By Archbishop Thomas Wenski - The Archdiocese of Miami
Archbishop Wenski's keynote address at the Youth Ministry Summit that took place on Saturday, March 3, 2018 at Monsignor Edward Pace High School.
Let me, once again, welcome you to this Youth Ministry Summit. This summit, like an earlier summit on marriage last year, is a response to needs identified in our Second Archdiocesan Synod. The Synod plan is being put into action by this and other initiatives. I thank you for your commitment, your presence here today. This is a sign of great hope.
Why do young people leave the Church or why don’t they engage with the Church in the first place? Why does anyone leave the Church?
The challenge of handing on the faith is a serious one. And social science is telling us that our ability to hand on the faith is in crisis. Surveys and studies are confirming what we all know anecdotally. A few weeks ago, I presided at the Rite of Election: more than 400 people had their names inscribed in the Book of the Elect in anticipation of their baptism at the Easter Vigils to be celebrated in their parishes. But for every new Catholic initiated into the Church, how many leave? A lot.
During my retreat with the bishops of the Southeast in January, our retreat master cited a survey which asked people who would now classify themselves as “nones” – with no religious affiliation – why they stopped practicing their faith. There was a long laundry list of “reasons” given: the sex abuse crisis, poor homilies, boring liturgies with bad music, a priest who was “mean” to them, the rules that to them seemed “old fashioned” or irrelevant, etc.
After the conference, I said to another bishop: These aren’t reasons, they are excuses: homilies were poor and music was bad and priests were all too human, the rules were hard before – when people were still coming to Church. I’m not saying that priests don’t have to be more coherent in their lifestyles nor that they should not work harder on their homilies; nor am I saying that liturgies should not be better prepared.
But what I am saying is that it isn’t enough – and it won’t be sufficient to reverse the negative trends that we all have to acknowledge and worry about. And the bad news isn’t just for us Catholics. We all know of Catholics who have left us to join evangelical churches – and so some suggest that we look to see what they’re doing and maybe learn from them. We can learn a lot from them – I am sure. They do put a lot more of their resources into youth ministry. But if we consider our Catholic school system from Pre-K to Post-Grad as a Youth Ministry (and why shouldn’t we?) the commitment of our resources isn’t shabby. But Catholic schools don’t seem to be that successful at handing on the faith, But here’s a news flash: neither are the evangelicals doing so well. One study of the millennials (the 20- and 30 somethings) paints a bleak picture. I quote: “Millennials stand out as least likely to value church attendance; only two in ten believe it is important. And more than one third take an anti-church stance.”
In Aparecida, in a document that prepared the way for Evangeliae Gaudium, the Joy of the Gospel, the bishops wrote in May of 2007:
A Catholic faith reduced to mere baggage, to a collection of rules and prohibitions, to fragmented devotional practices, to selective and partial adherence to the truths of the faith, to occasional participation in some sacraments, to the repetition of doctrinal principles, to bland or nervous moralizing, that does not convert the life of the baptized would not withstand the trials of time. Our greatest danger is the gray pragmatism of the daily life of the Church in which everything apparently continues normally, but in reality the faith is being consumed and falling into meanness.
We must all start again from Christ, recognizing that:
being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.
In other words, why do young people leave the Church? Why does anyone leave the Church? The answer is simple: They have not encountered Christ and his love.
If we don’t understand this, we will – despite all our good intentions – end up with ineffective and thus bad strategies. If we don’t understand what the real problem is, what strategies we come up with will be “bad strategies.” As St. John Paul II said, we are not saved by programs but by a person, Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today and forever. As one Presbyterian pastor said, “It is easier to develop a new program than to minister grace to a sinner.” And our young people are sinners – just like the rest of us. And so a young person is in need of the reconciling love of Jesus Christ – just like the rest of us.
And, as the pastor added, “There is no mystery here,” so there is no need to radically alter the mission of the Church. The Great Commission given to the apostles by Jesus on the day of Ascension remains operative.
In 2005 – that’s a long time ago; but in 2005, a man named Christian Smith wrote a study of the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers called “Soul Searching.” He says that the dominant religion among current American teenagers is what he called MTD, “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” This MTD is a religion that believes in a distant god – out there – who simply wants everyone to be nice to each other and for everyone to be happy. This faith, Smith says, is parasitic – it has to feed on the established traditions of historical religions like Christianity and Judaism to survive and grow – but it changes and distorts the theological substance of those traditions in order to create its own distinctive theological and religious viewpoint. Of course, this MTD is found not only among teens but it is the popular faith among many, if not most, US adults.
And simply to accommodate our ministries, programs and practices to this alternative religion of “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” is not a formula that will “save the world for Christ.”
Smith talks about “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”; Pope Francis has spoken in a similar vein. In various speeches and homilies, he has spoken about two trends that he sees make the transmission of faith difficult in our times – he sees these trends as modern incarnations of two ancient heresies and thus he calls them Neo- Pelagianism, which holds that the individual essentially can save himself or herself by their own efforts; and Gnosticism, which reduces salvation to just a kind of subjective good feelings. This Neo-Pelagianism can be seen in what we tell kids sometimes: You can be anything you want to be if you really work at it. Listen, as much as I might work at it, I’m never going to be an opera singer. But more sinisterly, no one born biologically a male can make himself into a female. But a society in which the individual is autonomous and truth is not a reality outside of ourselves but something we can create on our own betrays this Neo-Pelagianism. An example of the tendency towards “Neo-Gnoticism” is seen in what many people today say: I am spiritual but not religious and so I don’t need the Church and its rules.
On Thursday, the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith released a letter to the bishops of the world called Placuit Deo, “It is pleasing to God.” This short document which I have only had time to quickly read over seeks to explain what the Pope means when he uses these terms – and what he doesn’t mean.
In any case, in the face of these trends that Pope Francis has identified, trends that make the transmission of the Gospel more difficult today, the document reaffirms that the Church exists for the purpose of bringing the Good News of salvation in Jesus Christ, the one mediator, to all men and every creature. Salvation is not to be reduced to individual effort or to simply good feelings; rather salvation is a gift that incorporates us body and soul into Christ and therefore into a series relationships that make up the Body of Christ living in history and beyond history, namely the Church.
Maybe, to digress on MTD (Moralistic Therapeutic Deism) or on Neo-Pelagianism and Neo-Gnosticism is to get too deep into the weeds – and on a Saturday morning! But in youth ministry – and in any other ministry – we are about helping people meet and know Jesus Christ who is the Savior; we are about ministering grace to sinners so that they know his love. As missionary disciples, it falls to us to transmit the Gospel in an adequate way in the new cultural context in which we live. But our task is not to change the Gospel but to present the Gospel in such a way that it changes us – and those with whom we share it.
However, the Christ that is the answer to the longings of the human heart – the Christ that is found in the Gospels – is much different from the image of Christ that prevails in our culture today. The “popular” image of Jesus today, that of MTD, is of a Jesus who demands nothing, who never scolds, who accepts everyone and everything – a Jesus who no longer does anything but affirm us.
And, of course, this image of Jesus – in the view of many of our contemporaries – is the exact opposite of the Church – at least in as much as the Church still dares to make demands. Jesus wouldn’t care about these things, would he? And so the Church – according to this popular mindset – is equated with prejudice and intolerance. The Church is seen as an obstacle, a barrier keeping people away from Jesus.
Yet to say “I believe” is to place ourselves within a community of believers who also believe – or as the ancient Fathers of the Church in the first centuries of Christianity used to insist: You cannot have God as your Father without accepting the Church as your mother. An act of faith in Jesus, while personal, is not “private” – we cannot affirm the position that everyone is entitled to believe in Jesus “a su manera”, in their own way – for then everyone will create their own Jesus – made in their own image and likeness.
Pope Benedict, when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, said: “The Jesus that makes everything okay for everybody is a phantom, a dream, and not a real figure.” The Jesus we meet in the Gospel – who is the same yesterday, today and forever – is demanding and bold. And therefore, he is not always convenient for us in his boldness and in his demands. And the Church, if she is to be the effective presence of Christ in the world today, cannot be ashamed or afraid of the very real demands of discipleship that Jesus boldly makes on those who would be his followers.
And 50 years into the sexual revolution that has given us broken marriages and fractured families, HIV and abortion, hooking up, so called same sex marriage and gender confusion, we cannot be ashamed or afraid of the Gospel’s proposal about sexuality and human flourishing. The Church’s teachings on this have always been challenging to believers and a stumbling block to non-believers – regardless of their sexual orientation. (cf. Matthew 19: 9-11) For we all are sinners. The Church is, as Pope Francis has said, a “field hospital” tending to those wounded in the battlefields of life with the healing balm of God’s grace and mercy. The “medicine” of the Gospel is denied to no one. That’s why, in the Church we seek healing and we ask God to forgive our sins – and not to bless them.
Jesus – the real Jesus of the gospels – answers the deepest questions of our existence. As St. John Paul II wrote: “Young people, whatever their possible ambiguities, have a profound longing for those genuine values which find their fullness in Christ. Is not Christ,” he continues, “the secret of true freedom and profound joy of heart? Is not Christ the supreme friend and the teacher of all genuine friendship?” Then, he adds: “If Christ is presented to young people as he really is, they experience him as an answer that is convincing and they can accept his message, even when it is demanding and bears the mark of the Cross.”
