It’s August; schools are revving up and parishes are preparing to welcome young Catholics to their faith formation programs. Meanwhile there’s a crisis going on in our Catholic Church: a continual bleeding of members, especially younger members. In March the Public Religion Research Institute reported that the most common reason respondents cited for leaving their childhood faith was that they “stopped believing in the religion’s teachings.” And this survey and others report that people who drop out of a religion mostly do not seek another. They become part of the growing number of US “nones”—no religious affiliation. Clearly we parents, grandparents, great grands, catechists, preachers--and all the rest of us Catholics responsible for handing on our faith to the next generations--need to do a better job passing on the kind of faith that people will choose to keep for a lifetime.
I call that kind of life-lasting Catholic faith “ecclesial faith.” It’s the kind of faith that brings us a deep and enduring relationship with God through the Church, so that, if we were to consider leaving our Church, it would mean for us endangering our treasured relationship with God. In other words, we would understand instinctively that being spiritual but not religious would not work for us, would eventually leave us spiritually hungry. We would understand that my goal for my human life--to be an ethical human person whose life contributes to the goodness of the world—needs the guidance and support of my ecclesial community, others walking with me toward that goal. We would understand that although there are many paths toward the good, true, and beautiful, and all of them have both strengths and weaknesses, this Catholic path seems best for me.
So how can we better pass on this kind of ecclesial faith to our young Catholics? Here are some of my “takes” about this question.
Emphasize the communal: Our Western culture so over emphasizes the individual aspect of the human person. It emphasizes the specialness, the uniqueness, and the rights of the individual rather than how the individual is connected to other humans, and in fact to all of creation. Because of this cultural distortion, many conclude that a group, like a Church, really is not needed. This is not just a Church or religious problem. All group membership has suffered from this cultural distortion. Check out online Robert Putnam, and other literature about individualism. Already in 1995 Putnam listed ways in which Americans had disengaged from community.
It’s our job to do what we can to bring back balance about the communal nature of faith. Start by emphasizing the communal nature of the human person. Here we get some help from our culture. Interest in DNA ancestry searches shows that the individual we think we are is actually a conglomeration of strands—and if we were to look deeper into the DNA, there are shared traits from our animal evolutionary past. Engaging with the climate crisis helps us see our interdependence with other people and our planet.
So very important is that we ourselves belong to groups beyond the family, both religious and secular. We instill faith in groups by witnessing to our young that it is worth while staying with groups, through both the struggles and rewards of that, instead of just walking away when we get disgusted with them!
Regarding faith formation, we need to pull out the communal elements of Catholicism and emphasize and enhance them in what we teach. Do our members, especially younger ones, understand how our Gospels emerged from the recollections of various communities of early Christians—from people who heard and saw Jesus and gave us both their memories and their interpretations? Do they understand that the sacraments—except perhaps for Eucharist—came from communities of believers? They developed over time the ritual practices for remembering Jesus, giving order to the community, and handing on their faith that today we call sacraments. When we take our youthful members to Church, do they know that we are going to a family prayer service (which will include times of private prayer)? Our pastors are so important in this effort to emphasize the communal foundation of Catholic faith because, unfortunately, it is still true that Catholics encounter faith formation more at liturgy than through a class.
Criticize appropriately: The Church is a human institution. Every human institution has its flaws, its crimes, its sins. Children already encounter the reality of imperfect institutions in their schools; the news keeps flaws in our government before us; the Boeing company right now faces how production schedules and sales profits got prioritized over airline safety. We cannot excuse mistakes of our Catholic historical past, or excuse bad actors like sexual abusers and bishops who protected them. Being seriously flawed or historically blind is part of the human historical drama. Ecclesial faith means coming to understand what needs to be changed about our Church, and improved, and helping with that. Appropriate criticism begins that understanding.
Teach a developing faith: The Catholic faith is not finished defining itself, its beliefs, its mission because it is part of a changing and developing world. There will be changes in how we express the beliefs of our Church. Check out “doctrinal development” online through Magisterium AI. Every doctrine has a history, just as every idea in science or law has one. Christians of the first century did not have a developed understanding of Trinity or precise words to explain the divinity of Christ. The Catholic Church condemned Galileo in the 16th century, and in the 19th century opposed evolution. Today there’s a Vatican Observatory, and a discussion of evolution can be found in the section about creation in the U.S. Catholic Catechism. Change comes in every area of human understanding, including faith, as we humans acquire new knowledge, new language, new wisdom.
Emphasize the Incarnation: Incarnation means more than just the birth of Jesus of Nazareth in Bethlehem. It means that God is here, not just something/Someone we meet after death. God’s “with-ness” begins with creation—the first incarnation. As Alfred North Whitehead said, God is the necessary explanation not only that there is something but that it is as it is. The “with-ness” of God speaks to us through the natural world around us. The second incarnation is something ancient human beings already intuited, that this creating God is also a communicating God. Hebrew scripture traces how our Jewish ancestors in faith heard God speaking to them through human voices—through great leaders like Moses and through the prophets. That’s why when Jesus asked, “who do people say I am,” the answer from people awed by his speaking was “Elijah or Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” The infancy account in Matthew’s Gospel calls the infant Jesus “Emmanuel” (God with us), and John’s Gospel calls him, “The Word.” Jesus is the communicating God in a human person. His dying gift of the Holy Spirit to his followers continues God’s creating, redeeming, and enduring presence here and now and forever.
So we need to take every chance to share our appreciation of the incarnate “right here and now” God. Do our students, children, grands and greats hear us praying spontaneous prayers of thanks and praise, lament and sorrow, to the “right here” God? It’s hard to love and trust other human persons, isn’t it? Do we help young Catholics to see every person as an image of God with perhaps wisdom from God for us? Being Churched hopefully makes it easier to trust and believe that God is physically incarnate in other people (we call it the indwelling of the Risen Christ), because Church is where we meet people trying to be those very images of God for us. Church is where we get connected through sacraments with the Risen Christ living in us and also in all those humans who have walked Jesus’ way in the past. And all this incarnate God given us through Church’s revelation, sacraments, and present and past members is what we leave if we leave our Church.
Make your faith your own: There are so many facets to Catholicism. I love the Gospel image of a householder who brings out of the storehouse (think “attic”) old things and new (Matt 13:52). We don’t have to love all facets and details of Catholicism equally! Some beliefs of our Church mean a whole lot to me (eg, Incarnation). Others I need to keep in that attic because I can’t make much sense of them—even though others treasure them. And still others are not “enlightened,” and need to be “gone beyond,” for example by welcoming into our hearts and lives people who are divorced and remarried, or non-heterosexual. Live deeply what touches you deeply at your spiritual level. Do your family members know the passages of scripture you love most? If a young person asks a faith question, do you have some or your own words and images to use in answering? Of course we don’t need to have all the answers! After 2,000 years of Catholicism, theologians still search for words to speak of mysteries of our faith, like the meaning of entropy or suffering. Mystery means something that exceeds our conceptuality, like a horizon we can see but never reach.
I hope and pray that everyone reading this longish essay has other great ideas about handing on an enduring ecclesial faith. I wish I could hear them! Meanwhile, let’s send a special prayer this month for all those we entrust with doing that for our young members.
Sister Mary Garascia, PhD (Theology), is a member of the Sisters of the Precious Blood of Dayton, Ohio, where she now resides. Until recently she lived and ministered at The Holy Name of Jesus in Redlands. You can follow her weekly Sunday scripture blogs at PreciousBloodSistersDayton.org.