Youth in Formation
Four Scholars at Fordham Confront the Catholic Teen Dilemma
by Matthew G. Alderman
But, why did Jesus get whacked?” quoted the pert, red-jacketed woman on the stage. Laughter rang out in the long, low hall as veteran youth minister Margaret McCarty recalled a question from a baffled teen she’d once heard in catechism class. Young people want to know the faith, she explained, and need an environment where an adult won’t grin at theological terminology that is more The Sopranos than the Nicene Creed.
Fordham’s Pope Auditorium was packed with twenty-something youth leaders from Long Island, timid college students, mossy academic types, and a handful of black-suited priests. Next to me in the nosebleed seats, a gangly youth in a yarmulke emphatically scribbled notes. The evening’s topic: Catholic Teenagers: Faith at Risk?
Virtually nobody under eighteen showed up.
Alarming Findings
McCarty, founder of the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry, was one of the evening’s four panelists, brought together by the university’s Center on Religion and Culture.
They had come to discuss the alarming findings presented in Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers by Christian Smith, principal investigator of the National Study on Youth and Religion and director of Notre Dame’s Center for the Sociology of Religion. Purdue’s James Davidson, Alison Donohue of Regis High School campus ministry, and Smith himself were present. Notre Dame president emeritus Fr. Edward “Monk” Malloy, C.S.C., acted as moderator.
Smith explained that the National Study conducted nearly 3,000 parent-child phone interviews, with follow-up as the respondents grew older, supplemented by 267 personal interviews with teens in 45 states. As far as Catholicism is concerned, the results were appalling.
When the seventeen interviewers finally compared notes, Smith recalled, “we all . . . looked at each other and said, ‘What is up with the Catholic teenagers?’” In nearly all sociological measures of religious strength, Catholics fared poorly, showing “a thin connection” to the age-old faith, both “in their lives and in their imaginations.” Mormons did the best, while Jews proved even more lax than Catholics.
The study divides believing teens into four groups: the devoted, the regulars, the sporadic, and the disengaged. Catholic teens are most likely to be sporadic and least likely to be devoted. Of Catholic teens surveyed:
Matthew G. Alderman is a freelance writer, liturgical artist, and contributor to several blogs, including www.thenewliturgicalmovement.blogspot.com and www.holywhapping.blogspot.com. He was recently named an assistant editor for Dappled Things, an online literary magazine for young Catholic writers. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, he lives in Manhattan, where he works in the field of architecture and attends the Catholic Church of Our Saviour.
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