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Summer
Books To
keep young adults, church cant be lazy monopoly
YOUNG ADULT
CATHOLICS: RELIGION IN THE CULTURE OF CHOICE By Dean R. Hoge, William D.
Dinges, Mary Johnson, Juan L. Gonzales, Jr. University of Notre Dame
Press, 274 pages, $40 |
REVIEWED By TOM
BEAUDOIN
What happens when a generation of Catholics grows up thoroughly
washed in American pluralism and individualism, in the aftermath of the Second
Vatican Council, the most revolutionary church council in 500 years?
According to Young Adult Catholics, what happens is that we
are neither angry with the church nor satisfied with many official teachings.
We affirm many different religions as true, while preferring Catholicism. We
say that weekly Mass attendance is not important, yet also want more parish
adult education. We think there is something unique about Catholicism but
cannot say what it is.
The church today is confronted by its first post-Vatican II young
adult generation, aged early 20s to late 30s. In reporting the results of their
four-year study, fueled by over 800 interviews, the four authors argue that
young adults both react against and deepen the changes initiated by the Baby
Boomers in the ways Catholic identity is lived. This thoughtful and timely work
will be a handbook for those hungry for data on Catholic young adult life. All
who minister to or theologize about this generation should read it carefully.
(Full disclosure: Young Adult Catholics offers a negative interpretation
of this reviewers work that I will not respond to here.)
Dean Hoge, William Dinges, Sister of Notre Dame de Namur Mary
Johnson and Juan Gonzales stock over 270 pages with a concisely rendered
sociological snapshot, giving particular attention to how young adults define
spirituality, Catholic identity, and what we retain from our religious
education. Their book concludes with an agenda for understanding and
ministering to young adults today that the church cannot afford to ignore.
Much of what is commonly supposed about young Catholics is
confirmed by the authors research. Most in their sample define themselves
as spiritual, are in favor of expanded ministry roles for women and
all laity, and carry a sense of rue about what we did not learn during
childhood and adolescent religious education. Young adults prize the sacraments
and social justice as central to Catholic identity, and even though we know a
Catholic relation to Mary is distinctive, the authors argue that she is not as
integral to young adult spirituality as previously. Young Catholics are eager
to know more about Catholic identity, to be consulted in matters of morality,
and to appropriate our faith on our own individual terms.
A few conventional notions about young Catholics are questioned by
this book. Despite the common seeker appellation, their sample
tended not to look outside Christianity for their spirituality. The authors
found young Catholics assembling a spirituality from within Catholicism, taking
different elements of the tradition and discarding what was not useful for
making sense of their lives. And contrary to some assumptions, young adults are
not leaving the church in large numbers, even as they disagree with certain
teachings, and most are not attending Mass regularly.
Some readers will be surprised by a few of the findings. Young
Catholics across the ideological spectrum support lay empowerment and social
justice -- not just young liberals. Interestingly, similar
percentages of Catholics -- from the most to least active -- endorse what the
authors call religious relativism. And if active Catholic practice does not
lead young adults to shed relativism, neither, according to their data, does
Catholic schooling tend to produce active Catholics. Attending Catholic
elementary or high school does not correlate strongly with later parish
involvement or church attendance. And in a church that offers plural identity
options, one avenue was barred for this generation: Only about 15 percent were
ever encouraged to become a sister, brother or priest.
One of the most unique contributions of this book is its focus on
Latinos, who constitute at least a third of U.S. Catholics. The authors found
many similarities in conviction between young Latinos and other young adults.
However, personal devotional life is still much stronger among young Latinos.
This group is more likely to endorse an active church role regarding economic
and environmental justice, although they are less informed than non-Latinos
about Catholic institutional traditions. And yet, despite the more
churchy sample that the authors surveyed, Latinos were not
dramatically more traditional than other young Catholics. They are
a bit less ecumenical, a bit less relativistic and a bit less ready for
empowerment of laity. The interesting data on young Latinos show that
all young adult ministries need to be thoroughly inculturated while
still attending to common convictions among young adults across ethnicity, race
and culture.
It is important to keep the limitations of this book in view. The
authors admit that their study is limited to young adults confirmed in
adolescence. This leaves out 30-40 percent of non-Latinos and 60-70 percent of
Latinos -- and even those percentages are informed guesses. By their own
admission, then, this study is only claiming to represent approximately one
half of all young Catholics, and is biased in favor of those who had a more
active Catholic upbringing. Moreover, they admit that their Latino sample is
better educated and less transient than typical, and sometimes given to offer
answers that appear deferential toward the institutional church.
All sociological methods import theological assumptions,
especially in the sociology of religion, and there are some problematic
presuppositions in this book. Space affords me only one example: the data on
illiteracy about Vatican II, about which most young Catholics know little or
nothing. While this illiteracy is troubling, it must be pointed out that the
authors only seek to measure verbal or conceptual literacy about the council --
that is, what people can say or construe in a conceptually clear way to
interviewers.
Yet there are other kinds of literacy. Young Catholics today
manifest a performative literacy of the council every time they act so
as to endorse the church as the people of God, the value of religious liberty,
social justice or ecumenism. This performative literacy does not need to have
been inspired exclusively from the Catholic church to count as
Catholic. After all, the churchs teachings themselves on each
of these issues were formulated in dialogue with surrounding cultures. This
legitimate theological line of inquiry is left out of their sociological
approach.
Despite these hesitations, and an antiseptic writing style, this
book is a very important contribution, and the church is in debt to the
productive toil of these four researchers. They make the new situation clear:
Catholicisms institutional vitality, public witness and capacity to
retain its young are in jeopardy. Within American culture today,
the church cannot function as a lazy monopoly
simply assuming that
the next generation of Catholics will remain Catholic in the old way or
automatically return to the church
or that they can be reached in the
same way previous generations were reached.
Young Adult Catholics forces the question: Is the
much-heralded new evangelization simply a good idea, or is it
instead an imperative to be practiced more intentionally before this generation
reaches old age? Do we really want to empower young adults to claim their
church?
Tom Beaudoin is the author of Virtual Faith: The Irreverent
Spiritual Quest of Generation X. He is a Ph.D. candidate at Boston
College.
National Catholic Reporter, May 11,
2001
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