YOUNG AMERICAN CATHOLICS : Who are they & what do they want?

I do want my life to be a committed one," wrote Daniel Callahan in his introduction to Generation of the Third Eye, a collection of autobiographical essays by "younger" Catholic intellectuals published in 1965, as Vatican II drew to a close. For Callahan, authentic commitment entailed dedication to "the church, to my work in the church, to the world which Christ came to redeem." At the same time he identified himself as a member of "a generation which, cut loose from many of its roots, from the nurture of old traditions, looks constantly into itself." The central motif of Generation of the Third Eye was the "Journey toward Maturity" (as Francis E. Kearns's essay was titled), part of which--to judge from many of the introductory blurbs--involved the progression from Catholic college to secular graduate education. The truly mature Catholic now sought to reconcile the claims of authority and tradition with a newfound freedom that only the irresponsible would evade. Young people were being asked to revive the church. For these "new Catholics" the church itself would become the arena in which generational drama was played out, and it seemed for the first time that the whole world was watching.

American Catholic history since 1965 could be read largely as a convoluted sequel to Generation of the Third Eye, but the narrative seems to have finally exhausted itself in efforts to make sense of the experience of today's "young adult Catholics." Everyone acknowledges that this cohort is "different" from the Vatican II generation, but it is much harder to discern the ways in which the very questions posed to these young people reflect enduring notions grounded in the experiences of older Catholics. There has been a fair amount of published speculation and empirical research devoted to unraveling the mysteries of Catholics born and raised in the postconciliar era. Young Adult Catholics (University of Notre Dame Press; see page 15), a newly published quantitative study by four sociologists (Dean R. Hoge, William D. Dinges, Sister Mary Johnson, and Juan L. Gonzales Jr.) confirms earlier findings that the vast majority of these young adults sustain some version of a Catholic identity (nearly 90 percent of their sample). Yet only 10 percent of respondents fit the authors' criteria for identity as "core" Catholics: those who "take seriously the teachings of the pope (even where they may disagree with particulars), view Catholicism as the one true church (while acknowledging the truths of other traditions), pray daily, and reject the idea that one can be a 'good Catholic' without going to Mass."

There is also an explicitly comparative perspective underlying the authors' understanding of young adult "core" Catholics. "Our interviews," they explain, "taught us that many young adults today have not learned to distinguish between core and periphery, even though the generations growing up in the 1960s and 1970s knew how to do it and felt free to do so." In other words, "the earlier generation found a way to dissent and stay. But the young today are not clear about how to think about essentials and nonessentials." So the mere fact that young adults do not "leave" the church in larger numbers is not as comforting news as it might seem. Young Adult Catholics features many of the virtues of good social science and will provide material for many fruitful discussions, but in some ways it has already become part of the same intergenerational riddle that it seeks to resolve. Quantitative studies are unable to tell us what such notions as "authority" and "identity" mean to young people and how they work in the construction of religious imagination.

In the 1960s and 1970s, younger "core" Catholics worked out a kind of liberal consensus in public that enabled individuals to speak authoritatively for an entire generation. They combated racism and offered witness against the war in Vietnam, both of which constituted decisive breaks with the dominant sensibility of the preconciliar American church. There were debates, of course, but there was also a sense that what they said and wrote really mattered to the church, and they were right. A 1975 essay by Anthony Padovano, for example (in Journeys [Paulist Press], a collection edited by Gregory Baum), neatly captured the theological spirit of "younger Catholics" of all ages. "Without inner freedom," wrote Padovano, "life is logical rather than metaphysical, theology becomes a system rather than a symbol, Christianity is reduced from experience to ideology." The "new Catholic" was a kind of committed existentialist. A decade after Generation of the Third Eye, a passage in an autobiographical essay could still capture the tone of a generation's concerns without having to try too hard. The liberal consensus soon evaporated, however; the ascendance of neoconservatism was greatly abetted by such prominent erstwhile "new Catholics" as the theologian/writer Michael Novak and others who shifted the locus of true freedom from the self to the marketplace.

"Young adult Catholics" have rarely claimed to speak for an entire generation since those heady days now more than a quarter century removed. When a group of younger scholars in the 1980s and early 1990s began to reexamine the richly devotional life of the preconciliar church, the negative response of many older Catholic liberals to this project suggested that they virtually identified "young Catholic" with church reformer. They appeared resistant to entertaining alternative models of Catholic identity, though few if any of the younger scholars were intent on actually reviving devotionalism. They recovered the meaning of these ancient practices with a certain detachment and sense of irony that was a hallmark of the late baby boom "lost generation" of Catholics. With the emergence of "Generation X" in the 1990s, young people once again assumed the responsibility of exemplifying their cohort's unique travail. Part of the appeal of Tom Beaudoin's remarkably confident voicing of GenX's spiritual journey in Virtual Faith (Jossey-Bass, 1998), lies in its usefulness as a guide to vexed and/or perplexed older readers. Beaudoin patiently details the central role that popular culture played in the religious lives of Americans born in the late 1960s. Beaudoin calls pop culture a "form of 'surrogate clergy'" that bound together a generation determined to take religion into its own hands rather than have it imposed from above. Significantly, Virtual Faith is not a strictly "Catholic" book: By the late 1990s, an honest accounting of the spirituality of one who happened to be a Catholic in the culture was bound to resonate with an ecumenical audience.

My own somewhat limited experience with "young adult Catholics" has convinced me that we are already well into a new dispensation beyond Generation X. Young Catholics between the ages of, say, eighteen and their late twenties cannot be readily lumped into a single category: They are indeed marked by a resistance to any generational schemes imposed on them by oldsters. I began teaching at Saint Louis University, a large Jesuit institution, in 1994 (just a few months after the death of Kurt Cobain, lead singer of the rock band Nirvana and a "grunge" icon who may go down in history as the first and last martyr of Generation X). My students were a bit too homogeneous as Midwesterners to make up a truly representative sample, but taken as a whole the Catholics among them seemed to reflect the attitudes and behaviors ascribed to a slightly older cohort by the authors of Young Adult Catholics. They clearly embraced the centrality of the sacraments to their faith and regarded service to the disadvantaged as a key component of Catholic practice. They attended Mass and participated in small faith communities more often than most of the respondents in Young Adult Catholics, but their location at a Catholic university known for the excellent quality of campus liturgies helps account for their difference from members of a broader sample.

The attitude of these young people toward issues of authority and identity truly distinguishes them from older Catholics, but we cannot understand how that difference works until and unless we ask how they understand the terms themselves. Young Catholics convey a belief that authority generates its own validity and does not simply proceed from the claims of "tradition." They know that knowledge is power and that once unleashed its trajectory cannot be reversed. The future of stem-cell research on discarded embryos, for example, is for them a given, unaffected by appeals to natural law: The real issues entail allocation of resources and control of the means of reproduction. The ethical implications of this and related developments must be demonstrated to these young people with the clarity associated with the scientific method.

My impression is that young Catholics, like other young Americans, do not "question authority" in general but examine its claims case by case. They will invest in sources of credible authority, regardless of age, more readily than did young people over the four previous decades. They apply the same conviction to matters of authority within the church. Many young adult Catholics hold Pope John Paul II in great esteem, not because he is the pope but because he is a pope who says and does things that resonate deeply with their own concerns. When the pope visited Saint Louis in January 1999, the expected throng of onlookers along his motorcade route did not materialize; but a youth rally during his visit, held at the Kiel Center downtown, became the site of an extraordinary spiritual revival meeting. Many young people in attendance later testified to a life-changing experience that night. They responded deeply and immediately to the pope's simple message. "Do not listen to those who encourage you to lie, to shirk responsibility, to put yourself first," the pontiff urged the crowd of more than twenty thousand. The pope's influence on young Catholics was scarcely apparent during his early visits to the United States but became dramatically evident during World Youth Day in Denver in August 1993. The pope's appeal cannot be manufactured or manipulated but is grounded in the sense of authenticity he conveys. It also seems to separate young Catholics--to some extent at least--from those among their elders who view the pontiff with ambivalence.

The pope's appeal to the young is discomfiting to many older Catholic liberals, but some of the same students in attendance at the Saint Louis youth rally traveled later that year to Fort Benning, Georgia, to offer witness against the United States Army's School of the Americas. El Salvadoran counterinsurgency forces, trained at the SOA in assassination techniques, were implicated in the murders of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 and six Jesuits in 1989. At Saint Louis University, as at many other Jesuit schools, the annual visit to Fort Benning is carefully organized through the office of campus ministry, hardly the model for protest familiar to an older generation. Yet when I asked a first-year student who had just returned from the trip last autumn to describe the experience in class, both the depth of her commitment and her balanced understanding of the issues were undeniable. She had "observed, judged, and acted," the formula once exalted by Young Christian Students and other long-forgotten outposts of the lay apostolate. Students embraced the "mission" of the trip only after discerning its legitimacy on their own; at other times they have expressed deep skepticism for policies crafted by some of the same administrators who accompanied them to Georgia. This is a wary and most watchful crew of young people.

The fluidity and versatility of these young Catholics are striking. They traverse boundaries between traditions and denominations with an ease that can be startling to those raised in an era when the borders of spiritual real estate were neatly demarcated. Young adult Catholics partake of the identity politics that dominated the culture of their school years. There are, for example, gay, lesbian, and transgendered people who craft their own Catholic identities, a process familiar to many others who blend multiple elements, including religious loyalty, into an integrated whole. Then there are young Catholics who pray and act much like evangelical Protestants. Anyone who has taught religion at a Catholic college will nod in recognition at the findings reported in Young Adult Catholics: Many of these young people have a hard time identifying the differences between their own tradition and those of their friends and neighbors who worship down the block. None of this is news, but until we devise a means to understand just how this new model of fluid Catholic identity works in the "Culture of Choice" (the subtitle of Young Adult Catholics) we cannot really predict whether these people will indeed become the "core Catholics" of the future.

We often hear that young adult Catholics are theologically illiterate but it is rarely asked: Compared to whom? We have surely seen a democratization of theological education in the past four decades that should be viewed as one of the great triumphs of the postconciliar era. Advocates of greater freedom within the church found themselves caught up in the same dilemma that faced the American revolutionaries of the 1780s: it was a question not simply of home rule but who should rule at home. Theological sources whose access was once limited to an elite few are now readily available to anyone with a library card or a modem. Sure, there are issues of quality control and accuracy to consider, but would anyone really prefer to return to the era when religion was taught as rote catechism to dozing collegians? Students in Catholic colleges today are routinely exposed to such racy course topics as the New Testament, the sacraments, American Christianity, and even an occasional theology of marriage class. It may not be a golden age for the profession of theology, but never have so many young Catholics been introduced to such a diverse body of materials rooted in our common faith.

As the self-appointed ambassador of the young to middle-aged Catholics, filmmaker Kevin Smith (thirty-one) gave his detailed theological "reading" of the classic film A Man for All Seasons in the July 20 issue of the New York Times. (I had touted Smith's 1995 film, Clerks, as the work of an unmistakably Catholic imagination [Commonweal, September 22, 1995].) In the old days, people who called themselves devout Catholics, as Kevin Smith does, did not make films featuring the salty language and gross-out situations found in the likes of Chasing Amy and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Nor did they openly discuss their religious convictions with the unembarrassed intensity exhibited by Smith in the Times story. In contrasting Thomas More's martyrdom with that of the Puritan-accused witch John Proctor in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Smith explained that More "lays down his life for his soul. It's not about his identity; it's about his soul." In a further exercise in boundary-laying, Smith expressed doubts that nonbelievers can truly appreciate the grandeur of A Man for All Seasons. "It's such an inaccessible movie, in one sense, for people who don't believe in God."

Like many Catholics of his generation, Kevin Smith's formal Catholic education may have been deficient in certain respects (George Carlin's turn as a bishop touting the "Buddy Christ" [see cover] in Dogma was among the truly funny bits in the movie; it may also represent the filmmaker's partial payback for the shortcomings of 1970s-style catechetics). I am not suggesting that all thirty-year-old Catholics share Smith's vocabulary, or his imagination. I am saying that younger Catholics continue to pack their faith on journeys to uncharted cultural and spiritual territories, and that we might wait before reading them out of the congregation. It would be great of course if Kevin Smith would make a film of Flannery O'Connor's "The Displaced Person" or a comparable grown-up work in the great American Catholic tradition, but I'm not holding my breath. A great deal has been lost or squandered in recent decades, but that does not mean the riches may not yet be recovered. As a historian with an interest in the work of labor priests, I was particularly dismayed to learn from Young Adult Catholics that only 14 percent of respondents believed that the "church's traditional support of the right of workers to unionize" was an "essential" element of their faith, despite the clear teaching of the social encyclical Quadragesimo anno (1931). There is much teaching yet to be done. As Paul Elie suggested a decade ago in Commonweal ("The Everlasting Dilemma," September 27, 1991), we might consider renouncing the distinctions between generations "as limiting and divisive, choosing instead to emphasize what we share--our common faith and our long and complex tradition and our contemporary American situation and our bonds to one another." In the meantime, support your local American Catholic Studies program.

There is at least one more fascinating piece to this intergenerational puzzle. The more we hear that young adult Catholics are different from their elders in the church, the more we discover just how much they are like other Americans of all ages. "In an age of moral freedom," social commentator Alan Wolfe writes in Moral Freedom (W.W. Norton, 2001), "moral authority has to justify its claims." In interviews with Americans from a wide variety of backgrounds, Wolfe uncovered a deep distrust of traditional institutions and disappointment with the conduct of political and religious leaders. Meanwhile the quest for personal character and integrity remains a powerful theme in the lives of individuals. Some of Wolfe's most telling anecdotes are drawn from the testimonies of Catholics of varying degrees of affiliation with the church. They do sound much like other Americans, but this does not necessarily mean that their faith has been diluted or that the church will inevitably go the way of declining mainline Protestant denominations. It may just as readily be argued that the experience of young adult Catholics places them at the nation's moral epicenter, endowing them with a great opportunity to influence public discourse for the good of all.

In 1965 Daniel Callahan wrote that his generation "looks constantly into itself, and is thus partially paralyzed." In 2001 Alan Wolfe writes in Moral Freedom that "when a moral decision has to be made" Americans "look into themselves--at their own interests, desires, needs, sensibilities, identities, and inclinations--before they choose the right course of action." Young Catholics have evidently been prepared by their experience to handle this version of moral freedom, but they also inherit a tradition that offers another model of freedom. Here's to a meaningful adventure.

James T. Fisher holds the Will and Ariel Durant Chair in Humanities at Saint Peter's College in Jersey City, New Jersey.