A Hope to Share: Young Adults and Our Church

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A Hope to Share Young Adults and Our Church

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a hope to share IN THE SPRING OF 2003, the Church in the 21st Century Center published the inaugural issue of C21 Resources. This biannual magazine would serve as a catalyst for conversation and renewal in the wake of the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. Today, you hold the 30th issue of the magazine, during another challenging time for our Church. We pray for the gifts of reconciliation and healing and pledge to continue to provide you with the best resources on key challenges facing our Church today and tomorrow.

on the cover

Boston College Mass of the Holy Spirit, September 2018, Conte Forum. photo credit: ©Boston College Office of University Communications, Lee Pellegrini

The Church in the 21st Century Center is a catalyst and resource for the renewal of the Catholic Church.

C21 Resources, a compilation of critical analyses and essays on key challenges facing the Church today, is published by the Church in the 21st Century Center at Boston College, in partnership with featured authors and publications. c21 resources editorial board Ben Birnbaum Patricia Delaney Thomas Groome Robert Newton Barbara Radtke Jacqueline Regan Ernesto Valiente

This issue shares the hope that young people bring to our Church, and asks how we can better support and encourage young people to live the Gospel. How do we welcome them? How do we form strong communities? How do they inspire us, and how can we inspire them?

With the Synod of Bishops focusing on “Young People, the Faith, and Vocational Discernment” in October, we thought this issue would be timely. We were also deeply fortunate to have Sam Sawyer, S.J., from America Media, sign on to be our guest editor, someone who has spent much of his vocation finding innovative ways to connect with young Catholics.

Just as we were finishing the final layout of this magazine, the Pennsylvania grand jury report was released in the backdrop of Cardinal McCarrick’s alleged misconduct and resignation. We couldn’t address what was unfolding in the Church in this issue, but our spring magazine will reflect on our Church and what’s next.

During this time of turmoil, I am reminded of something Fr. William B. Neenan, S.J., a friend to so many, said to me years ago: “When you were born, you were baptized Catholic because God wanted that for you. Don’t ever let anyone take that away and don’t ever give that up. That’s yours, for keeps.”

Fr. Neenan always found a way to offer a hope to share!

Karen K. Kiefer Director, Church in the 21st Century Center karen.kiefer@bc.edu

managing editor Karen K. Kiefer guest editor Sam Sawyer, S.J. assistant guest editor Zac Davis the church in the 21st century center boston college 110 college road chestnut hill, massachusetts 02467 www.bc.edu/c21 church21@bc.edu 617-552-0470 Print and Digital Production by Progressive Print

© 2018 Trustees of Boston College

Guest Editor C21 Resources Fall 2018 SAM SAWYER, S.J. (‘00, STM ‘14), is a Jesuit priest

and executive editor and director of digital strategy for America Media. Before entering the Society of Jesus in 2004, he worked as a software engineer. During his formation, he studied at Loyola University Chicago and Boston College and taught philosophy at Loyola University Maryland. In 2012, while studying at the School of Theology and Ministry, he cofounded The Jesuit Post, a website and social media project staffed by Jesuits in formation and aimed at reaching young adults. He was ordained to the priesthood in 2014.

While an undergraduate at Boston College, Sam helped start BC’s Kairos retreat program, which continues to offer hundreds of BC students an experience of God every year.

Contents God Has Not Been

by Sam Sawyer, S.J.

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Idle with the Young

Faith Matters

The Youth Synod: A Hope We Need to Share

by Nicole Perone

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Ministering with Authenticity

by Susan Reynolds Todo Dios Es:

by Sacha Hauc

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All Is God

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Hail Mary

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by Billy Critchley-Menor, S.J. Inspiring Lives

by Sarah Hansman

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of Faith and Justice

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How Augustine Drew Me In

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If You Caffeinate Them, They Will Come

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Sorta Catholic

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C21 Fall Events

by Elizabeth Bruenig

by Sam Sawyer, S.J.

by Tracey Wigfield

Hope in God

by Kerry Weber

What Can Catholic Moms Do if They Want Their Children to Remain Catholic? Let Go

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by Kristin Grady Gilger

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How the Catholic Church Can Reach Millennials

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by Zac Davis

Young People as Street Preachers

by Ken Johnson-Mondragón, Lynette De Jesús-Sáenz

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Growing Young

by Kara Powell, Brad Griffin, Jake Mulder

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urces to go to press, it felt like the

As we were preparing this issue of C21 Reso

the Pennsylvania grand jury report about bottom fell out of the Church. The day after presiding at Mass for the Feast of the sexual abuse in the Church was released, I was meeting with Elizabeth and her hymn of Assumption, for which the Gospel is Mary’s this young woman from Nazareth— praise, the Magnificat. In the homily, I said that and lifting up the lowly—is far more who praises God for casting down the powerful than any number of priests and bishops. the image of what the Church is called to be zine and for the rest of August, the And then I returned to my desk at America maga oversy over who in the Vatican had failed Church and the world were embroiled in contr infighting was that so much attention in which ways. The most tragic part of all that expense of focusing on the experiences of was given to fights within the Church at the survivors of abuse or real avenues of reform. it attempt to do so. But it can, with its This issue cannot address all of that, nor does help direct our attention to the ways that focus on ministry to youth and young adults, future and to the young people who will the Church needs to pay attention to its own help guide us there.

Let me tell you why I believe there’s hope to

be found—and shared.

“ GOD HAS NOT BEEN IDLE WITH THE YOUNG” Sam Sawyer, S.J.

High school students from across the country and as far away as Japan, Ireland, and Venezuela participated in the summer “Ever to Excel” program, spending a week at Boston College to experience the University through the lens of Ignatian spirituality. Here students are learning the Rosary at the statue of the Blessed Mother on Chestnut Hill Campus.

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I was in Brazil, in 2013, with young adults gathered for World Youth Day. We were in Salvador, where Jesuit-connected groups from around the world had gathered for the Magis program about a week ahead of the main events in Rio de Janeiro. Toward the end of the gathering, Adolfo Nicolás, S.J., at the time the superior general of the Society of Jesus, met with representatives from the young people gathered there for questions and conversation.

One young man asked him what we could offer young people who seemed to have no need or desire for the Church. His question, echoed by many in the room, was about what we could do to make young people see that Catholicism had something to say to them and that it was worth their time to listen. Fr. General began his response with another question, saying we must ask, in relation to these young people, “if we are offering them what is most profound from the Gospel.”

And then he said, slowly and clearly, “God has not been idle with the young.”

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N E NOR MOUS A MOU N T of effort and attention goes into the Church’s outreach to young people. Yet, it can seem all that energy is for naught and that the returns on it continue to diminish, as young people seem increasingly disengaged from religion.

And in response, an enormous amount of effort and attention goes into diagnosing what is going on with those young people. What’s behind the “Rise of the Nones”?

Why are they more absorbed in their screens and social media than in spirituality? Why do so many of them seem to abandon the Church during college, and fewer and fewer of them reconnect with it when they settle down and have children? Why does attraction to service and activism not translate into a commitment to the Gospel message that calls for it?

These are, to be sure, vitally important questions. When Church leaders, youth ministers, and academics struggle with them, they are doing good and important work. But they run the risk of implicitly assuming the “problem” is with the young people, and then it follows obviously that the task of the Church is figuring out how to fix the problem with the young people. All too often, this falls into a cycle of critique and correction, and anyone who has spent any time working with young adults (or really, just working with human beings) can tell you how successful that is likely to be.

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Having just turned 40, I am well aware my own view of “what’s going on with young people” is more and more that of an observer rather than a direct participant. And having now been ordained a priest for just over four years, I can tell you with complete confidence that many things religious leaders say don’t get remembered even as far as the handshake at the end of Mass.

“God has not been idle with the young” has echoed in my head for more than five years now.

That simple phrase unmasked a fear—the idea, though never explicitly formulated, that the reason young people are not interested in Catholicism is because we had failed to make it interesting or because in our sinfulness we had discredited it. The idea that the attractiveness of the Gospel was somehow an accomplishment, a project at which we could succeed if only we found the right formula, but instead we seem to be failing.

But if we remember the project was never solely ours to begin with, if we remember it was the living God who roused us to faith and who still labors in the Church and in the world—then we have a very different set of challenges and questions.

These young people who seem so disillusioned with the Church: have we offered them what is most profound from the Gospel?

What if their disengagement is not just apathy, but a kind of witness and call, summoning us to live the heart of the Gospel more generously and radically? What if their frustration and disillusionment with the Church in the aftermath of the abuse crisis also communicates a prophetic denunciation of patterns of leadership that do not embody God’s designs? What if their reluctance to identify as Catholic because of how they see the Church treating women and LGBT people is our best indicator that we have not lived up to the Church’s own strong teachings about respect, inclusion, and hospitality?

It was not an established religious leader, but a young woman from Nazareth who began announcing God’s salvation with a hymn proclaiming the proud would be scattered, the powerful cast down, the lowly lifted up, and the hungry filled with good things.

What if God, who has not been idle with the young, has been using them to reach us as much as us to reach them? ■ SAM SAWYER, S.J., is the guest editor of this issue of C21 Resources. photo credit: Page 2: Lousie Nessralla ’19 Page 5: ©Catholic News Service (CNS), Enrique Garcia Medina

Pope Francis washes the feet of incarcerated young adults on Holy Thursday.

This edition of C21 Resources is focused on young adults in the Church. It has been developed at the same time as the Church has been preparing for the 2018 Synod on Young People, the Faith, and Vocational Discernment, to be held in Rome in October.

In his opening address to a gathering of young people during March in preparation for the Synod, Pope Francis said, “Too often we talk about young people without allowing ourselves to be challenged by them.”

One of the primary goals of this collection of essays is to help us be challenged by the experiences of young people and to find encouragement in their faith.

Toward that end, we have devoted significant space to the voices of young people themselves as well as provided articles that illustrate the best practices of ministers in the Church devoted to helping young people recognize God at work in their lives.

Above all, we hope the materials collected here serve as a resource for prayer and as a prompt to listen more carefully to the experiences of young people in the Church. There is no overall diagnosis of “the problem with young people,” nor is there a prescription for what the Church should do—but there is a call for the Church to engage deeply with the problems and the hopes young people bring to us and to live the Gospel more radically in response. When we do so, I believe we will find that God has been waiting there to meet us, having not been idle with any of us.

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“I think through interacting with people, faith really comes alive for me. And it’s not just someone alone, reading a Bible or praying or something. It’s being with a group of people.”

“It’s been really interesting

to watch the faith development of the 18 to 22 age range while I’m also in it.

I’m watching my peers do something different from what they say or it sometimes lines up with what they speak to or believe in. I think that’s a really interesting point of tension.

Sometimes it’s hard to be in a community and try to practice your faith together when you feel like it doesn’t mean the same thing to you as it does someone else and the next person.

I still have my faith. And I still think it matters.”

“It was a trip to Italy with the school after my sophomore year where I kind of had this faith experience.

We had a chaplain on the trip who was a young priest and just kind of seeing him live a life of conviction with joy, it was something I had never really seen before.”

“I go to a Jesuit parish.

Our pastor changed the mission statement of the parish to say we include people no matter what sexual orientation they are, no matter what race they are—the young, the old. And he still makes it a point at the end of every Sunday Mass to mention we should still be including these communities because that’s what being Catholic is about.”

“I think the same thing that drives people away is what brings them here, too, just people being open.

People who don’t believe witnessing people who truly believe, and have so much conviction in their lives and have this kind of purpose that seems elusive to most others. I think just practicing your religion the best you can and treating other people the way you believe your religion teaches is the best way to bring people to question, ‘Oh, is this something that I want in my life as well?’”

“When Pope Francis talks,

“The Church is embedded

“I feel like something the

I try to listen, because I think what he says is very important and it’s bringing the Church into the 21st century. I think it’s really easy to hear what he has to say and learn from it.”

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in political societies.

But I think what I really like about the Church today is there are a lot of people who are kind of transcending the political by talking about mercy first and love and talking to people more about why faith is necessary just for happiness. I think showing that faith is more a way of living and a way that can bring you more fulfillment is really cool.”

Church does well is give this clear presentation of the fullness of the faith and holding onto this idea of the truth in love or the truth in charity when it comes to issues that can be divisive. So I feel like kind of offering this fullness of truth and this certainty kind of in an uncertain time is part of what brought me and what kept me engaged with my faith.”

Some Boston College students attended a focus group last spring and reflected on the question: Does your faith matter? Here are some of their responses, edited for brevity.

“My faith gives me a reason for why I make the decisions that I do.

Especially as a senior, it’s kind of guided what I want to do with my career and how I want to live my life. And those are decisions I’m starting to think more about now. So I sort of view it as like the baseline, guiding principle by which I choose the decisions that I make.”

“Faith isn’t a binary of believer and nonbeliever.

There can be a lot of room in between and it is like a journey and a process. And not everyone has those lightning bolt moments where they’re like, ‘Oh, God spoke to me. And now I understand everything.’

And I think just that it is—like any relationship— it takes work. And it takes time and reflection and other people.”

“My dad is a theologian.

So I guess I’ve always had more of like an intellectual faith. And I think sometimes it’s been a little bit overintellectualized. But I think gradually, faith to me has come to resemble a way of being that I think will help guide my life.

I see it as kind of like a loving response to God. Sometimes, though, I see faith as more of a burden that has a lot of baggage associated with it, so a lot of shoulds and oughts and guilt are associated with it.

I think my most rewarding faith experiences have been where there hasn’t been that internal judgment or when I’ve avoided being so introspective and more have found God in all things.”

“I was raised in a very Catholic family and went to Catholic school since kindergarten. And I think there are a lot of things I disagree with about the Catholic faith. But there are also things I really like about it. I think some specifics of the Church do seem a little bit outdated to me and don’t line up with my personal views.

But I still find my faith and the Church valuable, even though it’s not perfect.”

“I enjoy going to Mass.

I wish I made more time for it. Every day, I try to incorporate gratitude as part of my faith. And whether it’s when I’m waking up or at the end of the day, I like to thank God for the day that I have or just be grateful for what has happened. Even if I don’t make it to Mass, I can just be grateful and kind of have a conversation with God.”

“A relationship with

God or relationship with Christ is different from being a good person. So I guess I personally find more traditional religious practices have been a way I try to integrate my faith into my life and work on strengthening my relationship with God, which is feeble.”

photo credit: Pages 6–7: Photos courtesy Boston College Office of University Communications.

“I found that in sort of having this space at BC to be able to choose when and where I can go to Mass, which Mass I go to, and which priest I interact with, I think that has made my faith a lot stronger because it’s a personal choice.

Now I have a personal connection with my faith. And that has made it a lot more meaningful than what it was when I was growing up.”

“I really like the Examen.

It’s something you can do no matter where you are. And even my friends who aren’t Catholic do it, which I think is really cool.

Because it’s something that we all can sort of share in. But it’s also something that’s really personal and a little bit more reflective, focusing on just stopping and slowing down in the day, which can be really hard to do, especially here when we have so much stuff to do day in and day out. It’s one of my favorite aspects of my faith.”

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The Youth Synod: A Hope We Need to Share Nicole Perone

Pope Francis has convened the 15th Synod of Bishops for October 2018. It brings together bishops from around the world to discuss important topics in a fraternal way with the pope, their brother bishop and leader. The 15th Synod has as its focus “Young People, the Faith, and Vocational Discernment.”

Pope Francis invited 300 young people from around the world to come together in Rome for one week as a pre-synodal meeting—a gathering that issued a document to inform the Synod’s work. This document became part of the instrumentum laboris, or working document, prepared for final use at the Synod in October.

Nicole Perone was a delegate to the meeting and on the writing committee.

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M AGI N E I W ILL be processing the experience of the pre-synodal meeting for quite some time. The week began with our Holy Father, Pope Francis, spending much of his day with us, hearing testimonies of the experiences of young people from different regions and responding to questions. I also had the unbelievable opportunity personally to meet Pope Francis, the catalyst for the gathering. It was deeply moving for me to have such an encounter with someone who has so inspired me and countless others, and who believes that young people had experiences, reflections, and thoughts worth sharing with the rest of the Church.

The experience of the week that was most striking to me was the realization of how BIG the Church is. To spend my days with young people from sub-Saharan Africa, the furthest reaches of Asia, all living experiences I can only imagine, was breathtaking. They see the Church through many lenses and live out their faith in many different ways. It certainly presented a challenge when writing the document because of the sheer breadth of lived experience that needed to be summarized. It also heartened me to see the threads of unity that bound us all, the same concerns that arose, and the same spots of joy we sought. The global context of the pre-synodal meeting was one of the most impactful aspects, because it provided much-needed perspective: the issues that we think are of paramount importance can be far from the needs of our brothers and sisters. It is easy for all of us to get caught up in our own contexts and the issues that reign supreme there—but we are a truly catholic (yes, “little c”) Church, and so all that we do is inextricably bound up in the reality that our vision must extend beyond the bounds of the Church in Connecticut, in the Northeast, or in the United States. I have tried to hold that in my heart as I continue to work for the people of God in my ministry.

The pre-synodal document is not meant to be a theological treatise or a how-to guide, but really to lay out clearly to the Synod Fathers the state of young people in the world today, and invite them to act on what they see there.

I hope the Synod Fathers will use the document we young people produced as a lens to view the plight, situation, and status of young people throughout the world. I pray the seeds that have been sown in the document take root in the hearts of the Synod Fathers and bear good fruit in dioceses around the world—that the Synod is not platitudinal but really transformative for our Church.

Additionally, it has been challenging for me that most average Catholics have no idea what a synod is or that one is taking place at all, let alone the pre-synodal meeting. I feel the work done that week in Rome was so important, but it has been humbling to acknowledge the world kept spinning. It then presents an opportunity for evangelization of sorts: to share the magnificence of 300 young people, many of whom know and love Jesus, who came together for this historic moment to speak on behalf of their generation to an ancient institution. Those who were there have the responsibility of sharing with others the hope that was palpable and to enter into conversation—not only about what is written in the document but about the experiences of young people in the Church moving forward. Therefore, it can truly be a banner moment of hope, if we let it be so.

So, the question remains: why did the pre-synodal meeting matter? For me, we were given the sacred responsibility of representing the interests, thoughts, feelings, and dreams of young adults from around the world, and allowed a seat at the table. This is what Pope Francis did by asking us young people to be present: have a hand in the ways the Church will hear, understand, and engage with us. Of course, those who work with young people in any capacity of their ministries should read this document and the instrumentum laboris (from those in our Catholic schools to youth and young adult ministers to evangelization ministers), but truly, I feel that the documents are accessible to many faithful Catholics who have an interest in ensuring a Church that is welcoming to young adults and thus sustainable for the future. To that end, the pre-synodal document is especially worth reading because it is a frank yet hopeful explanation of the state of young people, directly from young people themselves. Its greatest strength is its frankness, and its most important message is the hope that lives in every opportunity we as a Church have to engage with, invite, and minister to young people. ■ NICOLE PERONE is archdiocesan director of adult faith formation for the Archdiocese of Hartford. photo credit: Page 8: ©2018 Catholic News Service (CNS), Paul Haring

Learn more about the C21 Center’s resources: www.bc.edu/c21

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MINISTERING

with

AUTHENTICITY Susan Reynolds

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N MY EXPERIENCE working with Boston College students in campus ministry and social justice programs from 2011–2016, few virtues play as central a role in the way in which young people articulate their beliefs, values, and aspirations as that of authenticity. On retreats and in small groups, students employed the language of authenticity to describe the kinds of friendships and relationships they were seeking (and often perceived themselves to lack).

They articulated key dissonances in their lives—between their burgeoning senses of vocation and their practical, parent-pleasing majors; between their innermost desires and their outward lives—as crises of authenticity. And when

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many explained why, despite having been raised Catholic, they had stopped going to Mass in college, they again drew on the language of authenticity. As some described it, new experiences and challenging encounters had caused them to question the belief systems within which they were raised.

While many of them continued to identify as Catholic, they had stopped participating in the liturgy because they perceived that doing so would be an inaccurate and unfaithful reflection of where they found themselves on their journeys of faith—that is, it would be inauthentic.

While students’ articulations of authenticity weren’t always theologically or philosophically watertight, their

desire to construct lives of integrity evinced a deep Christian impulse.

They resonated with Jesus’ invocation against the scribes and Pharisees in Matthew’s Gospel, who “preach but they do not practice,” who “tie up heavy burdens and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them. All their works are performed to be seen” (Mt 23:3b-5a). The moral authorities my students most admired, including their favorite Boston College Jesuits, were those who seemed to lead lives of integrity, lives that echoed the inclusivity of Jesus’ ministry and simplicity of Jesus’ way of being.

Conversely, they reserved their most palpable contempt for proverbial wolves in sheep’s clothing (Mt 7:15)— for hypocritical authority figures who used shame and deceit to manipulate the vulnerable.

Those of us who work with youth and young adults must keep their admiration for integrity at the forefront of our minds as we seek a way forward in the wake of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in Pennsylvania and beyond.

Indeed, within a moral galaxy whose center of gravity is authenticity, few transgressions are graver than that of hypocrisy. Young Catholics may not explicitly name the abuse crisis as a reason they have left or would consider leaving the Church. Yet the horror of the crimes and the conspiratorial expanse of the cover-ups contribute to the image of a Church steeped in the sort of hypocrisy that young people vehemently reject. The lack of accountability among those responsible for perpetrating and covering up these crimes seems to reemphasize the image of a Church whose leaders are not doers of the Word but hearers only (cf. James 1:22).

When young people hear about the abuse crisis, they are hearing about an epidemic of violence whose primary victims were and are their generational peers: children, teenagers, young adults. As is often

true with social sin, it is children who bear the brunt of the crimes and failures of the powerful; young lives become collateral damage. As if the abuse itself wasn’t terrible enough, the actions of bishops who concealed crimes, protected abusers, and silenced victims communicate a chilling message to young people: this is an institution in which young lives do not matter. In the wake of the #MeToo movement and in light of growing critical awareness of rape culture among young people, many undoubtedly feel conflicted at best about their continued participation in an institution whose leaders were complicit in such crimes. Additionally, many responses to the crisis have scapegoated homosexuality and devolved into polarized infighting, further alienating many young people.

Young Catholics have many questions for the Church, questions born both of betrayal and of hope.

What does it mean to call myself Catholic, and thus to identify with an institution whose leaders have often proven themselves complicit in perpetuating a culture of rape and silencing? Does my life—as a young person, a victim of sexual assault, an LGBT Catholic—matter to those who hold power in the Church?

Whom can I trust? What is my role in helping to transform the Church’s culture? What kind of leader might God be calling me to become?

The Church and its ministers should respond to young people first by listening to their honest questions and conflicted feelings. With middle and high school-aged youth, it might seem at first that they have little to say.

As a “token Catholic” in my public high school when news of the sexual abuse crisis in Boston broke in 2002, I remember nervously laughing off the situation as “awkward” to friends who raised the issue. But be patient. Allow the conversation to unfold. As has become abundantly clear, silence only compounds violence. We must also

listen to their parents, many of whom are asking difficult and in some sense unanswerable questions about what it means to raise Catholic children in this historical moment. They, too, need support and a community of conversation.

It is equally vital that our response to the crisis include a critical examination of our practices of youth, young adult, and campus ministry.

In particular, we must recognize the sometimes irresponsible and manipulative ways in which we continue to place young people into vulnerable situations. When we consider abuse in the Church, we must bear in mind that members of the clergy are not the only authority figures capable of harming young people. Indeed, today, most youth who are involved in the Church have far more contact with youth ministers and other lay adults than they do with priests. A great deal of youth ministry programming is explicitly designed to lead young people into a state of profound emotional and psychological vulnerability. Youth ministers then find themselves improvising the roles of psychologist, social worker, or confessor, roles for which they are neither trained nor qualified. It is a situation with the same potential for abuse as the situations by which the Church has been so recently horrified.

Rebuilding the Church’s moral credibility is a process that will take not weeks or months but lifetimes.

In this liminal time, the Church and its ministers would do well to make young people’s hunger for authenticity, integrity, transparency, and humility the litmus test of our work. ■ SUSAN REYNOLDS, PhD (STM ‘18), is assistant professor of Catholic Studies at Candler School of Theology at Emory University. photo credit: Page 10: Photo by Dave Hrbacek, The Catholic Spirit

Learn more about the C21 Center’s resources: www.bc.edu/c21

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TODO DIOS ES: All Is God Sacha Hauc

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S A CH I LD, my grandmother would often bring me to Sunday Mass in a small chapel in the outskirts of Bogota, Colombia. This lengthy trip entailed an hour drive through the Colombian countryside, followed by what seemed to be an even longer climb up the mountain where the minute chapel rested. After a few years of this ritual, I asked my grandmother why she always chose to attend Mass at such a distant church when there were plenty of thriving congregations near our home. Her piercing green eyes looked down on me as she explained that the journey to the chapel was as much an act of devotion and prayer as the act of attending Mass. She went on to say how the wind, which seemed to embrace us on our climb, was the breath of God pulsing through the mountainside. That the trees that lined the roads to the church stood in reverence to the amazing celebration that was existence. She remarked that every mile we traveled on our mini-pilgrimage was a reminder that this world was nothing more than a journey of returning home to God. At such a young age, I was not able to understand the wisdom she shared. When I looked at the trees, all I saw was wood and leaves. As for the wind, it would often only deliver chills without any remnants of the divine.

However, when we entered the church it was often easier to see the lofty words she spoke of. The smell of incense and candles filled the altar as I was instructed to simply sit and pray. I would often look up to the wooden crucifix at the center of the room and tell myself, “There he is, there’s God.” As naïve as this may seem, it often filled me with a sense of peace and joy. For many years, this was what God meant to me, my experience of what God stood to mean.

A few years later, my family (and I) immigrated to the United States, and my sense of faith remained unchanged. As time passed, I would reflect on the words of my grandmother and the simple saying she endlessly repeated to me, todo es dios (all is God). This wisdom never resonated with me until I found myself returning to Colombia with my grandmother. It was a Sunday as we stood in our tiny apartment and prepared ourselves once more for the trek to the small chapel. For a moment, it was as if all time stood still and I was once more a child accompanying his grandmother to Sunday Mass.

However, this trip was unlike all the others as it proved to reorient my mental paradigm of what the divine represented. On our journey, I examined how strong the trees stood as the sun seemed to so delicately caress their leaves. I saw the smiles of the farmers on the side of the road as they carried freshly picked coffee fruit. As I trekked up the mountain, the wind seemed not to deliver its chilling presence but instead felt as if it flowed through me. By the time I arrived at the chapel, I had realized all these seemingly trivial experiences were facets of the divine revealing itself to me.

While I finally understood what my grandmother meant when she spoke of seeing God in all things, it wasn’t until I was completing a philosophy major in college that this notion truly developed. My professor at the time was covering material from St. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises. He explored one particular passage from this work that stated, “[Find] how God dwells in creatures, in the elements, giving them being, in the plants vegetating, in the animals feeling in them, in men giving them to understand.” This concept that St. Ignatius wrote on finding the divine presence in all of God’s creations was exactly what my grandmother was attempting to teach in our weekly pilgrimages. It was the simple acknowledgment that life was in itself an exploration of both the vastness and endless grace that is God, if we are simply willing to see it. In many regards, I have found it is no easy feat to live one’s life as a prayer, to the reflection of God in every facet of our lives. However, in my short journey, I have nurtured this perspective by reminding myself that life truly is a miracle. That to simply exist in a world that so generously provides for us is in itself a statement of the divine presence that encompasses and embodies our universe. I am reminded of this each time I return (home) to Colombia, where I still undertake the trek to the chapel on the hill. It now serves as a testament to the words of my grandmother. Most importantly, it has become an anchor for reminding me to never cease to marvel at the divinity that so intimately lies in each and every one of God’s creations. ■ SACHA HAUC is a 2018 graduate of Boston College, currently studying public policy at Yale University. photo credit: Pages 12–13: Chapel in Colombia, Creative Commons, Andres Reyes Reguros

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H E F I R S T T I M E I met with my spiritual director after entering the Jesuits, he asked me how I pray. One of the things I mentioned was regularly rattling through Hail Marys. I told him that I tend to pray them throughout the day—on the bus, on walks, during dinner—whenever. I also tend to pray them during set times of prayer, and sometimes with the rosary.

I remember being embarrassed by that response. I felt like I should have been engaged in “deeper” forms of prayer: meditation, contemplation, or imaginative prayer with Scripture.

But I had little experience with those.

I felt that my prayer was in some way inadequate.

I prayed Hail Marys because I didn’t know how else to pray. I’d had other experiences of prayer, but when it came down to it, rattling through some memorized words was the easiest way for me to pray when I knew I needed to or when I felt a desire.

The Hail Mary and the rosary were like training wheels, and I thought eventually they’d come off.

They haven’t yet.

I still say Hail Marys all the time.

Most often, I say them in times of stress or anxiety such as when I am walking into a room full of people, walking into a classroom the first day of a semester, or waiting to get feedback on a paper I worked hard to finish. I pray them when I finish conversations with people on the street, every morning when I look at the cover of the New York Times, or whenever I hear news of someone’s death.

It’s not uncommon for me to recognize myself going through Hail Marys and wondering, “How long have I been doing this for?” My Hail Marys can be subconscious. Praying 14

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them seems to be my first reaction to most things. My Hail Marys and my rosaries are frequently unexciting, unmoving, imageless, and emotionless.

Yet, there is a simple gratification in the touch of rosary beads and the sound of ancient prayers. They don’t bring me into an immediate conscious connection with God or His Blessed Mother. They often fail to satisfy a never-ending desire to hear God speak or to feel His touch. Sometimes, it is hard to even sense His presence in the moment of my rote praying.

HAIL MARY Billy CritchleyMenor, S.J.

It is often the moments outside of my Hail Marys when I can most feel their impact.

Nonetheless, I find that it continues to be a most valuable use of time and a sincere act of devotion. The rosary is helping me learn that the fruit of prayer is quite often experienced outside of itself. Sometimes in completely unrecognizable ways.

I met Dorothy Day’s granddaughter once. She left the Catholic Church when she was younger and eventually came back. When I asked her why, she told me that some old priest told her to pray the rosary every day. She took his advice, and there you have it.

St. Therese of Lisieux said that the rosary is a long chain that links heaven and earth. That feels true for me. Hail Marys and the rosary are indeed like training wheels, but ones that I will need forever. They train my mind, my body, my eyes, and my heart to live as though I am linked to heaven. Linked by things that may seem meaningless—touching beads and uttering words—but that do have a supernatural effect on my life.

It is often the moments outside of my Hail Marys when I can most feel their impact. I notice a deeper calm, less anxiety, and greater peace. I can more easily see God at work because my Hail Marys so frequently remind me of His existence.

And so, I continue to rattle to Mary my needs, wants, and fears. In turn, she helps me remember the long vision, the deeper desire, and the Fruit of her womb. Through my rattling to Mary, I’m reminded that there is much more to life than the present. ■ BILLY CRITCHLEY-MENOR, S.J., is a philosophy and sociology student at St. Louis University.

Reprinted with permission, The Jesuit Post: www.thejesuitpost.org Learn more about the C21 Center’s resources: www.bc.edu/c21

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INSPIRING LIVES OF FAITH AND JUSTICE Sarah Hansman

M

Y FOUR YEARS at Boston College were much like any other student’s from any other college.

I was challenged in class, formed meaningful relationships, and was pushed out of my comfort zone. However, BC was unique in that it took ahold of my faith, and my heart, through its mission as a Jesuit Catholic institution. I was raised Catholic but just went through the motions with passivity, never exploring or living out my faith. A public school attendee, I was never pushed to question, given the opportunity to reflect, or met with role models who were both intellectual and faithful. Boston College changed all of this.

I leave with a greater understanding of my own faith and a sense of meaning beyond college. Boston College is not a place you go to but a place you come from. I credit my positive and formative experiences to the Jesuit identity of Boston College brought to life, vibrantly and vividly, by the wonderful faculty members, graduate students, and undergraduate students.

However, as I grew more grounded in my faith over my four years at BC, I recognized the same faces of those who

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participated in faith-based programs and conversations. I wondered who wasn’t being reached by these messages.

In America, Catholicism is losing members faster than any other denomination. I saw this in my everyday life.

In a culture of individualism, relativism, and reluctance to commit, the Catholic Church has less appeal to young people. I heard peers ask questions like, “What is the point of a systemic Church when it has caused so much damage and oppresses so many?” I witnessed God, faith, and prayer being met with apathy.

I met leaders of the Catholic Church and leaders of Boston College who wanted to know why.

I did, too.

So, in my senior year, I set out to write a thesis that addressed these questions, specifically in regards to Boston College Campus Ministry, but more broadly around college students and faith. Who is participating and who is not, and why? What is working to invite young people in and what can be improved?

Long story short, I graduated. I turned in my thesis. I learned a lot. Here are a few takeaways.

PUSH IT BEYOND THE WALLS OF THE CHURCH: MAKE IT APPLICABLE AND MEANINGFUL TO EVERYDAY LIFE The 10:15 p.m. Mass at Boston College was the first place where I truly felt the community of the Church. People communed, celebrated, were left with questions and a challenge, and discussed it after.

It was an event that converged rather than diverged from our daily lives.

God is found everywhere, in the small and big moments of our everyday lives. Show that to us through the Gospels and homilies. Make a Mass for young people, and tailor it to them. Challenge us.

CREATE COMMUNITY Some of my best memories of faith were times when the phones were put away, face-to-face conversations were had, and people opened up about their struggles. Vulnerability creates connection. In my experience and research, opening up a place for technology-free conversation and inviting people in (food always helps) is a powerful gesture.

THE POWER OF NAMING: DON’T PUSH IT UNDER THE RUG

MEET US IN THE MIDDLE: REACH OUT IN WAYS WE KNOW

Often, when I talk to young people, they see the Church as behind the times, resistant to change, oppressive in a growing culture of acceptance.

While the Church cannot deny its past or even its current teachings and actions, it can acknowledge, name, and move forward. Why not have a panel on the history of Church sexual abuse, or a panel of women sharing their experiences in the Catholic Church, or members of the LGBTQ community sharing why they stay? These things are fresh, powerful, and important not to be pushed under the rug.

My mom always tells me “Everything in moderation,” so as much as technology can hurt, it can also help. A great way to involve young people is to reach them in places they already are. If young people don’t go to church, you can’t reach them that way. But try through technology to make a podcast, a YouTube video, a Facebook group. Reach out through e-mail or text, and you have a better shot. The power of sharing on social media is immense.

These tips are no solution, by any means. But any progress is progress.

No amount of research could have given me the perfect answer to welcoming young people into the vast beauty and uncertainty of faith. It is not a science. I believe it will always be an area where we can grow and improve. But we must keep working at it. It is too important not to. ■

EXPAND REPRESENTATION IN LEADERSHIP The Church can be stereotyped, especially by young people, as being run by old white men, which is not far from the truth. This suggestion goes beyond the ability of one college, one campus ministry, one teaching: young people must see more representation in the Church. More women, more people of color, more young people in leadership positions, a wider audience can be invigorating.

SARAH HANSMAN is a 2018 graduate of Boston College. photo credit: Pages 16–17: Photo courtesy Boston College Office of University Communications.

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How Augustine Drew Me In Elizabeth Bruenig

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S

HORTLY BEFORE Easter 2014, my family visited me in the United Kingdom, where I was studying Christian theology. I rode the train to meet them in London, where I planned to deliver the news to Dad myself. Mom already knew. Months earlier, I had requested from her a copy of my Presbyterian baptism certificate, which she located and provided without judgment, reasoning that there were worse things a young person could get up to in a foreign country than converting to Catholicism.

It was late when I made it to their hotel, where I met them in an upstairs lounge. We caught up for a little while before I mustered my courage and came out with it.

“I’m converting to Catholicism next week,” I said.

“That’s when we do it: Easter.”

At first my dad did not believe me. After all, why?

To them, converting to Catholicism did not seem like something I would do. Up until that point my parents had thought of me as most parents of that era likely thought of their adventurous, college-aged children: leftish, radicalized by the 2008 financial crisis, inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement, no ally of anything establishment or retrograde. They knew I was very religious, but conversion likely made even less sense to them given my strong faith: why mess with a good thing?

IN THE BEGINNING When I left home for college many states away, I intended to keep up with my Methodist church-going but didn’t. Our Protestant chaplain was a profoundly humane Quaker with whom I spent a great deal of time, and in the light of our friendship I periodically attended meetings of the Society of Friends. I appreciated the authenticity and earnestness with which the Quakers pursued God and thought it appropriately humble to sit silently under the white beams of a New England meetinghouse and await Him. But I was restless. In the quiet of the meetinghouse I would let my mind circle around threads of Scripture, moving like a spiral, inward toward meaning. But as the spiral tightened toward a kernel of truth, difficulties began to snare the lines. Already I was reading rapaciously about the histories of the biblical texts: their journeys through translation and interpretation; their auditions for the canon and those that did not make the cut; the late additions and redactions. I had not been raised to think the Bible totally bereft of metaphor or allegory, but these were problems of authority, not interpretation. Who could say what was symbolic or literal, what was historical artifact, and what was currently applicable instruction?

Take, for example, the winding historical journey of charity. The word caritas, Jerome’s fourth-century translation of the Greek agape, appears multiple times in

the Latin text of the Bible and is usually translated into English as either “love” or “charity.” In the Middle Ages, as the scholar Eliza Buhrer points out, sermons and homilies on poverty began to conflate caritas as the motivation for generosity with almsgiving itself, and though the Church would always distinguish between the two uses, they blurred in the popular religious imagination.

As a student, I became increasingly aware of the problems these textual knots posed for the way I had been taught to relate to God: how could I read my way to God by the light of my own conscience if I was not even entirely sure of the meaning of what I was reading, much less my ability to read it reliably? And in the course of all that confusion, as if by divine providence, a professor assigned St. Augustine’s Confessions in one of my classes.

HONEST CONFESSIONS I began to read Augustine compulsively. I devoured the Confessions and City of God, then moved on to his letters, his sermons, the Soliloquies and the Enchiridion, and on and on.

Some five million words of Augustine’s writings survive, and I wanted to read them all.

I loved his clarity of mind, his incredible intellect, his dazzling charisma. I loved, as a young adult, all that intensity—the strength of his feelings for God and the world, his passion. But I also appreciated the service his writings provided in terms of navigating difficult texts: without quite knowing it, I had begun to rely on the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church.

Tradition provides a chain of provenance beginning with the original biblical texts and extending down into our present year, with scholars and clerics reading their predecessors and puzzling out how to apply their thinking about God and his people to new questions that arise with time. Instead of leaving a single conscience to the knotty business of making sense of ancient texts, the tradition offers Christians a chorus of helpful coreligionists passing down insight over time. An individual’s conscience plays a role, of course, in her own interpretation of the tradition; but the weight of time and expertise are instructive, and they whisper through space and centuries that you are not alone.

College is likely when most people come in contact with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and though I had read them before, I, too, found my interest in left insights into political economy refreshed around that time. And it made me all the more curious about Augustine, who seemed to speak for a manner of thinking that could critique and even reject the aspects of modernity that are corrupt without receding into sterile nostalgia or abandoning the witness of history altogether. The reasoning was just as flexible as it needed to be, and no more. It was beautiful, elegant even.

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CHANGE OF HEART Plenty of converts to Catholicism prize the Church’s prudence when it comes to evaluating modern conditions.

Because the Church is a premodern institution, it does not take for granted many of the givens of modernity: that personal freedom ought to be endlessly maximized, for instance; that the most important goal in life is finding oneself; that politics and religion are two sharply and rightly separate spheres.

Part of the reason I found Catholicism’s challenge to modernity so compelling was that it critiques aspects of our world that mostly go unquestioned, even by those who have disputes with liberalism in sexuality, marriage, and so on. For me, the case in point was property ownership, the underlying question beneath all our current debates about poverty and wealth.

Early Christian writers, Augustine among them, thought deeply about the nature of creation. God made our material world, of course, but what for? Knowing what the bounty of the earth was meant to achieve would help them figure out how to use it rightly, that is, in accordance with God’s will for it and for us. In the view of the early Church (and indeed, in the view of the Church today), the world had been made and given to all people to hold in common to support their flourishing. “God made the rich and poor from the one clay,” Augustine wrote, “and the one earth supports the poor and the rich.”

I loved his clarity of mind, his incredible intellect, his dazzling charisma.

Property entered the equation with sin. Since people could no longer be trusted to honor the original purpose and use of creation, governing authorities were able to maintain order by dividing it up. But the Church remained sensitive to the preproperty purpose of creation, and with its own authority (throughout the Middle Ages, for instance, ecclesiastical courts heard many cases regarding property and contracts) and power to persuade states and subjects, it urged vigilance against the tendency of the wealthy to amass more than their due, to the detriment of the poor.

Individual actors departed from the counsel of the Church, of course, but never succeeded in altering its doctrine to advance their own purposes.

But that changed after the Protestant Reformation. While Erasmus and Thomas More had each been meditating on the common ownership of all things just prior to the schism, Luther and his adherents took a different approach. Reacting to the radical communitarianism of the Anabaptists, the Reformers took the view that all things ought to be held in common as a thin veil for idleness, debauchery, and sloth. With their assault on the authority of the established Church, they sapped the moral force from the Church’s teaching on property, which was now up to each person to decide for himself; and with their remonstration against the temporal authority of the Church, they appointed the regulation of property strictly to the state, which was meant to order human affairs toward sober efficiency, not some final good.

Yet the Church remains firm, unmoved by this current in modernity. And while it is impossible to speak for all Protestants—and important to note there exists a vast array of opinions on property ownership within the Protestant tradition, some hewing close to the Catholic view—the Catholic Church, at least, bases its position on property in a moral universe far more stable than that which has been constructed since the Reformation. And by the time I neared the end of my time in college, I had become convinced it was the only firm ground from which a Christian could fight back against the domination of the poor by the rich, against poverty, against the destruction of families and communities at the hands of businesses and their political lackeys, against a world stripped of meaning. ■ ELIZABETH BRUENIG is an opinion columnist at the Washington Post.

Abridged and reprinted with permission, America Media: www.americamagazine.org photo credit: Page 18: Wikimedia Commons, Saint Augustine of Hippo.

Line engraving by P. Cool after M. Page 20: http://tseliotsthewasteland. wikia.com/wiki/File:Augustine.jpg

Learn more about the C21 Center’s resources: www.bc.edu/c21

Sam Sawyer, S.J.

If You Caffeinate Them,

They Will Come

NEWS FLASH: Catholic University asks people to talk to students about God. All right, so that’s not much of a stor y. People have been tr ying that for years, and usually without much success.

The interesting thing about Boston College’s Agape Latte—the thing that got our attention—is that it actually seems to work. Students show up: hundreds of students, and then they come back, and they bring friends. We wanted to know why.

F

OR THE LAST few years, Boston College’s Church in the 21st Century Center, in partnership with BC’s Campus Ministry, has been figuring out how to engage students in a conversation about faith—with coffee (and cake, pastries, and other desserts: feeding college students to attract them to an event is an old trick, after all). They’ve been running a series of talks on the first Tuesday of every month, called Agape Latte. They ask well-known figures at Boston College—everyone from the president to professors to BC football’s (and formally of the New York Giants’) cancer survivor Mark Herzlich—to talk to any students who decide to show up about where and how they find God in their lives.

W hat is it that makes Agape Latte work? From what we heard from these students, we’d highlight two things in particular: consistency

and authenticity. A number of the students who were there for the first time mentioned they’d been thinking about coming or meaning to come for a while, and had finally found time to come. So the fact that there are a lot of these events, one offered every month, makes the offer of conversation easier to recognize and eventually, to accept.

And once the students were there, free coffee and cookies in hand, the conversations worked because they started from the ground of actual experience before they theologized about it.

Whether it’s a Jesuit confessing that sometimes God speaks through Taylor Swift or a linebacker describing how he learned to trust that God is listening when he prays, these conversations get to the heart of the matter—which is not, in the first instance, the religious meaning or interpretation of these experiences,

but simply the fact that they really happened to other real people.

As one of the students said in our interviews: these topics may not come up in daily conversation, but they are something they want to talk about, given the opportunity.

The possibility of real conversation about faith, especially among young adults, has been a popular topic here at The Jesuit Post. For anyone interested in that possibility, the video archive of Agape Latte talks is a good place to start.

Want to learn more about starting an Agape Latte program at your high school or college? E-mail agapelatte@ bc.edu. ■ SAM SAWYER, S.J., is the guest editor of this issue of C21 Resources.

Reprinted with permission, The Jesuit Post: www.thejesuitpost.org photo credit: Page 21: Photo courtesy Boston College Office of University Communications.

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A T R SO LIC O H CAT Tracey Wigfield

I

A M A sorta Catholic. Growing up in New Jersey, I was raised Catholic and went to 12 years of Catholic school.

But as a comedy writer living in Los Angeles, being Catholic is not a huge part of my deal. I only go to church on holidays or when the world feels particularly grim. I usually give up something lame for Lent, like “being hard on myself.” I practice what I call “Chipotle Catholicism”: I go down the line picking the parts of Catholicism that appeal to me (charity, Pope Frank, spooky stories about saints) in order to create a custom-made spiritual burrito.

So two years ago, when I got engaged to a fellow sorta Catholic, I assumed we would have a sorta Catholic wedding. We would get married at a fancy hotel or in one of those sun-dappled fields where Pinterest people get married. I would say my own vows, walk down the aisle to a cool, meaningful song, and the ceremony probably wouldn’t mention Jesus. Or if it did, He’d be called something vague like “the Universe” to not make anyone uncomfortable.

When I told my mother my vision for my wedding, she got on a plane and flew across the country to spit in my face. When you get married it is in a church with church music and your aunt reading “Love Is Patient.” A priest does the ceremony, you repeat after him, and it’s done, stop complaining, you’re giving me agita.

Fine, I agreed. But if my mother was going to force me to have a Catholic wedding (“Which I am!” she flew across the country again to scream), it was going to be a sorta Catholic wedding.

We chose a church in midtown that my mother had fallen in love with. Running out of time, I booked it sight unseen. But when I flew home a few months later to check it out, I was shocked. I don’t know what I was expecting, but this was a CHURCH. Not one of those new-age, modern churches with clean lines and lots of light—the kind that

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could be a church but could also be an Apple store. This was a CHURCH with stone floors, crazy-high ceilings, and stained glass. Granted, we were seeing it with all the lights off on a cold February night, but the vibe was less “chill wedding” and more “the Coronation of Pope Celestine V.” I did not like it. As usual, my mother thought I was just being difficult. “It’s classic and beautiful. Why can’t you like nice things like Kate Middleton?”

And why couldn’t I? It was just a wedding. I had always quietly judged women who got super into planning their weddings, women who threw fits because the Chiavari chairs they ordered were supposed to be champagne and not rose gold. I would smugly shake my head, “B----, it ain’t about the Chiavari chairs.” These women clearly had bigger issues going on that they were not interested in addressing. But that was not me. Sure, I was having biweekly meltdowns, not just about the Catholic parts of the wedding but about everything: the invitations, my dress, the Chiavari chairs that I did not order in rose gold—why would I do that unless I was purposely trying to make the table look like disgusting trash from hell?! But I was just trying to plan a nice wedding, and everyone was getting in my way.

And that was the kind of chill headspace I was in when Bev the church music director came into my life.

My fiancé and I had talked about music that had special meaning to us and he offered to e-mail Bev our selections for the ceremony. His e-mail was met with a list of four classical songs from which we could choose. I nixed all four immediately (boring, boring, spaghetti sauce commercial, Looney Tunes). Surely, if I could explain the situation in person, Bev would understand and let me have my way.

“But she said these were the only choices,” mumbled my husband-to-be, his eyes searching for a nearby exit from the

room/this impending marriage to a crazy woman. “Well, we’ll just see about that!”

I showed up at Bev’s office ready for a fight. Bev, a small, smartly dressed church lady, politely explained that this was a traditional church and therefore had traditional standards.

She handed me the list again. I did not want the list. What was the big deal? I was not asking to walk down the aisle to “Who Let the Dogs Out.” I just wanted a meaningful, tonally appropriate contemporary song. “Oh, well, we don’t do that here,” purred Bev. “A man once asked me if he could play a Rolling Stones song at his father’s funeral. I guess it was his father’s favorite song,” she chuckled at the memory.

“I told him, absolutely not.”

Excuse me, Bev? Now, I know I am not the one whose paycheck is signed by J.H. Christ, but this felt like a wild abuse of power. If God flows through everything good on this earth, He would absolutely be on board with “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” That song even has a choir in it! God can’t get enough of choirs! And surely He wouldn’t begrudge a grieving man who wanted to honor his dad.

After throwing a pretty embarrassing crying fit, I stormed out of her office, resolute. In the planning of this wedding, there were many battles that I lost. I couldn’t say my own vows. Fine. I couldn’t get married in a Pinterest field. Whatever. But the Battle at Bev Run was not a battle I was willing to lose. Church music was the hill on which I had chosen to die.

My campaign raged on over e-mail. Back and forth we went. I would suggest a song, and Bev would refer me back to the list. Little by little I ceded ground. Fine, a pop song was out of the question, but what about a different classical song? Maybe, teased Bev. What did I have in mind? I researched classical music, poring over YouTube clips, consulting musician friends. Finally I found a churchappropriate, classical, Bev-proof piece and sent it to her.

She e-mailed back: “I don’t have an arrangement for that.

What about a song from the list?” Who taught this woman to negotiate? Sun Tzu? I was getting nowhere.

A month before the wedding, my fiancé and I attended Pre-Cana. Initially, I was opposed to the idea. I was only sorta Catholic. Why did I have to waste an entire Saturday in a school gymnasium listening to an unmarried priest talk about what it’s like to be married?

But the thing they don’t tell you about Pre-Cana is— it’s kinda fun. Sure, there was an elderly Korean couple who spoke about sex with the in-your-face confidence of a Cosmo magazine editor, but it was basically just a daylong religion class full of easy quizzes, little art projects, and all the powdered doughnuts from Costco you could eat.

We were coming into the home stretch and, for our last exercise, the priest told us all to stand and face our spouses-to-be, holding hands. The priest would say vows and we would repeat them. “Yikes,” I joked, yanking at my collar, “this is getting a little too real.” My fiancé and I took each other’s hands, and as we started repeating the vows,

But the thing they don’t tell you about Pre-Cana is—it’s kinda fun.

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saying them in unison with the 60 other couples in the gymnasium, something weird happened…I started crying.

Like uncontrollably crying. Now I had cried a lot during the past few months, but this was not a tantrum over the price of gold-embossed napkins. This was an emotional catharsis, the kind of deep tears reserved for a Pixar movie you watch drunk on an airplane. My fiancé was weirded out. Why was I crying?

Why was I crying? Because I realized I was getting married. Feels like I could have used context clues to figure that one out sooner, but somehow it had not occurred to me. Like really occurred to me. We were embarking on this giant, life-changing life change. And it was both terrifying and comforting because we weren’t doing it alone. We were doing it with each other. And with the 60 other couples who had just listened to an ancient Korean man talk about how he likes to have sex on his birthday and with the billions of people who had done this before us and who would do it after we were long gone. It was one of those moments that makes you feel both very big and very small at the same time.

And then a horrible thought occurred to me: “B----, it wasn’t about the Chivari chairs.”

How could I not see it before? All the fits and the fights and agonizing over stupid details were just a distraction. A distraction from the simple, unavoidable truth: I was getting married. For real and forever.

Rather than confront the enormity of what was happening, I poured my fears into wedding planning. My mind went to Bev. Poor Bev! She was right. Getting married was serious business. It should happen in a serious place, scored by a serious song written a long-ass time ago.

And you can’t sorta do it. It’s like being Catholic. Or having a kid or climbing Mount Everest or doing anything worth doing. You can’t sorta get married. ■ TRACEY WIGFIELD (‘05) is a comedy writer and producer (30 Rock, The Mindy Project, Great News).

Adapted and reprinted with permssion, America Media: www.americamagazine.org photo credit: Pages 22–23: Scott Cramer, ©iStock.com Page 24: Erin Muller, ©iStock.com

Learn more about the C21 Center’s resources: www.bc.edu/c21

Rather than confront the enormity of what was happening, I poured my fears into wedding planning.

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Fall Events Catholic Belonging in a Time of Scandal Monday, October 15, 2018 McGuinn Hall, Room 121, 5:00 p.m.

Episcopal Visitor: Bishop Brendan Leahy of Limerick Tuesday, October 23, 2018 Gasson Hall, Room 100, 5:00 p.m.

A Hope to Share: Young Adults and Our Church Monday, October 29, 2018 | C21 Resources Luncheon Guest Editor: Sam Sawyer, S.J. Gasson Hall, Room 100, 12:00 p.m.

Sacred Stories: Finding God in Everyday Life Thursday, November 8, 2018 Nancy Ammerman, Professor Emeritus of Sociology of Religion, Boston University Murray Function Room, Yawkey Center, 5:30 p.m.

SPECIAL C21 EVENT Why I Remain a Catholic: Belief in a Time of Turmoil Tuesday, November 27, 2018 | Panel Discussion Robsham Theater, 7:00 p.m.

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Why I Believe…

Why do you believe? Send along a real-life story about God working in your life and why you believe. Stories should be 300 to 650 words. Your story could be featured on our digital platform, C21 Engage.org and the C21 Center’s social media. Selected stories will also be featured in upcoming issues of C21 Resources magazine, which has a reach of 180K readers.

Submit your story at C21Engage.org.

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Kerry Weber

in GOD

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 DRAGGED MY kids to 8 a.m. Mass this morning for the Feast of the Assumption. It was one of those days where the “obligation� part of the Holy Day felt particularly heavy.

There is a small parish within a short walking distance of our home, but we are still adjusting to the logistics of leaving the house with two kids, so my husband, our three-monthold, our two-year-old, and I managed to roll our stroller quietly to the back pew of the church around the time the first reading started. I pointed out the pictures in the stained glass of Jesus and Mary and Joseph to my son, who snacked on Cheerios while my husband juggled my daughter on his shoulder, slowly becoming drenched in drool.

We make the effort, however imperfectly, because I want my son and daughter to know that our faith is important, because I want them to choose to live it themselves one day, because I believe it is good. And my belief in the good at the heart of our faith is why I have tried hard to contribute to the institution, too: to find community in our parish, to spend hours researching local Catholic schools, saving to pay for them, budgeting to make donations to the church, to Catholic charities.

And then I came home from Mass, and while the kids napped beside me, I started reading the grand jury report of sexual abuse in several dioceses of Pennsylvania. I could only get through a few pages before feeling physically ill and being filled with a sense of disgust and anger and betrayal that I know is only a fraction of what the abuse victims and their families must have felt for so long.

I was confirmed by and was handed my high school diploma by the first U.S. bishop indicted on child sex abuse 26

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charges, so there was never any doubt in my mind that the abuse and its cover-up reached high into the Church hierarchy. But I, perhaps naively, had allowed myself to think the majority of the cases of abuse had been found out, the policies and procedures put in place would help prevent new ones, and we knew about most of the men who had covered it up, though few of them have faced consequences.

The revelations of the grand jury report indicate otherwise, and I have found myself for the first time truly afraid of what it means to ask and to allow my children to be part of the Church. Can I trust they will be safe as altar servers or students or just going to Mass? And what would I say if my children were to one day ask me, why? Why in the face of such systemic horrors committed by the people supposedly leading the Church did we stumble down the street to Mass each week?

Robert Collins, S.J., the priest who baptized my son two years ago (and who also happens to be a longtime editor at this publication), had asked my husband and me to do an exercise prior to the baptism that got me thinking about the answer to this question before I had asked it. Write a letter to your son, Fr. Collins said, and tell him what you hope for him in the faith. We did, and we read the letter at his baptism, and recently did the same for my daughter. I have found myself going back to it over these last few days, hoping to find some sustenance for my own faith life as well.

In reading it, I saw that so much of my hope for my children and myself and our place in the Church rested on the belief that, in the process of becoming holy, they might help to make the Church holier, too.

THE LETTER, ADAPTED SLIGHTLY HERE, READS AS FOLLOWS: We hope that your faith inspires you to be just, loving, humble, and merciful. We hope that your faith inspires you to encourage the Church to be more just, more loving, more humble, and more merciful.

We hope you find community here, people who will support you, love you, challenge you. We hope that your faith community inspires you to reach out to the larger community—to love others, to challenge them and support them.

We hope that your faith inspires you to care for those in need, to be like the shepherd who smells like sheep, to perform the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, to be mercy for others.

We hope that when the world makes it difficult to live out your faith that you find the strength to persevere. We hope that you find strength in the Eucharist, in the real presence at Mass and in the people of God.

In a broken and hurting Church, it is good to remember that the Church as an institution is not why we are here or what we are here for. Yet we are responsible for it, and that means holding it accountable and working to make it more truly reflect the kingdom of God. The grand jury report is one painful step toward doing just that.

The Gospel at Mass this morning included a reading of the Magnificat, Mary’s powerful prayer of praise. The priest’s homily in response was unconventional and brief.

He stood and simply said, “Every year, when the Magnificat is read, I just think, What more could I add?” and then he sat down. Indeed, Mary’s prayer both challenges and comforts, disturbs and offers some consolation and hope, hope in a God who “has scattered the proud in their conceit...has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly”—a God who will do so again. ■ KERRY WEBER is an executive editor for America Media.

Abridged and reprinted with permission, America Media: www.americamagazine.org photo credit: Page 27: Tim Arbaev, ©iStock.com

We hope that you are inspired by the lives of the holy men and women in heaven and the holy men and women around you now. We hope that you read and learn about your faith, drawing on the wisdom of those who have helped to shape our Church. But even more, we hope that you use this knowledge to live your faith—that your life gives witness to the joy of the Gospel.

We hope that you love God with all your heart but that you also know that it is OK to be angry at God sometimes, that it may seem God is silent at times, but that you are never alone and that God loves you right through it all. That we love you right through it all.

We hope that your faith inspires you to be forgiving, to let go of grudges and malice. And we hope that your faith inspires you to ask for forgiveness when you are in need of it.

We hope that your faith brings you great joy and that you share that joy with others.

We hope that you see this journey of faith as an adventure, that you know that none of us live it perfectly, but that we simply try to do it sincerely and with great hope. We hope that you take time to be grateful for this life with the knowledge that this world, as beautiful and glorious and heartbreaking as it is, is not all that there is.

“ We hope that you love God with all your heart but that you also know that it is OK to be angry at God sometimes… but…God loves you right through it all.”

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WHAT CAN CATHOLIC MOMS DO IF THEY WANT THEIR CHILDREN TO REMAIN CATHOLIC? LET GO Kristin Grady Gilger When you have children, everyone tells you that your life is going to change. They mean this in both the best and the worst possible ways: there are the predictable losses (lost sleep, lost money, lost time) as well as the wholly unexpected gains of loving a child beyond reason, beyond yourself.

What people do not tell you is that your children are bound to make unexpected and sometimes bewildering choices—and those choices have the power to change you. Children will shake your sense of identity, challenge your beliefs, and fundamentally alter who you are.

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Anyone who has tried to pass on their religious faith to their children knows this to be true: You can be a good Catholic and raise a passel of atheists. You can be a strident ex-Catholic and raise a priest—like I did.

My son would tell you that I have had a big influence on him. He dives into the world in the same way I do, with the firm intention of changing it. He works out his thoughts by writing them down. He believes in the healing properties of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches on a rainy day.

But when it came to making the biggest choice of his life— to convert to Catholicism and become a Jesuit priest—I was left to wonder what influence I had had on him or whether I had wielded any influence at all.

Many of the good Catholic mothers I have talked to are just as bewildered. They did everything in their power to raise children in their faith only to see them adopt other religions or reject God altogether. Some say they were defeated by a culture that increasingly values the material over the spiritual, or they point to the rigidity of doctrine, failures of individual priests, sexual abuse scandals, boring services, and bad music. Many blame themselves, although they struggle to say where exactly they went wrong.

Those whose children remain practicing Catholics have some ideas about why that may be the case, but they, too, are well aware that things could easily have turned out differently.

In a recent survey of more than 1,500 U.S. Catholic women, commissioned by America and conducted by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, 73 percent of women who are mothers said their children remain in the Church. Fifteen percent indicated that none of their children are now Catholic. The remaining 12 percent reported a mixed result: some of their children are Catholic and some are not.

‘YOU WANT TO SHARE YOUR JOY’ Sophie Byrnes of Streamwood, Illinois, has three grown children she raised on the importance of prayer—prayer she describes as being as essential as breathing and eating.

She was brought up in a home where her mother insisted on the family rosary every day. Byrnes says she remembers feeling a little resentful on summer days when she was kneeling inside the house while her friends played, quite audibly, outside. “But I always knew at a young age that your faith will help you in life,” she said.

These mothers have learned what we all learn at some point— that we do not control our children’s choices; we only control our response to those choices.

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Later, during an abusive marriage, Byrnes prayed just to get through each day, and she taught her children to pray, too—not formal, rote prayer, but the kind of prayer that consists of talking to God. These conversations took place at all times of the day. “We never left the house without praying,” she said. “If we left at three different times, we said a short prayer each time. Whenever we got in the car, we prayed to get home safely.”

The most important conversations, though, took place in the evenings as the children got ready for bed. Each of her children had a list of people they prayed for each night.

One of her daughters got so caught up in the practice that her list grew to 50 people. “When someone got on her list, they never got off,” Byrnes said with a laugh. “It was tiring.”

She said not going to church was never an option for her children, but she does not think once-a-week Mass was the most important part of their Catholic upbringing; it was making God part of their everyday lives. Byrnes taught religious education and got involved in her parish and insisted her children do the same. They were altar servers and lectors, sang in the choir, and went on mission trips.

“It can’t be just sometimes,” she said of the practice of religion. “What doesn’t work is telling your children about God and not practicing it by your own example. What

doesn’t work is if you don’t make God real in your life and your children’s lives.”

All three of Byrnes’s children, now in their 20s and 30s, are practicing Catholics. She has seen seven grandchildren baptized—baptisms she no longer posts pictures of on social media or tells many friends about because so many would find it a painful reminder that their own grandchildren are not being baptized. “I’m sure,” she said, “that would be the greatest hurt in the world.”

Nancy Berube of Spencer, Massachusetts, does not yet have grandchildren to be baptized, but she has been thinking about it. Her oldest son and his wife are practicing Lutherans, her daughter attends Mass occasionally, and her youngest son “professes to fear that lightning will strike him if he crosses a church threshold.”

Raising her children in the Catholic faith was extremely important to Berube, who once seriously considered becoming a nun. Her husband, although not Catholic, was supportive of her commitment and got involved in their parish as much as she did. Several years ago, he converted to Catholicism, completed an online Catholic study program, joined the parish council, and began serving as a eucharistic minister.

I know now there was something else calling my son, something even more compelling than babies, and that is the call—the vocation—he ultimately heeded.

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Berube, meanwhile, has become an associate of the Daughters of the Holy Spirit, the order of women religious she considered joining as a young woman. The lay associates gather for prayer, Bible readings, and retreats, and they work to promote a variety of social justice and human rights causes across five continents. The work gives Berube, a family physician, a Catholic community beyond her parish and a way to practice her faith in ways that are meaningful to her.

Berube has tried to talk to her children about the central role that Catholicism plays in her life and that of her husband, but these attempts make them uncomfortable.

Despite the fact that two of her sons are in the U.S. military, which “gives them orders all the time; they don’t like being told what to do by their mother,” she quipped. Besides, she does not believe in a “hard sell for religion,” and she does not want to drive a wedge between them and herself and her husband. So she waits.

“I find the Church [to be] a source of great joy and would love to be able to share that with them. However, it has to be on their own terms,” she said. “They’re thinking people; they’re very moral and upright, and I think their Catholic upbringing has affected their sense of what is right and what you can and can’t do in the world.”

While Berube waits, she considers what St. Monica could have done to make St. Augustine behave himself during most of his early adulthood. “He came around, and he was way more messed up than my kids are,” she said with a laugh. “But I understand her wanting him to be part of something that gave her joy because you want to share your joy with them.”

These mothers have learned what we all learn at some point—that we do not control our children’s choices; we only control our response to those choices.

LETTING GO When my son, Patrick, announced he had decided to enter the Society of Jesus, my husband and I were incredulous.

“If you want to be a priest why not become an Episcopalian priest?” I asked him. “That’s the church you were raised in, and you could still get married.” I did not need to finish the sentence. Patrick already knew what I really cared about was not some hypothetical daughter-in-law; it was grandchildren—preferably lots of them.

I have always thought Patrick would make a great husband and dad. Like his father, he is playful and loving and thoughtful. He actually likes to talk about his feelings,

and he never asks much for himself. He is the kind of guy who will take your hand without warning and hold it close and tell you he loves you.

No matter where he is, he notices babies. We can be in line to order coffee, walking through a museum, or pushing a cart through a grocery store, and he will spot one in a mother’s arms or peeking out of a pack strapped to a dad’s back. His reaction reminds me of the stuffed toy glowworm he had when he was small—something bright and warm lights up inside of him.

He does not often approach these babies—that is too creepy for a single man, especially for a priest in these tendentious days—but you can tell he wants to. And when he is around his friends’ or his sisters’ babies, when he does not have to worry about what people think, he will get down on the floor with them and play like a kid and hold them so close it’s as if he’s inhaling them.

I know now there was something else calling my son, something even more compelling than babies, and that is the call—the vocation—he ultimately heeded. It took me several years to accept his decision; I am still working to fully understand it.

We have spent countless hours talking about what it is like to be a Jesuit living in a community of religious men, the spaces he seems to fill in the lives of other people, and what he hopes to accomplish. I ask him—often—whether he is happy. And I have begun going to church again, this time with a lot less willfulness and a great deal more humbleness. I am giving Catholicism a second chance.

I have come to realize that, as a mother, I have two choices, and both involve letting go. I can surrender my son to a choice I would not have made for him, or I can acknowledge what I do not know and what I cannot control and walk with him.

Patrick would put it this way: Motherhood, like any vocation, is a calling—the voice of another calling us to something more. Sometimes the voice that is calling is God’s. Sometimes it is that of your children. Sometimes it is hard to tell them apart. ■ KRISTIN GRADY GILGER is the senior associate dean at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the executive director of the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State University.

Abridged and reprinted with permission, America Media: www.americamagazine.org photo credits: Page 28: Joe Gough, ©iStock.com Page 29: Benjamin Brandt, ©iStock.com Page 30: ThamKC, ©iStock.com

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HOW THE CATHOLIC CHURCH CAN REACH MILLENNIALS

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T 24, I am well within the demographics that are of interest to Catholics who want to engage young adults in their faith. I go to Mass (most) weekends, try my best to pray during the week, and have a small faith-sharing community in my parish that sustains me. But am I a success story? I have spent plenty of time parish shopping. I have been the youngest person in the pews too many times. I can no longer count the number of churches I have walked in and out of without anyone saying hello and asking what my name was, or if I was new.

It would have been really easy for me not to search as long as I did for a solid community, to become yet another story of, “I was raised Catholic, but….” I would like to think it was a powerful conversion experience that I had as a teenager in youth group, where I felt with the conviction of Paul I was loved unconditionally by God, that pushed me to find a faith community. On my more cynical days, I think I would have quit this a long time ago if my profession as an editor in Catholic media did not keep me engaged in my faith on a day-to-day basis.

This year’s general assembly of the Synod of Bishops, “Young People, the Faith, and Vocational Discernment,” is the latest effort, but not the first, that the institutional Church has made to encourage participation among young people.

Yet, despite the success of events such as World Youth Day, on a day-to-day basis, parishes, high schools, and colleges still struggle to successfully reach a wider swath of individuals from this demographic.

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Zac Davis

A CHANGING CHURCH Christina Lamas, 38, understands what it is like to come up against skepticism or resistance when working in youth ministry—a feeling not limited to members of the episcopacy. “There’s a fear of the unknown. People are intimidated by not knowing what to give a young person,” she tells me.

As a Latina with more than 20 years’ experience working in youth ministry at both the parish and diocesan level, she brings with her a vision rooted in where the Church is heading, both demographically and pastorally. As the American Church creeps toward a majority Hispanic population, the young Church is already there. Sixty percent of Catholics under the age of 18 are Hispanic.

And yet according to a 2014 report from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate and Boston College’s School of Theology and Ministry, only 26 percent of responding dioceses had a director of youth ministry for Hispanic Catholics.

Alejandro Aguilera-Titus, assistant director of the Secretariat for Cultural Diversity in the Church at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, thinks the Church has failed thus far to minister to this group of “perceived minorities.” “Second- and third-generation Latinos have been left behind,” on a national level, he says. He blames this on the traditional youth group model. Parishes, perhaps out of goodwill, often integrate Latino youth into the existing youth groups without providing any ministry designed for

immigrant communities. “There is an openness to working with immigrants, but not with cultural-specific ministries,” he says. The Church in the United States must be careful that, as it seeks to evangelize new populations, it does not ignore the one right in front of it.

GROWING WITH THE FAITH In youth ministry, there are several widely attended national events, organizations to connect and train youth ministers from around the country, not to mention a healthy market for resources and curricula. That is not necessarily the case for ministry specific to young adults aged 18 to 35.

At 29, Evan Psencik, the coordinator of youth and young adult ministries for the Diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut, has garnered enough experience in the youth and young adult ministry world to observe some changes. “In the late ’90s to early 2000s [when Psencik himself was a teen involved in youth ministry], there was this shift, that was like ‘Oh, let’s take young people and let’s do youth ministry over here, and let’s do teen Masses and really take young people out of that and put them over here,’ setting them apart from the rest of the parish environment.

“We put all of the young people at ‘the kids’ table’ and then, when they got out of high school, they went to a church that was not the kids’ table and they didn’t feel a part of it because we never really showed them how to be a part of the bigger Church,” Psencik said.

The negative effects of this model become clear in transition moments, whether from high school to college or the workforce, or from college to the workforce.

“Sometimes [a young person will] get to a college and they’ll be like, ‘Oh I’m really excited. I was in youth ministry, I went to my Steubenville conference, and I’m excited,’ and they might get to their university and it’s not a Catholic university,” Psencik said. “Or they show up to the Newman Center and they go, ‘Oh it’s just all the weird Catholics who can’t find dates, so I’m not coming back here.’”

A MODEL PARISH? A difficult fact to reckon with is that the parish model itself is less appealing to young people, who are unlikely to be connected to a single parish. The Archdiocese of Chicago is among those places trying to find a solution.

For young adults, “the parish shouldn’t be the starting point for ministry—it should be the end point,” the Rev. Peter Wojcik, 36, director of the Office for Parish Vitality in the archdiocese told me. “We’re working to create as many starting points as possible.”

One of those starting points is the archdiocese’s Theology on Tap events. These events, which typically include a guest speaker, drinks, and appetizers, have become a popular model for young adult events around the country.

The archdiocese recently asked parishes to collaborate in organizing these events regionally, so that the efforts and expenses are shared and the events are not competing with one another.

The Archdiocese of Washington has also found success in transitioning away from a parish focus toward a regional one. Jonathan Lewis, 31, the director of young adult ministry and evangelization initiatives for the archdiocese, learned some useful lessons from his own experience of being a young Catholic in a state of flux. At one point in his life, Lewis moved four times in five years and was often traveling three hours one way to see his girlfriend, the woman who would become his wife.

“Does my transience in that stage of life preclude me from fuller responsibility in the Church?” Lewis asked.

“Our parishes are built for stability,” he said. “They’re built for people who have mortgages, who have kids and school schedules, who know where they’re going to be....If they move, they move in the same neighborhood.”

For Lewis, the story of Jesus walking with the disciples on the road to Emmaus serves as a good foundation for the conversation to come. “Jesus walked with them on the road to Emmaus for seven miles. But it was away from Jerusalem, so he walked the wrong direction for seven miles...just to be with them, and to draw near to them,” he said. “Are we willing to leave our churches to walk away in the ‘wrong direction,’ so that we can encounter people and walk with them in that journey, so that inspired by that encounter with the Lord, they return with a heart burning within them?” ■ ZAC DAVIS is an associate editor for digital strategy at America and a host of Jesuitical, a podcast for young Catholics.

Abridged and reprinted with permission: America Media: www.americamagazine.org photo credit: Page 32: CNS photo/Eduardo Munoz, Reuters

Sixty percent of Catholics under the age of 18 are Hispanic.

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YOUNG PEOPLE

AS STREET PREACHERS Ken Johnson-Mondragón Lynette De Jesús-Sáenz

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HESE DAYS, WE are witnessing an awakening in the Church to the importance of a ministry in a missionary key, and the centrality of encounter with Jesus and following him in all aspects of youth and young adult ministry. This type of ministry doesn’t develop out of nowhere. It requires enthusiastic leaders who are committed to their mission with young people, and above all among the young people themselves. As Pope Francis says, “How beautiful it is to see that young people are ‘street preachers’ (callejeros de la fe), joyfully bringing Jesus to every street, every town square and every corner of the earth!”

We are still far from accomplishing this vision. The reality is that after Confirmation, many young people opt to discontinue their spiritual journey with the Church. Among Latino immigrants, very few participate in parish youth groups. However, in some parishes there is a vibrant pastoral juvenil hispana (Hispanic youth and young adult ministry) led by the young people themselves, sometimes through an ecclesial movement, when and only if they are supported by the parish pastor. Children of immigrants often face specific challenges because many of them don’t fit in youth ministry in English or in pastoral juvenil in Spanish.

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We must also pay attention to the programs themselves because the faith isn’t transmitted solely by knowledge of Church doctrine and history. Pope Francis tells us “Transmitting the faith requires forming habits of behavior; one must create the proper conditions for young people to receive the values that will prepare them.

The first step in accompanying young people is to get to know them. More than half of young Catholics in the United States are Latinos, but they are not all the same. For example, some are young immigrants who identify primarily with their country of origin. Others have assimilated to American culture and seldom think of their Latin American roots. A good number of them live in the midst of poverty and violence and they need role models to follow so as to avoid the great risks that come with their environment; many of them feel as if they’re neither from here nor there. And more and more there are young people who have adapted to American culture but maintain their Latino identity and their use of the Spanish language.

In order to effectively accompany young people, it is essential to know what is happening in their personal development and understand the parameters that define their reality. For example, the relationship between parents and children becomes complicated when they effectively are of different cultures and have different social horizons.

Logically, this also affects the transmission of the faith from one generation to the next. Sometimes the parish wrongly supposes that if all of the young people in the group speak English, one program would be sufficient for everyone.

But research indicates that the more Latinos assimilate to American culture, the less they participate in religious programs. If parents don’t speak English well and ministry leaders don’t speak Spanish, it’s likely that religious formation won’t echo from the church to the home and vice versa. A close and trusting relationship between ministry leaders and parents is crucial to formulate a comprehensive ministry that responds to the real needs of the young people in the community.

As a team-building exercise, La RED’s conference attendees were encouraged to build a net—on October 22 in Seattle.

PROCESSES OF ENCOUNTER, COMMUNION, AND DISCERNMENT What parents of immigrant families most hope for from their faith community is help with the socialization, religious formation, and protection of their kids in the midst of a cultural environment that presents many dangers. Therefore, it is imperative for pastoral leaders to take into account the perspectives and concerns of young immigrants, in order to avoid undermining some of their most cherished values. Mutual, in-depth listening sessions between ministry leaders and families, whether formal or informal, are very valuable in order to reduce those risks. That is how to work toward what Pope Francis calls a “culture of encounter.”

When this is done well, the parish youth and young adult ministry or the apostolic movement usually serves as much as a resource for parents, as for the adolescents, and young adults, especially when cultural and generational differences bring them to a stand-still. Additionally, this creates

a sense of belonging; that everyone is important and that everyone has something to contribute in the life of the community. In other words, it fosters communion and participation in the community, and the walls of separation and discrimination are brought down in favor of a “comprehensive, bilingual, and united pastoral juvenil, [which is capable] of creating new forms of evangelization.”

The ideal is not a program imposed from the outside. It is a comprehensive response developed from within the community—with, by and for its young members.

How do we put this into practice?

The young leaders at the First National Encounter for Hispanic Youth and Young Adult Ministry said that they are “idealists, dreamers and achievers seeking changes for a more caring world, following the ideals of Jesus.”

When young Latinos encounter injustice or a lack of opportunities in their lives, some of them respond with anger and violence or they lose hope. But these same experiences present an opportunity to nourish their vision of a “utopia” and solidify their commitment to the Gospel. Like Pope Francis has said: “Knowing how to guide and enable a young person in their idea of utopia is a treasure. What can I do to ensure that this young man’s desire, that this utopia leads him to encounter with Jesus Christ? Allow me to suggest the following. Utopia grows in a healthy way in a young person when it is accompanied by memory and discernment.”

According to the Pope, young people need teachers of discernment, capable of boring themselves with hours and hours of listening. In this “time wasted” with adults in the community, the young people receive the historical memory contextualized in a life of faith.

what the best tool is for evangelizing the young? Another young person.”

But we can’t expect young people to accept their vocation as missionary disciples without support, formation and motivation. What motivates most is a vision and an invitation to make a difference in the world. Through methods of learning-by-doing, we must accompany them in carrying out their own ministry and invite them to take concrete actions of solidarity with young people who suffer from poverty and are marginalized, and to confront the throwaway culture. They are certainly going to stir things up, like Pope Francis has asked them to, but this is also a part of helping them grow in their social commitment. The Church must be willing to walk with them through this process.

If the faith of the current generation of young people is in need of renewal, the same applies to the practice of youth and young adult ministry. The leaders and ministers of youth ministry and pastoral juvenil need to rediscover the joy of dedicating themselves to forming young missionary disciples.

They need to spend hours listening to the them to discover how to communicate the essential message of the Gospel in their language and culture, and then empower them to share the message with their peers.

There is a certain freedom in that: as pastoral ministers, we don’t have to do everything ourselves. Rather, we are witnesses and facilitators of a hope-filled utopia that is always new and greater than we alone could ever imagine. This is falling in love with Jesus, his message and mission, young person to young person, to the ends of the earth. ■

WELL-FORMED YOUNG PEOPLE, PROTAGONISTS ON A MISSION

Abridged and reprinted with permission, USCCB: www.usccb.org

Here is where we come full circle and return to the first principle of youth evangelization: “Do you know

KEN JOHNSON-MONDRAGÓN serves on the V Encuentro Leadership Team as coordinator of research.

LYNETTE DE JESÚS-SÁENZ is coordinator of the Office of Cultural Ministries and director of the Hispanic Pastoral Institute in the Diocese of Rochester, New York.

photo credit: Page 34: NCR photo/Soli Salgado

Learn more about the C21 Center’s resources: www.bc.edu/c21

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GROWING YOUNG Kara Powell Brad Griffin Jake Mulder

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Fall 2018

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T’S TRUE THAT across traditions, most churches in America are not growing, and the share of adults in the United States who identify as Christians is dropping.

What’s more, while young adults ages 18 to 29 make up 22 percent of the U.S. adult population, they represent about 10 percent of Catholic parish attendance, and similarly less than 10 percent of churchgoers broadly.

Many parishes see the average age of their attendees increase year by year and wonder what the graying heads mean for the future.

HOW STRATEGIC PARISHES ARE GROWING YOUNG Our research team at the Fuller Youth Institute has spent the past handful of years studying over 250 churches of diverse sizes, ethnicities, and geographic regions that are unlocking the potential of teenagers and young adults. These churches are bucking the national trends and seeing not only young people but their entire parish thrive.

These churches joined us for one of the most comprehensive and collaborative studies on churches engaging young people, involving over 1,500 research participants, 10,000 hours of staff research time, over 20 denominations, nearly 40 states, and both new communities as well as those with over 100 years of history (see fulleryouthinstitute.org/growingyoung for more details and resources).

All that work was focused on learning more about what’s going right. The primary goal has been to understand how and why these parishes are effectively engaging 15- to 29-year-olds. Put more simply, we studied churches that are growing, and growing young.

Our research unearthed six core commitments these parishes tended to hold in common: • Unlock keychain leadership, encouraging all to use their key gifts. Instead of centralizing authority, empower others—especially young people.

• Empathize with today’s young people. Instead of judging or criticizing, step into the shoes of this generation.

• Take Jesus’ message seriously. Instead of asserting formulaic Gospel claims, welcome young people into a Jesus-centered way of life.

• F uel a warm community. Instead of focusing on cool worship or programs, aim for warm peer and intergenerational friendships.

• Prioritize young people (and families) everywhere.

Instead of giving lip service to how much young people matter, look for creative ways to tangibly support, resource, and involve them in all facets of your church.

• B e the best neighbors. Instead of condemning the world outside your walls, enable young people to neighbor well locally and globally.

The boundaries between these commitments are often permeable, and the context of each parish is pivotal. One of the parishes that opened its doors for a visit from our research team was in Indianapolis.

GROWING YOUNG AT SAINT JOHN’S St. John the Evangelist parish knows that growing young is not just optional but essential. Its story illustrates the six core commitments in action.

Founded in 1871 as the first parish in Indianapolis, St. John’s has a rich history. Located in the heart of downtown, its towering steeples have been a landmark of the skyline for over 140 years. But in the 1980s and ’90s, the future looked bleak.

St. John’s had been heavily affected by suburbanization, and membership had declined. Most attendees were commuters who worked in the city and attended midday Mass. There were hardly any children or younger people involved, leaving a sparse mix of senior adults and professionals. The buildings were aging, and the average age of the membership was migrating higher and higher. One bleak year, the church almost closed its doors for good.

Then in 2009, the parish turned a corner. Unwilling to concede that the people were too old, the road too difficult, or the timing too late, the church resolved to grow young.

In a move of support, the archdiocese decided to prioritize young people at St. John’s. The downtown area had recently been redeveloped, making it the ideal time for a revitalization of the parish. Fr. Rick, a gifted leader, was recruited to serve as the campus chaplain at one of Indiana University’s campuses nearby. New activities were initiated for young adults, including a Sunday evening Mass and midweek gatherings.

Slowly, younger people started to reengage with the church. Overall attendance began to increase, average age began to decrease, and ministry grew. Understandably, these changes brought a few trials. Several of the longtime older members felt undervalued; others found it challenging to connect with this younger population. One parishioner named Gladys recalled, “It felt like they were scared of me, or like they didn’t want to talk to an older person.”

She voiced these concerns to Fr. Rick, who helped her and others empathize with the young people and their search for identity, belonging, and purpose. The leadership team began to mix the age groups in membership committees, small groups, and service teams. They also started an

“adopt a student” program that matched adults with college students who shared similar vocational interests or hobbies. Eventually cross-generational relationships grew deeper and a warm community developed.

Fr. Rick was later appointed to lead the parish, and he worked to merge young and old into one community through practicing keychain leadership. Emerging adults were especially drawn to the social justice efforts of the church, including a powerful ministry to their downtown neighbors who were homeless. The young people joined an already consistent group of volunteers who fed dozens of hungry people daily in efforts to become the best neighbors in the city.

The church’s dynamic young adult community soon evolved into a mixture of singles and married couples, many of whom met at St. John’s. As the couples began having children, the parish responded over time by developing training and small groups to help young families adapt to this new life stage, further prioritizing young people everywhere.

A few years into these incremental changes, an arsonist broke into the church and set it ablaze. While the fire was miraculously extinguished quickly, the flames still consumed the church entryway, and the suffocating smoke that filled the sanctuary caused over $400,000 in damage. It was a defining moment for St. John’s.

Rather than express hatred and anger toward the arsonist, a 20-something remembered, “The leaders of the parish called us not to be mad but to pray for that person and to demonstrate the Gospel.” This gracious approach to taking Jesus’ message seriously deeply affected young people in the community. As they weathered this tragedy and raised funds to rebuild, their shared passion to restore the church transcended generational differences and further united them as a family.

Today, St. John’s is a thriving parish. As a national Catholic advisor to our study commented, “St. John’s is one of the most vibrant parishes I’ve ever seen.” Indeed, there are over 1,500 members, nearly 1,000 of whom are teenagers or young adults.

The story of St. John the Evangelist, while remarkable, doesn’t have to be uncommon. ■ KARA POWELL, PhD, is the executive director of the Fuller Youth Institute and a faculty member at Fuller Theological Seminary.

BRAD GRIFFIN is the director of the Fuller Youth Institute. He speaks nationally at churches, denominational training events, and youth ministry conferences.

JAKE MULDER is the director of strategic initiatives at the Fuller Youth Institute and is pursuing a PhD at Fuller Theological Seminary.

Abridged with permission by authors: https://churchesgrowingyoung.com photo credit: Page 36: Our Father (The Lord’s Prayer) ©Jen Norton, www.JenNortonArtStudio.com

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