AmericanPapist Comments
I'm rather skeptical of such claims, as the term "liberal" is rarely defined well. Does it mean socially or econimically liberal? Sexually liberal? I think what's more likely the issue is that kids are griwing uo with more permissive parents, so they come out of high school with less of a moral barometer. They're often left to search for the truth on their own.
It's interesting that they use the terminology "more liberal and less practicing in their faith and values." This would seem antithetical to the common "liberal" argument that a more liberal view of the faith is a more realistic way of practicing one's faith in today's world.
Setting aside the matter of labels, the survey claims that college-age Catholics are increasingly opposed to Church teachings on abortion, divorce, and homosexuality. The question is, is this true?
I'm inclined to say yes. Surveys consistently show that youth of all rites move to the left over college. Thankfully, many come back afterwards. I would be interested to see what the survey says about young Catholics 5-10 years after graduation.
It would also be very interesting to see the comparative results of a survey such as this in an area where the Traditional Latin Mass is regularly available (at least) every Sunday against an area where it is unknown.
I just finished a book by Colleen Carroll on young adults embracing Tradition. Easy read, a short book review on my blog.
I do believe that those younger adults that stay are stronger in their believes. IOW we may have less quanity, but the quality is going up.
Depends how you are using "liberal". I feel the last two Popes are way...way...way liberal when it comes to the death penalty (they're really against it underneath the mandatory props to past tradition). And NCR had a report sometime back that a poll showed millenial young Catholics to be also against the death penalty increasingly but for abortion increasingly.
http://ncronline.org/NCR_Online/...005/
093005o.php
So oddly enough the millenials are in line with Rome more so than their elders on the death penalty while they are bizarrely permissive on abortion. Rome seems to have thought that opposing the death penalty would convert people against abortion...but the seamless garment of life has developed seams. What Rome should have done was excommunicate Catholic pols who support choice. For 24 years going back to Gov. Mario Cuomo's refusal to veto an abortion funding bill in 1984, Popes and Cardinals and bishops have done zilch to those pols. Sorry gang...but that sends a message....and not a good message about abortion. The hierarchy shares in the situation. And the last two Popes tossed 1300 years of tradition on the death penalty...while citing tradition as valuable in the abortion area. You can't send two opposite messages about tradition's value simultaneously and then wonder what is going on in your audience when they toss a different tradition than the one you tossed. And you can't allow such pols to receive the Eucharist for 20+ years and think that your permissiveness will not cause other permissive behaviour in young people.
I've got to agree entirely, Mr. Peters, with your assessment of the faithful youth. I teach at a Catholic high school, and just this year I began teaching the theology of the body. The response from the freshmen is amazing--several boys have joined e5men.org with me and are fasting on bread and water once a month in reparation for sins against women. Other students are remarking how important the class is and that JPII's teaching has radically changed their own thinking--the Church, one boy wrote, really cares about us! Last week, at the behest of a sophomore student, I began to deliver the ToB to anyone interested during a lunch period. 29 boys total came (we'll see how it goes tomorrow!). Furthermore, we have boys who spend First Fridays in chapel at school, boys who pray the Rosary in the chapel as a group, boys who attend a Theology Club (we're reading Spe Salvi at the moment), boys who go on seminary trips, boys learning to serve the EF of the Roman Rite, so on and so forth.
Many of these boys--and I'm sure it's true across the world--have seen the pain caused by the excesses of the Boomers, and they have found Christ in the Church welcoming them with love, stability, and the promise of meaning. True--many youth may become "liberal" and run away from Truth, thanks to society's dictum on said Truth. The ones who crave the Truth, however, stand by it and are eager for more.
That, anyway, is my two cents.
God be praised, now, and forever, and forever!
Ed
The boomer as demons theory is not holding up...millenial Catholics (born between 1979 and 1987) should be more against abortion but are far more in favor of abortion than boomers....with 89% saying one can be a good Catholic while approving abortion whereas Vat II Catholics are 56% and post Vat II Catholics are 59% on that...still awful but not as awful as the young.
Further in the 2005 poll as to Mass attendance, NCR noted that boomers attend far more than the young: 6 out of 10 versus 4 out of ten for the young millenials.
Panda, don't you know that 72% of all statistics are made up! :)
Seriously, though, let's look at a few things here: I know at our March for Life in Little Rock, we had about 5000 people, and the vast majority, as reported by the news, were of the young. I seem to recall reading that held true throughout the nation.
Second, are we dealing with Catholics or "Catholics," those who claim the mantle but do nothing about it? Case in point: divorce, depending upon with whom you speak and which marriage is being discussed, is somewhere between 40% and 70% in this nation, including among those who call themselves Catholic (my understanding is that the abortion rate among those who call themselves Catholic has pretty much always been equivalent with the rest of the nation, too)(I might add here that I am the son of a divorced Catholic--and a ridiculous number of my students are as well--from the Boomer generation). However, among those Catholics who actually follow Church teaching--including Mass attendance and, yes, sexual morality--the divorce rate is below 5%.
My point is that a lot of folks can claim to be Catholic, but if they aren't living the Catholic life, then their supposed Catholicism has no bearing on the decisions that they make.
One final point: I have a subscription to the National Catholic Register and I have read many articles from the National "Catholic" Reporter. My NCR has reported about the Millenials who practice their faith with enthusiasm, even wondering aloud about experiencign a New Springtime of evangelization. By no means do I have every article of the Register of the past two years memorized, but I do wonder, did you get your statistics from the NCR of from that other newspaper?
I certainly did not intend to imply that the Boomers are all evil, hedonistic, anti-Christs. That, of course, would be silly! However, it is undeniable that the Boomer Generation--and that which followed (normally I fall under the Gen Y category--thanks for including me with the Millenials!)--have, in general, not employed the virtue of temperance.
God be praised, now, and forever, and forever!
Ed
But your National Catholic Register sounds like it was doing the anecdotal...not a poll... which is what you did above...the anecdotal... and while polls can be imperfect, anecdotal can be more unreliable since they are simply a microcosm informal poll of their own.
Those make nice reading but apply to one's personal experience which may not work 100 miles down the highway in your state.
If only good Catholics should be the data base for Catholic polls, then Rome should stop recording 1 billion plus as the number of Catholics worldwide... which is based on baptismal records. They should report ?? 1% of that....10% of that? Who will make that call? And I doubt that Rome will back off the 1 billion plus figure in line with the "good Catholic" litmus test. Is it a good Catholic if one attends Mass but drives 7 miles above the speed limit on a residential street with children signs all around?
We just had the tragedy in the NY area on tonights news of a Catholic wife who attended Mass yesterday shooting her husband to death today while the two children were away at college. Maybe that is why Rome knows not to have litmus tests for the number of Catholics she reports. And I will say this: the woman looked like she had a broken nose when others did see her at Mass so that I hope the courts really give her a non severe sentence if abuse was extant from the husband and she really flipped out.
Let's hope Rome reads polls and if they don't like the polls, they should put their own sociologists to work and do one and not proceed on the anecdotal since their baliwick is the macrocosm and not the microcosm of a school or region.
For the Mass attendance stats go to Sep. 2005 of the National Catholic Reporter archives.
ps the other stats were from the link in my first post.
I also teach at a Catholic high school and I tend to agree that young Catholics are becoming increasingly liberal. And from where I am, that trend isn't changing anytime soon. If anything it will get worse, and rapidly.
But I would also caution liberals from getting too giddy about this. In fact, I would venture to say that the attitudes of young Catholics (at least in my experience) could better be described as 'individualism' than liberalism. They oppose Church teaching on homosexuality not out of great concern for gay-rights, but because they are revulsed by the idea of anyone being told what they should or shouldn't do (especially in sexual matters).
The natural leap that many older liberal Catholics would like to make in response to studies like this is, obviously, to 'liberalize' the Catholic Church. Anyone who has paid even a whit of attention to the mainline protestant churches over the last century would know that this is a grave mistake. No amount of liberal accomodation is going to get these "liberal" young Catholics to take their faith more seriously. They don't go to Church not because they're at odds with Catholic teachings, but because they just don't care all that much about Christianity or religion in general. (Obviously there are many exceptions.) All that liberalizing the Chuch will do, I'm afraid, is make them feel a little less guilty about ignoring their faith.
Sorry if this assesment seems a little dour! This is what I see here in the Northeast...things may be different in other places. I love the kids I work with, really, but their is reason for real concern.
I think it's natural for young people to be heavily influenced by the culture they grow up in, at least much more so than older people who are already formed in their ways. The culture is pretty much formed and molded by industries and institutions that are not in like mind with the Church. The media, entertainment, school systems, big business, etc.
The only potential counterbalance for those social influences that I can find in America is the Church itself, but sadly she seems content to sit on her hands and only speak to such incredibly pressing concerns like immigration or the environment. Let me guess what Sunday's homily will be about... loving one another and forgiving your neighbor? What are the chances? It's only the same thing every weekend.
Unfortunately by the time young people are old enough to form opinions of their own they have been so exposed to such watered-down Church teaching that most decide to move on to something else. It's sad to think that modern culture provides more "meat" than what's passed off in your typical Catholic church on a Sunday.
I see the future of that "faithful" Catholic segment going the way of many European countries: a very small minority that is tolerated yet has virtually no ability to exert change on the culture.
All JMO of course; and I could be, and often am, wrong.
John Calla
Your post made me laugh. I tried to fraternally correct two separate priests in my parish for my having had to endure over a decade of those hall mark card sermons. I went to each priest separately in the rectory and asked why only a sliver of the Scriptural issues were given in such sermons and then to my surprise from these seemingly meek men.... both almost blew a gasket in their neck as they gave me a list of their degrees etc. I would have been safer in the mixed martial arts octagon with Carlos Condit putting an arm bar on my elbow.
I don't doubt that the raw numbers show the Church leaning liberal but those numbers do likely include all baptized Catholics. Further, if you compare them to Fundamentalist Evangelicals (I was a Church of Christ fundy, now entering the Church this Easter) it would certainly seem that Catholics are also by comparison not only becoming more liberal but doing so faster. I believe this is again misleading. Evangelicals don't tend to count those children who grew up in Evangelical homes but now don't come to church. In fact, very often they will only count their numbers in terms of average Sunday attendance. Therefore children are only counted until they move off to college and will only continue to be counted if they go to church on their own of which the more liberal ones don't bother.
The key quote, as has been pointed out, is "younger Catholics have become increasingly more liberal and less practicing in their faith and values."
The problem (or blessing) with liberals is they don't tend to pass on their faith as effectively as traditionals. The void in one's heart where God should be, is not very inspiring after all. Thus we see many liberal orders literally dying out while the few orders that are growing tend to be much more traditional. Does this mean that the number of religious, over all, is growing in the expected manner as compared to the overall population? I don't know, I haven't done the research and probably won't. but the point is that the orders that are seeing any growth at all are, by and large, traditional, while the people who should be entering the liberal orders are, just one generation out, don't see the point in even bothering. That is the fruit of liberalism. Liberals taught their kids to believe in anything they want, but what they got was a generation that doesn't believe in anything. Some of that generation rebels from that idea and that is encouraging but it doesn't appear to be the majority of the overall population.
These liberal Catholics are still on the roll because they were perhaps baptized by activist parents hoping that they would grow up in a brave new church. But they are now, again, one generation on, not bothering to remain active and often not bothering to get their own children baptized, catechized and confirmed. But they are counted.
I think we will likely see, in the next generation, which is even now upon us, a great falling away of liberals from the Church for two reasons. First, many will ask "Why bother?" Some will come for social reasons but, as time goes on, fewer people see church as a necessary prerequisite for respectability and those who might get involved for activist reasons will likely, more and more, view the Church as 'hobbled by tradition' in fulfilling that mission.
Which leads us to the second reason. The most active parts of the Church, the growing parts of the church will tend to be those who believe in it and its mission and thereby attract ne
Oops, got cut off:
and thereby attract new workers. Also, the traditional elements within the church are the demographic portions that are growing because they are having bigger families. And those bigger and more devout families are more likely to produce vocations and those vocations will, of course, be from traditional families will therefore tend to be more traditional. A vicious but beautiful circle.
Ultimately the cross, that Jesus told us we must bear will in the end, drive off the pretenders.
Cel
Were you allowed in your previous church to judge those who left attendance as all being pretenders who could not carry the cross? It is a temptation that Satan loves in Christians because John's epistle seems to support it 100%... I Jn.2:19
"They went out from us, but they were not really of our number; if they had been, they would have remained with us. Their desertion shows that none of them was of our number."
The trouble with that (and Satan knows this) is that John was inspired of God and we are not inspired of God. And John knew that his Johannine community had a clean slate with no pervs to give scandal for example whereas we here in the 20th century not only do not have a clean slate historically (burnings at the stake...now condemned by Vatican II) but we have things like the sex abuse scandal which may have driven millions away (US Catholics number 60 million+) not all due to the pervs but due in part also to the coverup by those in authority and the retransfers of dangerous men by authority....all the while with the diocesan press doing next to nothing to sound the alarm (it is modern legend that this broke recently by the Boston Globe...Diane Sawyer did the same thing way prior to that on TV).
In short, leaving the early church as in John's community....and leaving the 20th century Church are apples and oranges in some cases. And only God knows what that percentage is. When we guess that all who leave are simply craven morally, Satan enjoys that to no end because it makes us feel like the remnant based on several positions that we can control and which we obey sometimes because we are inclined to those things anyway and it may not be so much that we are carrying the cross. There are Mass attendees who have not missed a beat in decades but who would not think to clean under their elderly mom's dresser at her home. Sometimes the cross is not the thing we brag about.
As with so many matters, liberal and conservative Catholics don't so much disagree as talk past each other. As a firm liberal Catholic, I can say that the myth expressed here and elsewhere that our proposed solution to declining participation among young Catholics is not more permissivness.
Here is liberal response#1 -- we have a problem when thoughtful people like Thomas Peters respond to the issue of young Catholics by speaking about students at college, campus ministry and young professonals. Colleen Carrol, in her book which claims to be a study of trends among young Catholics exclusively deals with college students or graduates.
If conservative Catholics listened to liberal Catholics, you woudl hear that we sem to be singularly raising the issue of the 75% of Catholics that are not college graduates or college students. Why would we think that we would have anything less than a disaster when our conservative brothers and sisters in Christ glibly ignore 75% of young people?
I'm proud to say my (strongly liberal Washington, DC!) parish has energetic efforts for evangelization of non-college youth. I can name no conservative parish in the DC or Arlington dicoeses that does.
If being blind to 75% of our youth was solely a problem of conservative commentators and bloggers, it might not be such a problem. But I find it is true among our pastors as well (mitigated by the fact that conservative priests request and are given assignments in parishes that have more college bound youth/college graduates while progressive priests tends to ask and recieve assignments in parishes that have the largest numbers of working class members.)
On other matters raised by the Dean study, matter might not be as bad as the commentary here. Young Catholics retain a high belief in the importance of belief in the resurection, the Eucharist, the Chistian duty to help the poor and devotion to the Blessed Mother.
Other survey show that young people are slightly more pro-life than before. The wording in the Dean study had to do wih could one be a Catholic and disagree with the Church on abortion. I would be interested in probing deeper to see if they were saying one could be a good Catholic and accept abortion as a moral act or if they were disagreeing with those who say one cannot go to communion if one's views on abortion civil law was not in line with the Church's public policy statements.
Same to with homosexuality. Are they responding to the morality of the act or the social treatment of gay people their Catholic forebearers practiced?
The survey also does not conclude that participation in Catholic life indicates conservative views. It shows that among participatory Catholics, they increasingly include in their participation the Church's social justice mission.
I've been thinking about this for a while: to be a young, conservative, practicing Catholic in 21st Century America is basically countercultural, which would make young, conservative, practicing Catholics... LIBERALS.
Weird. Up is down and right is left.
Liberal is not the same as unpopular.
Liberal is to ask for tolerance, to want to engage the modern world rather than reject it or become owned by it, to emphasis a pastoral approach rather than an authortarian, to be committed to the Church's social justice vision, and to focus on the bottom half of society. As liberals reject the economic conservative theory of "trickle down" prosperity, Catholic liberals reject the Catholic conservative theory of "trickle down" grace -- to evangelize the social elites. Liberals believe the church must be present with the poor, the wrokers, the oppressed, and the socially alienated.
Works for me :)
I wonder what you mean by the word "liberal." For the young "Catholics" around me that word means they follow Church teaching only when it suits them and when it's in line with their pop-culture understanding. They push "social-justice" issues, and downplay life issues (though why there is a divide is beyond me). Mostly because they don't agree with them. "Hey whats a few million dead babies? Minimum wage went up!" I'm afraid that my generation will be the death of American Catholicism, and really the death of any decency left in American culture.
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