For the past decade or so, the Catholic Church has seen a marked increase in children born into Catholic families departing from the body of the Church or ceasing to practice by the time they graduate college. An oft-quoted figure asserts that as much as 83 percent of youth, aged 14 to 18, will no longer be active Catholics by the time they reach their mid-twenties. Church leadership and educational services tend to treat this as a problem in and of itself, a reflection of a lost culture war in a spiritually-weakened youth population that can only be treated by greater efforts to encourage involvement in the Church and lock youth into the theological framework of Catholicism at an early age, so tightly that they cannot possibly extricate themselves. It is this precise viewpoint that effectively persuades youth to leave Catholicism for good. Youth and young adults leave the Catholic Church not because they are morally corruptible or swayed by the temptations of the secular world, but because they have never been given a compelling reason to stay.
It is a failure, first and foremost, in religious education. The Catholic faith remains a source of strength and stability for almost a billion people across the world; it is not flawed at its foundations or it would not remain so universally appealing and spiritually enriching. Those newest to it, young people born near the turn of the century into the heart of a rapidly secularizing world, simply cannot balance an active spiritual conscience formed by a deep, personal relationship with divinity with the demands of external life. The cannot do it because, in most cases, their exposure to Catholicism amounts to a decade of classes and forced attendance at Mass followed by immediate immersion into a moral environment for which they are woefully unprepared. All the lectures in the world about Catholic teachings regarding chastity won't make a shred of difference to a teenager if the bottom line is, "Because it's a sin," or, even worse, "Because that's what God says to do." These are throwaway responses, and they don't cut it for a generation exposed to far greater ideological diversity and questions of morality than any in history. It is not enough for modern young people to hear "just because" as a justification for their faith. Catholicism deserves better. My generation deserves better.
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Simply put, the relationship between the individual and the Church cannot exist if the relationship between God and the individual is not equally strong. Lectures on the necessity of daily prayer or the merits of abstinence ring hollow for Catholic youth who have no context in which to consider them. Instructing a teenager to pray each day or to go to Mass every weekend creates a habit, but not a relationship. Once the conditions driving that habit are removed, it falls to the wayside. In effect, youth who leave the Church in early adulthood depart because they were never truly practitioners of the faith. They were never granted a forum to ask questions, nor teachers prepared to give answers, nor a healthy environment in which to express doubts. They understand only the "Whats" of Catholicism, but are left to the world with a million unanswered "Whys" and "Hows." When we teach the faith to young people, it is never about them. It is about the Catechism, Church teaching, the clergy, but never about their lives or their outlooks. The beauty of the Catechism, the reasons behind a thousand-year-old tradition, never become manifest to youth because we never bothered to ask about their personal encounters with the same God who gave us the Church. How can we help you pray today? What is God to you? What most confuses you about your faith? Of what are you most certain?
Without the context of a close personal relationship with God, Church teaching and Catholic morality will never make sense. Young people leave the Church because we try to teach them backwards, starting with the laws and teachings of the Church and working backwards towards the individual. Often, by the point we reach the core of a person's spirituality, the roots of their faith, they are already gone. They can only see arbitrary restriction in the laws, so they leave. In educating this way, we kill both their relationship with the Church and their relationship with God. We speak in terms of sin rather than in terms of salvation. We alienate them, not the other way around.
The beauty of our Catholic faith is its emphasis on personal encounters with Jesus, through our Sacraments and through our prayer lives. Our doctrine stems from these encounters. The relationship of the individual to God and the individual to the teachings of the Church ought to be one in the same. When we try to separate them, we lose the young Church, and they lose God.
So the solution is simple: Start with prayer. Everything else will fall into place naturally.
