Mortal Remains
Getting Rid of "Youth"
by S. M. Hutchens
Catholic correspondents are sending me links to news articles about the Youth Synod called by Pope Francis for October 2018 on the subject of youth, faith, and vocational discernment, and for which a 7,000-word final document was issued in March. According to the Catholic World Report,
The document describes itself as "a statement reflecting the specific realities, personalities, beliefs, and experiences of the young people of the world." Its purpose is to provide "a compass" and "a navigational guide" to the bishops who will attend the synod so that the Church will be informed "of what she needs to do moving forward."
My Catholic friends are, by and large, less than favorably impressed by the whole business, in which they see much evidence that it has been pre-engineered by the Vatican to provide support for its own progressive agenda, which finds, to the virtual exclusion of young Catholic traditionalists, that the future of the Church lies in the opinions of youth who think it needs to be updated to be relevant. Touchstone-type Protestants, many of whom have spent our lives at war with the aggressive mendacity of liberalism in our own ecclesial communities, are asking ourselves, "Now where have we seen all this before?"
Apprentice Adults
The first problem to be noted here is the whole idea of the "Youth" as a third estate in the church between children and adults, gifted with its own unique and valuable wisdom to be consulted and followed in the conduct of its affairs. It's not just modern Catholics who are tangled in the ambiguities created by this notion.
My mother was born in Chicago in the year (1929) that the noted pastor and Bible teacher H. A. Ironside came to the pulpit of Moody Church, from which he retired in 1948, when she was nineteen. She heard him preach many times, and one of the things that struck her was how Dr. Ironside declared against this tertium quid. When the children had been trained enough to understand and participate in adult worship and activities, Dr. Ironside taught, that was where they should be—not in a limbo of youthdom, but among their elders as apprentice adults.
In this, the fundamentalist bishop stood with a very old and universal tradition, in which the transition between child and adult happened not in a decade or more, but in a day upon which the chrysalis was reckoned to have broken and the child, initiated by his elders into adulthood, could say, "Today I am a man," after the manner of women at the unmistakable moment of menarche. In this, no one saw the new man or woman as a mature example of their sort, but they were recognized as bearing the weight of adulthood and its basic expectations. This meant that little adult toleration was required for youthful indiscretion—there was no Rumspringa of indefinite term—and realism could be exercised about the immaturity in young adults. "Youth" was not, under these conditions, an exempted class, but a responsible one. (Look at a high-school yearbook from the early twentieth century. See any "kids"?)
Communities that are successful in resisting and overcoming the infection of the Youth Idea in its various forms will no longer feel responsible for listening to young people as though the opinions of the ignorant and inexperienced were to be considered equal to those of the mature, any more than a master would feel obliged to consult his apprentice on how the work of the craft should proceed. That, of course, does not mean the master would not properly place the apprentice in his reckoning, and acknowledge his increasing weight as he grew in knowledge and skill, in the hope that some day the youth would himself become a master. He would be proud of those who under his mastery achieved the distinction.
Co-opted by Liberals
Strangely high estimation of youth opinion is a mark of liberal activity in the church. It is based upon the flattery that tells the young their opinions are far more important than traditionalism accounts them because they are fresh and new and forward-looking and the like, while in the traditionalist scheme of things, the valuation of opinions is strongly weighted toward age, experience, and earned status, of which on all accounts the young have little. Co-opting them is a vital part of any program bent on changing the doctrine and character of the church—all of which is presented in terms of the new, the fresh, the innovative, the exciting paradigm shift.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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