Burying three outdated Catholic assumptions

I have heard them before, many times before. They were once true.

But when I heard these three old assumptions spoken recently by Catholic dads and a priest, they rang hollow. They are just not true anymore. And abiding by them could have terrible consequences—eternal consequences.

1. Young Catholics who drift away from the Church in college and early adulthood will return when they have children.

This was once the case, when being part of a church and practicing a religion was socially acceptable among adults. “It’s just what you do when you have kids.”

But for today’s parents of the Millennial and Gen Z cohorts, religion and attending church are not things to do. Child sports and activities, all weekend long, are socially accepted; attending church is not. I was shocked when last month I heard a baseball father include, while running through his family’s activities later that Sunday (it was a 9:00 a.m. game), that “we might catch church later.” Usually, that last detail is not mentioned when adults discuss their family schedules, which these days is the main subject of small talk. At any rate, of his two sons’ activities for that day, church was the only one spoken in the subjunctive.

Pew Research Forum’s latest numbers support the anecdote: 28% of Catholics attend Mass weekly while 58% of Catholics are ages 50 and older. The data is clear: young people are leaving, and they are not coming back.

2. Catholic schools and religious education programs will supply everything my children need to live their faith.

It’s dubious whether Catholic schools alone ever provided all the formation necessary to form live-long Catholics. In the pre-conciliar days, when the Catholic identity at schools was palpable, and this identity was reinforced at home and within ethnic neighborhoods, Catholic schools certainly made a major contribution to forming their students.

But theirs was never meant to be a solo mission, though some less zealous parents relied on parish schools to do all the formation work.

Today, by contrast, seven hours a day in even the most robust Catholic schools is merely a blip in lives consumed by secular living and anti-religious messaging that is both in the culture and streaming into kids’ heads via smart phones constantly. A child with a Catholic education not buttressed by home and something of a social life may not have been formed adequately enough to make the decision to remain Catholic, while so many of his friends have quit.

Religious education programs, consuming a tiny hour of a busy week, have virtually no chance of imparting the faith to students without major support at home and in the community. The sad reality is that religious education, whose classroom team with the 72% of children not attending Mass, is just another activity for disinterested, over-scheduled, unchurched kids.

In this situation, religious education is as impactful as a raindrop in an ocean.

3. Providing my children a good example by attending Mass and living a decent life is all they need to stay Catholic.

This assumption resembles the previous. Like it, this was always a bold assumption, one that could be believed when children lived their faith within a school and a supportive culture. Within this milieu, the faith could be “caught” from parents who could get away with not teaching it.

But today, absent the school and supporting culture, what a faithful parent believes to be a decent example of Catholic living will be perceived as something very different by his children who have a very different—and non-religious—worldview.

I have seen this play out in my life. I am the oldest of four children. We all went to Catholic school from kindergarten through college. We attended Mass every Sunday—my father often reiterated his two rules for us, and one was that, as long as we lived under his roof, we had to attend Mass each Sunday. But our Mass and school attendance was not supported by any additional religious practice, in the form of prayer, conversation, or instruction, at home. Our weekly parish bulletin and diocesan newspaper were the only signs of life beyond the church, and my dad and I were the only ones interested in them.

Today, years later, I am the only one of my siblings who practices the faith. We match the depressing national average: one out of four.

What lesson do we draw in realizing that these three assumptions have expired?

Forming our children in the faith has to be an intentional, daily effort that requires the combined efforts of parents, schools, and social circles that care about the faith. That is, if we do not successfully evangelize and convince our children with strong witness, direct catechesis and prayer at home, and communal Catholic living, their Catholic faith, barring a miracle, will likely not survive through adulthood.

The peril of believing these expired assumptions is that they make Catholics passive observers rather than active evangelizers of the Faith. In Post-Christian America, waiting for wayward Catholics to come back, or depending on others to teach our own children the faith, or believing we can live the faith before our children without also explaining it, resembles Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot—he just isn’t coming.

The same will be said of our children coming to the faith if we do not get to work.

Catholic World Report