Yesterday, I read a book with a title to delight many of you: God and Man at Georgetown Prep: How I Became a Catholic Despite Twenty Years of Catholic Schooling by Mark Gauvreau Judge.

The book is, in a way, an interesting companion piece to Matthew Lickona’s Swimming with Scapulars – both sort of young men (although Judge is 40, closer to my age than Matthew’s) who are unapologetically orthodox Catholics – Judge has more of a journey than Matthew , however, having gone away from practicing Catholicism, which Matthew never did.

The book was okay. I really thought it could have been structured more powerfully, to highlight the anecdotal, autobiographical material above the rather surprising amount of historical background Judge provides on the collapse of catechesis in the post-Vatican II era. That historical material is important (and available in other books), but there’s just a lot of it, and since the book has hooked us on a personal level, we expect that to take center stage, and it really doesn’t – it shares the stage equally with the historical material (even on the visual level – I found the book awkwardly designed) to the detriment of the book, I think.

With that caveat: Judge’s tales of going to Georgetown Prep, Catholic U, and teaching at Georgetown U. are depressing – environments in which hardly anyone cared about teaching the faith to young people, and those who should have were too deeply enamored of their own (ahem) woundedness to bother to care.

Everytime I read something like this and reflect on my own experience, I’m left with two questions…how did this happen so fast? Judge describes national catechetical gatherings in the mid-60’s that were already on the fast track to evisceration of content. We’ve discussed this before – there must have been some hollow core in what was going on in the U.S. Church up to that point – we can’t completely blame the external landscape. There’s no way those people, completely formed in pre-Vatican II institutions, would have rejected it so fast as "irrelevant" and missing the point if all was well.

Secondly, the supreme irony of Judge’s "formation," as was the case for many of us, was that the goal of that post-V2 catechesis, on paper, was to introduce us more directly to Jesus, and get us to focus on Him.

The consequence? As Judge so aptly relates, it was the complete opposite. Something about all that happened relegated Jesus to a vague historical figure (who might or might not have done the stuff he’s said to have done), and stripped Catholicism, as it was lived by most people, of its daily power, relegating it to a Sunday-only meeting. The complete opposite of what was needed. It’s what I’ve seen in my work, and what I’ve tried to help correct.

Common to both Lickona’s and Judge’s books is the importance of fathers. Both men had faithful Catholic dads who approached the faith with intellectual vigor, deep spirituality and a who shared a holistic approach to faith – it permeated every nook and cranny of life, and it’s this latter point that Judge particularly faults his catechesis for abandoning.

From that first beach week through the next ten years, this is basically what happened to me. My Catholic schooling simply did not educate me that joy, friendship, and the powerful attraction to the opposite sex were natural and healthy reactions to the manifestations of the Creator. These things were the best things in life, and Christ had been minimized to the point where I could not see him in the world. When this happens the things that God created offer diminishing returns. When there is no longer a hierarchy of loves with God at the top, those lesser loves become gods who cannot satisfy.

So, take note dads: You matter.