YOUNG AMERICAN CATHOLICS : Who are they & what do they want?

I do want my life to be a committed one," wrote Daniel Callahan in his introduction to Generation of the Third Eye, a collection of autobiographical essays by "younger" Catholic intellectuals published in 1965, as Vatican II drew to a close. For Callahan, authentic commitment entailed dedication to "the church, to my work in the church, to the world which Christ came to redeem." At the same time he identified himself as a member of "a generation which, cut loose from many of its roots, from the nurture of old traditions, looks constantly into itself." The central motif of Generation of the Third Eye was the "Journey toward Maturity" (as Francis E. Kearns's essay was titled), part of which--to judge from many of the introductory blurbs--involved the progression from Catholic college to secular graduate education. The truly mature Catholic now sought to reconcile the claims of authority and tradition with a newfound freedom that only the irresponsible would evade. Young people were being asked to revive the church. For these "new Catholics" the church itself would become the arena in which generational drama was played out, and it seemed for the first time that the whole world was watching.

American Catholic history since 1965 could be read largely as a convoluted sequel to Generation of the Third Eye, but the narrative seems to have finally exhausted itself in efforts to make sense of the experience of today's "young adult Catholics." Everyone acknowledges that this cohort is "different" from the Vatican II generation, but it is much harder to discern the ways in which the very questions posed to these young people reflect enduring notions grounded in the experiences of older Catholics. There has been a fair amount of published speculation and empirical research devoted to unraveling the mysteries of Catholics born and raised in the postconciliar era. Young Adult Catholics (University of Notre Dame Press; see page 15), a newly published quantitative study by four sociologists (Dean R. Hoge, William D. Dinges, Sister Mary Johnson, and Juan L. Gonzales Jr.) confirms earlier findings that the vast majority of these young adults sustain some version of a Catholic identity (nearly 90 percent of their sample). Yet only 10 percent of respondents fit the authors' criteria for identity as "core" Catholics: those who "take seriously the teachings of the pope (even where they may disagree with particulars), view Catholicism as the one true church (while acknowledging the truths of other traditions), pray daily, and reject the idea that one can be a 'good Catholic' without going to Mass."

There is also an explicitly comparative perspective underlying the authors' understanding of young adult "core" Catholics. "Our interviews," they explain, "taught us that many young adults today have not learned to distinguish between core and periphery, even though the generations growing up in the 1960s and 1970s knew how to do it and felt free to do so." In other words, "the earlier generation found a way to dissent and stay. But the young today are not clear about how to think about essentials and nonessentials." So the mere fact that young adults do not "leave" the church in larger numbers is not as comforting news as it might seem. Young Adult Catholics features many of the virtues of good social science and will provide material for many fruitful discussions, but in some ways it has already become part of the same intergenerational riddle that it seeks to resolve. Quantitative studies are unable to tell us what such notions as "authority" and "identity" mean to young people and how they work in the construction of religious imagination.

In the 1960s and 1970s, younger "core" Catholics worked out a kind of liberal consensus in public that enabled individuals to speak authoritatively for an entire generation. They combated racism and offered witness against the war in Vietnam, both of which constituted decisive breaks with the dominant sensibility of the preconciliar American church. There were debates, of course, but there was also a sense that what they said and wrote really mattered to the church, and they were right. A 1975 essay by Anthony Padovano, for example (in Journeys [Paulist Press], a collection edited by Gregory Baum), neatly captured the theological spirit of "younger Catholics" of all ages. "Without inner freedom," wrote Padovano, "life is logical rather than metaphysical, theology becomes a system rather than a symbol, Christianity is reduced from experience to ideology." The "new Catholic" was a kind of committed existentialist. A decade after Generation of the Third Eye, a passage in an autobiographical essay could still capture the tone of a generation's concerns without having to try too hard. The liberal consensus soon evaporated, however; the ascendance of neoconservatism was greatly abetted by such prominent erstwhile "new Catholics" as the theologian/writer Michael Novak and others who shifted the locus of true freedom from the self to the marketplace.