YOUNGSTERS LEAVING THE CHURCH

I found the following story most interesting, if only for the fact that the "eminent sociologists" and the Priest who serves in youth ministry got it all wrong.

Doctor Mark Gray, a senior research associate at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University, recently published the results of two national studies by CARA - which conducts social science research about the Church - in the publication Our Sunday Visitor. 

One of the surveys was of those who were raised Catholic but no longer identified as Catholic, ages 15 to 25. The second survey was of self-identified Catholics age 18 and over.

“It’s almost a crisis in faith,” Doctor Gray said. “In the whole concept of faith, this is a generation that is struggling with faith in ways that we haven’t seen in previous generations.”

Young Catholics are leaving the faith at an early age - sometimes before the age of 10 - and their reasons are deeper than being “bored at Mass,” the report claims. 

And it is losing Catholics at a young age. “The interviews with adolescents and young adults who had left the Catholic Faith revealed that the typical age for this decision to leave was made at 13,” Gray wrote. 

“Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed, 63 percent, said they stopped being Catholic between the ages of 10 and 17. Another 23 percent say they left the Faith before the age of 10.”

Of those who had left the faith, “only 13 percent said they were ever likely to return to the Catholic Church,” Gray wrote. And “absent any big changes in their life,” he said, they “are probably not coming back.”

The most common reason given for leaving the Catholic faith, by one in five respondents, was they stopped believing in God or religion. This was evidence of a “desire among some of them for proof, for evidence of what they’re learning about their religion and about God,” Gray said.

It’s a trend in the popular culture to see atheism as “smart” and the faith as “a fairy tale,” he said.
“And I think the Church needs to come to terms with this as an issue of popular culture,” he continued. “I think the Church perhaps needs to better address its history and its relationship to science.”

Father Matthew Schneider, LC, who worked in youth ministry for four years, emphasized that faith and science must be presented to young people in harmony with each other.  A challenge, he explained, is teaching how “faith and science relate” through philosophy and theology. While science deals only with “what is observable and measurable,” he said, “the world needs something non-physical as its origin, and that’s how to understand God along with science.”  

“It was the Christian faith that was the birthplace of science,” he continued. “There’s not a contradiction” between faith and science, “but it’s understanding each one in their own realms.”

How can parents raise their children to stay in the faith? 

Schneider cited research by Christian Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, who concluded that a combination of three factors produces an 80 percent retention rate among young Catholics.

If they have a “weekly activity” like catechesis, Bible study or youth group; if they have adults at the parish who are not their parents and who they can talk to about the faith; and if they have “deep spiritual experiences,” they have a much higher likelihood of remaining Catholic, Schneider said.

Sorry, gentlemen, but this is nonsense.

The reason children do not continue to practice their faith or confess any allegiance to the Church is that they are being raised in homes where the Catholic Faith is not being practiced by their parents.  They are growing up in homes where the Sacraments are not valued for the life-giving Grace and peace they offer.
Their parents do not practice their Catholic Faith. They provide no consistent witness of their own personal commitment to the Church and the Sacraments.

I am not familiar with either of these individuals or with their academic pedigree or qualifications.  But I can say that their particular viewpoint on this subject is surprising. 

I am astounded, really, that a Priest involved in youth ministry does not appreciate the most critical element in the formation of young people:  the investment of love and attention afforded them by their parents and their example of Catholic practice which inspires faith in their offspring.  

10 year old and 13 year old children do not make faith commitments or decisions based on scientific proofs presented to them.  This is preposterous!  

What children do is rebel.  They push the horizons of parental influence and relieve the pressure exerted upon them by their peers.  Children succumb to and assimilate what is acceptable to the people with whom they share their lives, that is, other children who are equally rebellious and challenging of any and all authority in their lives.

Parents who do not provide a consistent value system of faith and morals abandon their children to the immature and whimsical choices other children and the secularized society in which they live. They surrender their children to misguided influences which result in their children remaining immature and misguided for the greater part of their adult lives. 

This is the truth of the matter:  children need parenting, pure and simple!

What these two studies and these two gentlemen seemed to have overlooked is the timeless wisdom of the Church which reminds us, most especially in the ritual for the Baptism of infants, that “parents are the first teachers of their children, especially in the ways of faith.”

In the spirit of that same wisdom, let us hope that parents “will be the best of teachers by what they say and do.  In Christ Jesus, Our Lord.” 

Perhaps, then and only then, will children not be brought up in a way which predisposes them to abandon their Catholic Faith at any time in their lives.