YOUNG Catholics are more confused about religion than other Christian groups their age.
Cardinal George Pell will warn the National Catholic Education Commission’s annual conference today that young members of the church seem to regard life as a "smorgasbord of options from which they choose items that best suit their passing fancies".
They are in danger of becoming muddled about their faith, he will warn the Sydney conference. And although inadequacies of family life and religious education are factors, they are not the only ones.
"Too many young Catholics have been led by the pressures of contemporary propaganda … so their religious confusion is worse than that of all other young Australians," he says.
Cardinal Pell cautions that churches may be experiencing an acceleration in Christian "slippage, with Catholics slipping faster, although they have bigger numbers on the slope".
Catholic education is experiencing a "complex and turbulent process of change" with "only limited capacity to transmit our tradition and preserve our identity", he says, citing the findings of the recent Spirit of Generation Y survey produced by the Australian Catholic University, Monash University and the Christian Research Association. He was surprised to find a mere 10 per cent of Catholics between the ages of 13 and 29 believed "only one religion is true". This compared with a survey average of 11 per cent, and 34 per cent among "other Christians". For Anglicans, the figure was 14 per cent.
"The pressures on young Catholics beyond tolerance and ecumenism and towards muddle are evident here, channelled sometimes through the ill-effects of courses in comparative religion," says Cardinal Pell, also Archbishop of Sydney.
Worse than the low numbers identifying Catholicism as the one true faith, and "particularly disturbing" for Catholic educators, is that 75 per cent of young Catholics believe it is acceptable to "pick and choose beliefs".
This simply reflects the catechesis they’ve (we’ve) received. It is not stated so bluntly, but the assumption is there in the cornerstone of contemporary catechesis:
Jesus came into the world to show us how to love, and to show us how much God loves us. The Church is the place where we can celebrate this.
And that’s really it. There is not a bit cosmic about it. There is nothing, not a hint, as Cardinal O’Malley says in the homily he blogged in his last post, quoting (gasp) Weigel:
As religious we must forcefully and boldly proclaim that the Gospel of Jesus is the story of the world not some appendix, excess luggage. As Weigel has stated, the great problem is that the world does not know its own story. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not an imposition upon the world but the proposal to the world of its own true story. For the Catholic Christian the world is not alien territory but a creation of love that has tragically alienated itself from its creator. The mission of the Church is to call the world home.
This is something I am really just starting fully to grasp, myself. Not that I didn’t get it on a superficial level and even say it a lot, but the implications and the truth and the necessity of it are really just starting to churn around in my head – due credit must go, I’m going to say like a broken record – to reading N.T. Wright, and what he has said not only about Jesus, but about Paul.
It is not a matter of "pre-Vatican II triumphalism" – if you actually read theology and spiritual works and "read" the cultural expressions of much of our history you see what a fine balance was struck – successfully much of the time. Not always, and as today, the best often got lost on its way to the popular level. There was an acceptance of the limitations of human understanding, the mysteries of human cultures and societies as they develop, but a clear understanding of the Body of Christ as the place where it all comes together, where God continues his work, through weak human instruments, to call back the lost in this great work of redemption.
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