Why the Youth Are Leaving

It has come specially to my attention recently that young Catholics are leaving the Church. I don't think this is exactly revelatory to anyone, but from a number of pieces I have read, and from several personal conversations, I have been reminded, somewhat frantically, that the total number of Catholics is declining. It seems the Church is destined for some kind of winnowing in the 21st century; but who can tell that future but by reading the signs of the age, and they have always lied about the Church. I won't be touching that awful subject just now, though my conception of it is more desperate of late. Something also has been brewing in my head these months about the Church in what we call the Modern world, but it has rather more to do with the Modern world than with the Church. In any case, it is a large idea -- too large for my small mind to put in a small number of words -- and I'll save it for another day as well.

I have again today fallen on what is a very familiar rant in my mind. It concerns me and my youthful co-religionists, and it concerns a very bad display of reasoning in those whose mission it is to guide us through this transitory period of youth. No doubt these are sincere in their attempts to guide, and in many cases it may be due to ignorance rather than illogic that they fail; in any case, it is my intention to point them to the problem, that they might sooner find the solution.

Here is my thesis, and it sounds like a paradox: young Catholics have left the Church because certain Church officials have tried to be "relevant" to young Catholics. It would be truer to say that certain officials watered down Catholicism, or that they became "Catholic-lite", or a million other things that all inevitably suggest that they failed in their devotion and zeal for the Faith, and thus failed in their mission to give those gifts to us. But let us restrict ourselves to this affirming statement: that the Catholic Faith is now relevant to the youth. Even at first glance, it would seem a contradiction to suppose that the Church is now relevant for the first time in many centuries precisely when the entire Catholic world is seized of the desperate and obvious fact that the youth of today care nothing for the Church. And when, in contrast, the dusty, stodgy, stiff, and cramped conspiracy of old men that was the pre-Vatican II Church seemed to have no problem setting fire to the hearts and minds of many young men and women of its day; at least, of course, a sufficient number to fill the priesthood and the convents. Most modern spectators will place the blame on our society; and they'll find no argument from me there. But they will suggest instead that the youth-relevant liturgy, homilies, music, and youth groups have done much to staunch the wounds caused by secularism, and that it is merely by an unhappy accident that these things coincide with the attrition of young Catholics. It is not true; it is by cause and not by accident that these things occur in tandem, and I will take it on myself to try to demonstrate the link.

Let us begin with two analogies. First, suppose a master builder decided that wood-working and construction were not appealing to young people; indeed, most of them lived in houses and used furniture daily, and yet never paused to consider these wonders. We might say that it was obvious they took such things for granted, but that such things were still very necessary to them; that they were merely foolish in ignoring the house to focus on the toys. But suppose rather that our master builder decides to try his hand at building electronic devices instead, supposing them to have youthful appeal; and that in this crowded and fickle market, it was seen that he had not many customers, and his former customers, loyal though they be, found themselves without a use for his new trade. Again, suppose that Michelangelo or some such Renaissance artist were living in our time rather than his own. Now, we know that he worked many artistic wonders under the patronage of the Church, and that in this capacity, the bishops and popes had a influence on his work. But suppose those bishops felt that realistic painting was tired, or that marble did not appeal to Modern youth, and preferred to give their patronage to Catholic filmmakers, or television producers, or video game designers instead. Those treasures of Renaissance art would be sacrificed for fleeting and fast-forgotten pieces in ephemeral media, lost on the older generation and dated to the next generation, forgotten before effective in the furious pace of the technological world. The Pieta discarded for the Passion of the Christ; an immortal monument for a two-hour film.

Obviously these analogies are contrived, but they serve to show two important truths about the situation. First, the Church is like the master builder; she has ever been the only thing able to build a solid home for Man. And when she clouds this vocation, even for a moment and only in spirit, with a desire to attract people with shiny new things, she will appear to falter. She ought not worry and fuss over being appealing; better to wait for the obstinate youth to experience poverty and homelessness, so that he might begin to appreciate his Home. Second, the Church has her patronage, and her choice of artists. Surely it is not unreasonable to expect her to spend her resources on ancient and immortal art, and not squander it on quickly-broken toys; even more, it must not be unreasonable to imagine that she would win more hearts and minds with the beauty of the art than with the shine of the toys.

I have placed a strong emphasis on competition in both these analogies, because I feel personally that this is the motivation of many "relevant" innovations: they are trying to compete with Protestants, and with the world. This demonstrates a most puzzling ignorance of the mental condition of most young men and women. It seems to me that everyone who has been young knows that youth is a time of transition and uncertainty; it seems evident that we are looking for a place in the world; an identity; a home. And the world cannot offer it to us. We have already sickened of the despair of Modern philosophies; we have wearied of the emptiness of Post-Modern diversions; we are gripped by metaphysical doubts and wonder at their meanings. I once thought I was shamefully alone in having ever given thought to suicide, but the same feeling has since been affirmed by so many of my friends that I now believe it must be nearly universal in our generation. We come to the Church, as all men ever have, because we are fleeing from those worldly terrors. The last thing we ever want is something that even appears like it wants to imitate the trappings of that dying world; heaven knows we don't want it to compete with individualistic creeds or worldly negations. Consciously or unconsciously, every man or woman, young or old, who considers the Catholic Faith does so because he or she desires the Catholic philosophy; we may desire it for one of thousand different reasons -- one of the thousand ways it differs from any other philosophy -- yet it is always the same philosophy that is desired. We come looking for the praise of life, and living, and love, and the value of each human soul, against the despair of loneliness and suicide; for the unchanging and infallibly certain doctrines, against the soul-rending doubts of relativism; for the strict moral laws, against the confusion and regret of libertinism; for the experience of God, against our small, selfish lives.

So, as an open request to all who sit in positions of authority and decision-making in Catholic parishes, let me propose the following things as effective at attracting and keeping young Catholics. We don't want contemporary Protestant worship-music, or evangelical sermons; if we wanted them, we would attend Protestant churches, since they will always be better at them. We don't want vague and feel-good homilies, loosely inviting us to love and personal relationships with God; again, we could get this in any contemporary Protestant service. We don't want youth groups that are merely social organizations, without theology or moral exhortation; we can be social in school and secular groups. We want hard, honest, definitive, and uncompromising doctrinal statements; we want theological discussions on the Trinity and the Incarnation, and the thousand other Catholic mysteries that are deeper than all Modern sophistries; we want moral imperatives; we need penance, and want to be driven to the confessional; we want Latin, reverent liturgy, beautiful hymns, transcendent art and statues, and all the other things that engage the senses and tell us we're in the presence of the eternal. Most of all, we want to bow before God and celebrate the mystery that He comes to us, even into our very bodies, in the Eucharist. And we want a Home, something that gives us an identity and a culture. In short, we want everything the Moderns think old-fashioned, because everything the Moderns know about the human person is so terribly backwards.

So my plea to all Catholics is that we stop trying so hard to be relevant to the world. The Church already has what every man and woman on earth is really seeking; in the great phrase of Chesterton, the Church is the natural home of the human spirit. Our only mission, as the stewards of this great Truth, is to guard and protect it, and share it with all the world. We do that first and foremost by not being ashamed of what we have, and by not assuming that our beliefs are out-of-date or out-of-touch with anyone. We do it by being mirrors of the Church, as the Church is the mirror of the loving face of Christ.

On the subject of youth in the Church, I am reminded of the essay of Chesterton called "Shocking the Modernists." In it, he observes the strange ignorance of the Anglican Church of his day as they tried to adapt to bring in young people. I don't think Chesterton would have ever believed it if you had told him that within a century the Catholic Church would be attempting some of the same experiments. Mater Dei, ora pro nobis.

I once read a paragraph in a daily paper, about a notable outburst among the most advanced intellects in the Church of England, which bears witness to the promptitude with which such triumphs are appreciated. Under the two headlines of "Youth Finds Church a Bore," and "A Girl Tells Clergy," the paragraph, or rather series of paragraphs was arranged in a suitably sensational way as follows:

"Youth finds church a bore--and stays away from it. This contention, put forward by a girl of eighteen from the platform at Girton College, Cambridge, yesterday, made the elderly delegates to the Modern Churchman's Conference sit up sharply in their seats.

"The speaker was the attractive daughter of a Portsmouth naval chaplain. Her most telling passage was this: 'I don't think public worship has any attraction whatsoever for the young. Religion is supposed to express God through truth and beauty, we are told, but in this age of specialisation people turn to science, art and philosophy to satisfy those needs'."

I wonder what her least telling passage was.

Of course the fun really begins with the astounding and staggering effect produced by the original thunderbolt of thought "Youth Finds Church a Bore," on all those admittedly elderly delegates who were sufficiently ancient to be described as Modern Churchmen. Dr. Major leapt to his feet with a howl; Dean Inge bounced up to the ceiling like a ball. Dr. Rashdall uttered one piercing shriek and fainted; for not one of these venerable doctors, in all their long experience of the Modernist Movement, had ever heard one human being articulate with human lips the star-staggering blasphemy that youth finds church a bore. Not one of them had ever heard so much as a rumour of young people yawning during a sermon; to none had any voice dared to whisper that little boys have been known to catch flies or dig penknives into pews during Divine service; not one of them had ever in his life heard a baby begin to squeal in church; none had ever listened to the hideous slander that youths and maidens in church had been known to look at each other instead of keeping their eyes fixed rigidly on the lectern (for nobody in the church of a Modern Churchman would condescend to look at the altar); none of them ever knew before that there had ever been any friction between the fits and moods of youth and the routine of religion. Never, until the attractive daughter of a Portsmouth naval chaplain made this stupendous discovery in modern psychology, had they even thought of the possibility that a long religious service might be rather a bore to a boy.

But yet, even about that discovery, it seems as if there might be more to be said. Some of the elderly Modern Churchmen have been schoolmasters. It seems just possible that some of them had discovered that the Sixth Book of the Aeneid can be a bore to a boy. But in those cases it was not invariably assumed that the boy was right and the poet was wrong. It was not taken for granted that the boredom of the boy in itself proves that Virgil is a bad poet; still less did anyone ever propose that a simplified and modernised version of Virgil must be substituted for the old one. Nobody proposed that passages from Kipling about the British Empire should be substituted for the more austere salutations of Virgil to the Roman Empire, because such education would be more modern, compact and convenient to a truly National Church. Nobody proposed that a really smart and snappy up-to-date description of the Derby, taken from an evening paper, should be regarded as a complete substitute for that thundering line in which the very earth shakes with the horsehoofs of the charioteers. And, if I may venture to hint a disagreement with the Prophetess of Girton College, Cambridge, I think it will be found that the same argument applies even to the substitutes that she herself proposes. She says that people turn to science, art and philosophy. Will she swear by the Death of Nelson, or whatever oath binds the daughter of a Portsmouth naval chaplain, that no science student ever shirks or plays truant in a science school? It will be vain for her to swear any such thing in the case of an art school; for I have been to an art school myself, and I can assure her that there were quite as many art students who found application to art a bore as there could possibly be divinity students who found divinity a bore. As for young philosophers, I have known a good many of them; at an age when nearly all of them were much more fond of philosophising than of learning philosophy. And I might hint that there are other young agitators, of the sort that seem to agitate so strangely the Modern Churchmen and the modern newspapers, who seem to have a certain spirited and spontaneous preference for saying things rather than for thinking what they are saying. Is it really necessary that we should toil through all this tiresome repetition about the perfectly obvious difficulty of getting young people to work when they naturally want to play, before we even begin to discuss the mature problem of the relation of doctrine to the mind? It is perfectly natural that the boy should find the church a bore. But why are we bound to treat what is natural as something actually superior to what is supernatural; as something which is not even merely supernatural, but is in the exact sense super-supernatural?

G.K. Chesterton, from "Shocking the Modernists" from The Well and the Shallows (1935)

On the Universality of the Church

Chesterton writes a number of beautiful pieces which can be said to demonstrate what is meant by the "universality" of the Church. Of all errors that non-Catholics make in thinking about the Church, probably the worst is that they imagine it to be merely sectarian. Every time I am pressed to think about the sects and rifts in Protestantism, I am reminded of a conversation I had years ago with a Korean exchange student. Though she was at least nominally Christian herself, she had a very simple view of Christianity, having come from a culture with a short Christian history; and she was bewildered by the Christian divides, so clothed with European ideas. To her, they were foreign oddities, and she commented on them with the same indifferent curiosity as I might comment on contemporary Korean politics. She could not understand why there was a Baptist student group, and a Reformed student group, and Methodist and so on, each with its different activities, and each eager to remain exclusive from the rest; yet all these groups claimed to be "Christian." She had asked members of these groups, and all she could understand is that it had something to do with history and some slightly different beliefs; she knew the different beliefs, mind you, like infant baptism and the rest, but she had no positive idea why any of it was important. But you could tell she accepted this puzzling fact in much the same way she accepted the fraternity system: it was simply some aspect of a foreign culture to which she was an outsider.

I can easily see someone else making this conversation an argument for a "Bible-based" Christianity -- one that eschews these sectarian divides in favor of a lowest-common-denominator evangelical belief. But it wasn't her bewilderment about the divides in Protestant Christianity that struck me -- I must confess I have the same bewilderment -- but what she went on to say about the Catholic Church. Her simple intuition grasped that it was not just another one of these divided groups; whatever it was, it was something very different. From talking to members of the Protestant student groups, she understood that each believed the others to be Christians, but for small reasons, they just weren't the "right" sort of Christian. But all she could grasp from asking them about Catholicism is that they didn't like it. She wasn't sure if Catholics were Christians, and had no idea what we believed, or why these other Christian groups disliked us so much. So she was curious to know what we did believe. So I attempted to cross that language-barrier, and to communicate in simple English the ideas that defined the Catholic Church; I am afraid all I really communicated was an affirmation that she was correct, and that there was more than one doctrine that defined and set apart the Church.

I'm relating this little story as an example of what the "catholicity" of the Church means -- that it is something that transcends language, culture, and time. I have recently read a curious number of independent personal accounts of Protestants with historical interest becoming Catholic after seriously pondering the question, if St. Augustine or some other Father suddenly came back and walked the earth, where would he go to church and what would he recognize as the Church? Try as the Reformed might to claim Augustine, I don't think any one of them in good conscience could say Augustine would attend their church. And there is something almost comical trying to imagine St. Augustine at a "contemporary" church service: trying to sing a hymn to electric instrumentation while reading the words from a projector screen. No, he would be emphatically Catholic; and whatever he found in the modern Catholic Church that was strange to him, there is no doubt that he would know it at once to be his spiritual home.

And these two images, that of my Korean friend and that of St. Augustine, converge precisely to illuminate the universality of the Church. In short, I can only say it like this: Protestantism is part of a culture, and the Catholic Church is outside culture. This is emphatically not a sectarian boast; you might very well believe it to be a bad thing that my religion does not mingle with culture. But it is a fact that it does not; and it is a fact that every Protestant sect does. It is an undeniable fact that the Protestant Reformation could not have occurred outside of Europe, and certainly not before modernity. The most obvious example of this is that all of it rests on personal reading of Scripture, something that takes for granted both the fact of universal (or nearly universal) literacy, and the lack of expense in printing and binding books, both of which are the result of the printing press and both of which are positively confined to the modern world. If you but remove those accidents of modern society, you remove the backbone of Protestantism. It may be true that something remains, in the sense that there is more to Protestant Christianity than reading the Bible, but it certainly would be spineless. And just as Protestantism cannot adapt itself to a time or place without widespread books and literacy, so any single Protestant sect cannot adapt itself to a culture or language that does not share its singular philosophy. It has been argued to me that our modern notion of free will and fate does not, in all its detail, precede Augustine; whether that is true or not, it is certain that many societies have had and still have no notion of it whatsoever. But without such language and such ideas, Calvin's philosophy could never even begin to be anything but a foreign obstacle to such a culture. Every piece of Catholicism can survive without Augustine, and therefore without Augustine's philosophy, but Calvinism cannot and did not exist at all without Calvin; there was the Catholic Faith before Augustine, but there was no Calvinism before Calvin.

So I get to my point: there is no doctrine, nor person, nor philosophy, nor culture, nor language, nor anything else alone that defines the Catholic Church. She is what She is, no matter the philosophical or social landscape; and She will still be Herself, when all the world is different. And that is what is meant by the universality of the Church; it might better be called immortality.

Anyway, here is Chesterton in one of his many beautiful passages about the universality of the Church.

The Church is not merely armed against the heresies of the past or even of the present, but equally against those of the future, that may be the exact opposite of those of the present. Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists. Thus, when the world went Puritan in the seventeenth century, the Church was charged with pushing charity to the point of sophistry, with making everything easy with the laxity of the confessional. Now that the world is not going Puritan but Pagan, it is the Church that is everywhere protesting against a Pagan laxity in dress or manners. It is doing what the Puritans wanted done when it is really wanted. In all probability, all that is best in Protestantism will only survive in Catholicism; and in that sense all Catholics will still be Puritans when all Puritans are Pagans.

Thus, for instance, Catholicism, in a sense little understood, stands outside a quarrel like that of Darwinism at Dayton. It stands outside it because it stands all around it, as a house stands all around two incongruous pieces of furniture. It is no sectarian boast to say it is before and after and beyond all these things in all directions. It is impartial in a fight between the Fundamentalist and the theory of the Origin of Species, because it goes back to an origin before that Origin; because it is more fundamental than Fundamentalism. It knows where the Bible came from. It also knows where most of the theories of Evolution go to. It knows there were many other Gospels besides the Four Gospels, and that the others were only eliminated by the authority of the Catholic Church. It knows there are many other evolutionary theories besides the Darwinian theory; and that the latter is quite likely to be eliminated by later science. It does not, in the conventional phrase, accept the conclusions of science, for the simple reason that science has not concluded. To conclude is to shut up; and the man of science is not at all likely to shut up. It does not, in the conventional phrase, believe what the Bible says, for the simple reason that the Bible does not say anything. You cannot put a book in the witness-box and ask it what it really means. The Fundamentalist controversy itself destroys Fundamentalism. The Bible by itself cannot be a basis of agreement when it is a cause of disagreement; it cannot be the common ground of Christians when some take it allegorically and some literally. The Catholic refers it to something that can say something, to the living, consistent, and continuous mind of which I have spoken; the highest mind of man guided by God.

Every moment increases for us the moral necessity for such an immortal mind. We must have something that will hold the four corners of the world still, while we make our social experiments or build our Utopias. For instance, we must have a final agreement, if only on the truism of human brotherhood, that will resist some reaction of human brutality. Nothing is more likely just now than that the corruption of representative government will lead to the rich breaking loose altogether, and trampling on all the traditions of equality with mere pagan pride. We must have the truisms everywhere recognized as true. We must prevent mere reaction and the dreary repetition of the old mistakes. We must make the intellectual world safe for democracy. But in the conditions of modern mental anarchy, neither that nor any other ideal is safe. just as Protestants appealed from priests to the Bible, and did not realize that the Bible also could be questioned, so republicans appealed from kings to the people, and did not realize that the people also could be defied. There is no end to the dissolution of ideas, the destruction of all tests of truth, that has become possible since men abandoned the attempt to keep a central and civilized Truth, to contain all truths and trace out and refute all errors. Since then, each group has taken one truth at a time and spent the time in turning it into a falsehood. We have had nothing but movements; or in other words, monomanias. But the Church is not a movement but a meeting-place; the trysting-place of all the truths in the world.

G.K. Chesterton, from "Why I am a Catholic" from Twelve Modern Apostles and Their Creeds (1926)

Chesterton - Faith and Fads

"Some day perhaps I may try to write something about the spiritual or psychological quarrel between faith and fads. Here I will only say, in conclusion, that I believe the universal fallacy here is a fallacy of being universal. There is a sense in which it is really a human if heroic possibility to love everybody; and the young student will not find it a bad preliminary exercise to love somebody. But the fallacy I mean is that of a man who is not even content to love everybody, but really wishes to be everybody. He wishes to walk down a hundred roads at once; to sleep in a hundred houses at once; to live a hundred lives at once. To do something like this in the imagination is one of the occasional visions of art and poetry, to attempt it in the art of life is not only anarchy but inaction. Even in the arts it can only be the first hint and not the final fulfillment; a man cannot work at once in bronze and marble, or play the organ and the violin at the same time. The universal vision of being such a Briareus is a nightmare of nonsense even in the merely imaginative world; and ends in mere nihilism in the social world. If a man had a hundred houses, there would still be more houses than he had days in which to dream of them; if a man had a hundred wives, there would still be more women than he could ever know. He would be an insane sultan jealous of the whole human race, and even of the dead and the unborn. I believe that behind the art and philosophy of our time there is a considerable element of this bottomless ambition and this unnatural hunger; and since in these last words I am touching only lightly on things that would need much larger treatment, I will admit that the rending of the ancient roof of man is probably only a part of such an endless and empty expansion. I asked in the last chapter what those most wildly engaged in the mere dance of divorce, as fantastic as the dance of death, really expected for themselves or for their children. And in the deepest sense I think this is the answer; that they expect the impossible, that is the universal. They are not crying for the moon, which is a definite and therefore a defensible desire. They are crying for the world; and when they had it, they would want another one. In the last resort they would like to try every situation, not in fancy but in fact, but they cannot refuse any and therefore cannot resolve on any. In so far as this is the modern mood, it is a thing so deadly as to be already dead. What is vitally needed everywhere, in art as much as in ethics, in poetry as much as in politics, is choice; a creative power in the will as well as in the mind. Without that self-limitation of somebody, nothing living will ever see the light."

-G.K. Chesterton, from the Conclusion of The Superstition of Divorce