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Catholicism for the Millennial Generation
"The great hope we can present to young adults is that their life was designed to be more than they expect it to be."Posted: Friday, July 30, 2010
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STEUBENVILLE, OH—Addressing participants at Franciscan University's St. John Bosco Religious Educators Conference in July, Shawn Christopher Reeves, director of Religious Education at St. John's Catholic Newman Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discussed the challenges of ministering to the Millennial Generation, including a pervasive suspicion that organized religion seeks to restrict their freedom.
Citing a Knights of Columbus poll, Reeves, author of Embracing the Mystery of the Holy Spirit, said, "Fifty percent of Catholic Millennials say they're spiritual, but not religious.
"Religion is the body of spirituality. What do you call a spirit without a body? Dead. You take the body away, and your spirituality becomes a specter."
The goal of the Catholic life, Reeves said, was summed up in a saying of St. Irenaeus: "The glory of God is man fully alive."
"You can't help young adults enter fully into life unless you know what's preventing them from experiencing a full human life," he explained.
He described five wounds of the Millennial generation: relativism (there's no right or wrong, anything goes) taken as the norm; the rise of an aggressive "new atheism"; feelings taken as dictating reality; confusion over authentic human nature and true freedom; and a deep desire for truth and stability in a world that denies these exist.
"I think some of these wounds are just enhancements of the wounds of my generation," said Reeves, who identified himself as a Gen Xer. But each stands in the way of young people fully flourishing as human beings, as well as entering into the divine life through the Catholic faith.
"I propose that we as campus ministers are physician assistants to Christ, the great physician."
Speaking during the Campus and Young Adult Ministry certification track to those engaged in ministering to young adults on campuses and in parishes, Reeves offered a series of remedies for these wounds. The list included a willingness on the part of campus and young adult ministers to challenge the assumptions of this generation about relativism and subjectivism, presenting the rational arguments for the faith and deep understanding of human nature provided by the classical and Catholic philosophical traditions, and helping the Millennials find the rock solid stability of truth and a relationship with the unfailingly loving God.
"The great hope we can present to young adults is that their life was designed to be more than they expect it to be," said Reeves, an alumnus of the Franciscan University of Steubenville MA in Theology and Christian Ministry Program. "Their life was designed to be fuller than they experience it now, and union with the Trinity is the means to that, as well as the end goal for which we were made."
At a later workshop, he gave participants insights for aiding young adults to reach for union with the Trinity in prayer.
"Tell them our prayers don't have to be perfect," Reeves said. "When we enter into the life of prayer, we don't need to worry about saying the right things because we have an Advocate with us. As St. Paul says, the Spirit prays for us with inexpressible groanings."
Reeves suggested participants emphasize that prayer is intimacy with Almighty God.
"Christian prayer is a covenant relationship between God and man in Christ," he said. "It's an invitation into the divine life to enhance our being, and to make what we are more than what we were before."
He acknowledged that in the modern, tech-driven, ever-changing youth culture, young adults are very uncomfortable with the silence and time commitment needed to develop a prayer life. However, if they are taught what it is, how to do it, and the union with the divine nature that it leads to, then prayer becomes attractive. He suggested teaching young people about the different traditional devotions of the Church, such as the Rosary, Stations of the Cross, and Divine Office.
"Catechesis—in prayer, in morality, in every aspect of the Catholic life—is essentially about being Philip the Apostle. You meet the Ethiopian eunuch who needs help understanding divine revelation and the nature of reality, and you guide him into all truth."
Reeves warned participants that his workshops came with an expiration date since the youth culture was so evanescent.
"Every four or five years, there's a new set of needs, there's a new set of wounds that need tending to," he said. "You need to be attentive to the culture."
Reeves's talks were part of the larger Campus and Young Adult Ministry track, which can be completed over several summers. The track was one of six tracks at the conference, which also included general session talks, daily Mass, confession, and eucharistic adoration.
One participant, Patti Collyer, diocesan coordinator for Youth and Young Adult Ministry for the Diocese of Oakland, California, said, "I enjoyed Shawn's talk and the different ways to approach prayer with young people...If we can equip young adults with the tools for prayer, it will help them get through those challenges that are inevitable in everyone's life a little bit better, to recognize that there is something greater than them, that they don't have to be autonomous."