, and we should oblige by making our presence, influence and values known from the moment they enroll to their graduation and beyond.
If some students don’t like it, well, there are plenty of other schools out there with enrollment problems they can go to instead. If some administrators and instructors don’t like it, well, there are other places they can serve that probably better-align with their ambitions anyway.
Our job as Catholics goes far beyond filling classrooms with warm bodies. Our responsibility is to introduce, demonstrate and call others to our faith. That may make a lot of people nervous, but think about it. Doing so attracts more students who want to be formed by that influence in their lives instead of students who want less of it. Granted, we may have to work harder to seek them out, but they will come, because courage and authenticity act like a magnet.
What we decided to do was to replace the very identity that forms and shapes our souls with some kind of watered-down, non-offensive, generic, pie-in-the-sky version of God that appeals to no one. This occurs in no small part because that version of God doesn’t even exist in the first place. Remember that.
Think about it- How many interfaith churches out there actually do well? They don’t, because the average soul instinctively-knows how all of that is pure nonsense.
More often than not, the only ones who support and entertain those kinds of ideas are the same people who are blinded by their own lostness in the first place. They can’t resist trying to create a belief system that accommodates that. They also can’t resist injecting that into ours under the pretense of enlightenment and modernity. And we catered to that. We actively-sought teachers and mentors who offered that perspective to students because we thought we were doing everyone a favor by forcing the Church to live in the 21st century.
How could we think that injecting that kind of emptiness and ambivalence into the hearts and minds of our own people, at such a tender stage in their lives, was somehow doing them a favor? Taking that a step further, they’re carrying all of that in their consciences as they wander through life while also serving the Mystical Body of Christ too. None of this is doing anyone any favors.
We already confused at least one generation of Catholics on top of the current one because of our lack of faith in God’s provision. Is that really what this boils down to? That we’re too-afraid to adapt and adjust our own institutions to contend with a shrinking student population because we’re worried that we won’t have enough money or remain relevant?
Remember the God that we claim to follow is the God of miracles and constant provision. In fact, there’s nowhere in our entire history that suggests the way to grow our reach in the world is to compromise our faith along the way. If anything, the exact opposite is true. Double down on the faith, accept the struggles and trust that God will provide. God rewards faithfulness.
This approach also contributed to the strong and persistent interest among many involved in Catholic education, and lay ministry, to believe and promote nonsense because they want to challenge the Church and our faith. Fine, no problem. But do it in the appropriate context. Feel free to expose students to other beliefs, perspectives, lifestyles and whatever else you think they’re lacking. However, if that isn’t designed to lead them back to a closer, intimate and mature understanding of God and the faith, then what’s the point?
All you’re doing is cultivating their own sense of confusion and lostness. Look, if you’re not happy with the way the Church is living in today’s world, fine, deal with it in your own way. But don’t empower yourself to use that as an excuse to drag others along the same path.
Our job as Christians, as disciples of Jesus, is to turn from sin and grow in holiness in order to properly and completely live in love. Just because you’re unwilling to carry that cross and conform your life, your thinking and your sensibilities to the truth of the Gospel doesn’t mean that you have some kind of special call to lead others astray too.
Remember, we’re not supposed to be conforming ourselves to this world to begin with. We’re supposed to be transformed by the renewal of our minds so that we can be used by God to transform others (Romans 12). You would assume that would somehow involve being educated and properly formed in the faith at a Catholic school somewhere, right? Yet, that’s often the last place where this happens.
What on earth are we doing to ourselves here?
To make matters worse, we’re also encouraging young people to embrace and accept other faiths as part of their own because we’re all in this together.
No, we’re not.
Most of humanity is going somewhere where we don’t want to go in the first place. It’s our job to make ourselves available to God so we can be used to minimize those losses.
Sure, we can all get along. Let’s promote peace and goodwill and just learn how to be friends with everyone in order to make the world a better place. Hey, I’m all for that, one-hundred percent.
However, we are evangelists above all else.
We are called to lead people out of darkness by bringing the light of Christ into their lives. We’re not promoting an ideology here either. We believe that God himself established the Christian faith as the de facto way to draw His creation unto himself. We are supposed to be living and breathing examples of that in the world. Doing so draws people to us, to God, and if we’re lucky, some of them may very well end up becoming Catholics along the way.
Do I really need to remind you that our faith was carved out with the blood, sweat and tears of countless souls over the course of our long history? Real sacrifices were, and still are, made to that end.
We cheapen all of that when we decide to become friends with the world because we’re nervous about working a little harder to be a witness than we had to before.
Just because the world decided that it doesn’t need God anymore, or that our collective and shared humanity doesn’t require a specific and clearly-defined path to the Almighty doesn’t make any of it right. There’s no reason on earth why we should be diluting and compromising what we believe for acceptance from those we are called to reach in the first place.
Interfaith activities can be a wonderful thing when we engage them properly. That means a lot of different things to different people. Yet, at the end of the day, our job is to lead people out of the world and out of flawed and incomplete belief systems and bring them into the truth.
That’s not happening today. Much of what we’re doing is having the exact opposite effect. We are deceiving young people into thinking that we can find ways to blend our faith into everything else to the point where none of it matters anymore. And for what?
What we believe as Catholics matters. Even if some of that is wrong, it still matters. So much so that even the indirect influence of basic Catholic values that is disseminated in the world brings peace, hope and life to humanity in ways that would be impossible otherwise. Frankly, the world would collapse into itself if Christianity wasn’t around to constrain evil. Our efforts should be oriented toward pulling people closer to the faith instead of enticing our own people away from it.
We remain the moral compass for the world. However, that’s not going to last if we keep walking down this ridiculous path. We’re already seeing the effects of our diminished presence in every aspect of our lives. None of this is leading anywhere that is good, holy or pleasing to our Lord, creator, shepherd, King and friend.
We can still wrestle with thorny issues and things we don’t understand with respect to Catholic theology or moral teaching. But, we don’t need to abandon ship and throw the baby out with the bathwater along the way. That’s exactly what’s happening within the world of Catholic education, particularly in the West today, and the harm that it is causing students, and the souls they encounter, is incalculable.
I don’t know what we need to do to solve this problem. Yet, I’m willing to give my all to doing my part, and I certainly want to facilitate and promote a framework that will support this effort.
There are a growing number of institutions and religious communities that are taking concrete, proactive steps to turn this trend around. I praise God for them, and so should you. They are treasures to the faith and models of courage and authenticity. I also want to throw what little support I can provide to assist them in accomplishing that goal.
Again, and I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating here: This isn’t about being a conservative or a liberal.
I’m not taking sides with respect to any of that. In all reality, Christianity, by virtue of its very nature as the living, breathing Body of Christ on earth isn’t either. We reflect bits and pieces of both ends of that crazy spectrum and everything else in between.
This is about fidelity, about being faithful to the Gospel and the call and mission of our shared faith in the world that remains unchanged despite the passage of time. Just because some, who don’t really believe in the first place, were able to find a home among us and allow this nonsense to take root doesn’t make it right or acceptable either.
What we need more than ever is an army of honest-to-God believers in the core tenets of our faith to step up and do something about this. What are those core tenets? It’s summed up perfectly in the Apostle’s Creed, which I’m happy to share with you here:
I believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried;
he descended into hell; on the third day he rose again from the dead;
he ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty;
from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting.
Amen.
When we make it the rule, instead of the exception, to model, support, propagate and drill this message into the hearts of the faithful throughout their Catholic educational experience, then I’ll stop complaining.
Until then, grab the popcorn, because I’m just getting started.