Cover
story Theologian: GenXers make uneasy peace with church
By PATRICIA LEFEVERE
As a theologian, Tom Beaudoin sees
it as his responsibility to do my part to keep the church in a constant
state of reform. His 1998 book, Virtual Faith, has given thousands
inside and out of Call to Action a guide to understanding the theology of
GenXers through their music videos, fashion and cyberspace. Beaudoin, 31, is a
doctoral student at Boston College.
His research indicates that young Catholics are wary of
seeing religion reduced to church squabbles and political backbiting. A lot of
them have made an uneasy peace with the intransigence of the church, he
said, noting that while theyre not apathetic about the role of women in
the church, race or birth control, theyre also not extremely
involved.
If CTA expects younger Catholics to revitalize the church, it has
to be much more sensitive to their spiritual needs, he said. Unless the
spiritual disciplines of the church are experienced as nurturing, as
contributing to ones interior life, they will not be attracted to the
reform movement. Many of them have already seen that those whove labored
to change the church are often disappointed, cynical, bitter and
burned-out, he said.
If the shift does not happen -- from reform being grasped as a
spiritual discipline instead of a reaction of overt anger toward
the institution -- Beaudoin predicts that the reform movement will fold its
tent within a decade. He does not expect GenXers to swallow the agenda of
the boomers whole. Instead those younger Catholics who remain faithful
will put their energies into local, limited battles, into working more
discreetly and changing relationships rather than into national or global
church strategies, he said. We dont want to give our careers to
spinning our wheels.
This is not to say that GenXers are not as passionate about church
reform as older folks in Call to Action, said Beaudoin, who while not a member
of the organization, has observed the group closely. Until we have truly
intergenerational teaching and learning within lay reform groups and among
clergy and the hierarchy, the church will continue to have loud and soft
debates. The body of Christ will stay fragmented
with differences
allowed to fester at low temperatures.
The future might well see GenXers claiming a church of their own,
he said, though he doubts that there exists a critical mass of the
post-Vatican II generation large enough to do the claiming and the
inviting. The bishops and clergy could also do the hard work of wooing
back young Catholics by listening to them and being open to their spiritual
needs.
But Beaudoin finds a certain laziness among church
leaders, whose attitude for the most part is: Theyll come back when
they want to raise a family in the church. The inference is:
Well have nothing to do with you until you seek us out.
This is a missiology that sucks, Beaudoin said. It
makes the church look like a sacramental PEZ dispenser.
Its
not evangelization. Despite declarations from Rome, from the bishops and
from diocesan synods, the designated priorities of adult education and adult
catechesis are being met with woeful inadequacy, he said. With few
exceptions, there is nothing in place for GenXers when they do
return.
The lack of engagement in the church on the part of the majority
of GenXers may have as much to do with an emerging global culture as it does
with rust in the reform movement or an iron-willed papacy, reckoned Robert
Ludwig, author of Reconstructing Catholicism: For a New Generation.
Ludwigs own children as well as many students at DePaul University in
Chicago, where he is professor of Catholic studies and director of university
ministry, dont love the church enough to want to reform
it.
Ludwig has observed a huge renaming of God going on
worldwide. A new global culture and a new global religion are emerging with the
shrinking of the world, he said. Many GenXers are more attracted to Swiss
theologian Fr. Hans Kungs Global Ethics movement and to groups like the
World Parliament of Religions than to institutional churches or their reform
wings, he noted.
National Catholic Reporter, October 6,
2000
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