By J. Michael Parker
For Today’s Catholic
SAN ANTONIO • Catholic parents and teachers must learn to fire young people’s romantic imaginations for faith and teach them to balance the two elements that drive modern culture: energy and wisdom.
That’s the greatest missionary challenge in American Catholic life today, Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI, told the San Antonio chapter of Legatus, an organization of Catholic business people, Jan. 20. About 30 attended the dinner at the Oblate Renewal Center.
The priest, president of Oblate School of Theology, whose popular writings include The Holy Longing and Forgotten Among the Lilies, edited a book titled Secularity and the Gospel: Being Missionaries to Our Children.
Father Rolheiser said the church has done well in the past 25 years in providing balanced theology that inflames intellectual imaginations but hasn’t done nearly as well firing romantic imaginations, particularly among youth — except in the case of Pope John Paul II.
“We no longer know how to get people to fall in love with faith.”
Recalling that St. Francis of Assisi, in giving up his family riches and live in poverty, walked naked out of Assisi, the priest brought down the house when he quipped, “We got 700 good years out of that.”
In the 1950s, he said, the popular Bing Crosby film “Going My Way” presented a stylized, over-romanticized notion of the priesthood that captured people’s romantic imagination about priestly ministry.
Thomas Merton’s best-selling autobiography, "The Seven Storey Mountain," so captured people’s romantic imagination about the contemplative monastery life, Father Rolheiser said, that “for a whole generation, the Trappists had to beat men away with sticks because everybody was discovering their ‘inner monk.’”
But Catholic parents are in a kind of pioneer territory today.
“We haven’t been able to make our children fall in love with the faith. The real struggle today is not with Christianity or with faith so much as it’s with the church. There’s a huge gap between belief in Christ and going to church.”
As an example, he said that about one-tenth of the Catholics in the Archdiocese of San Antonio attend Mass on Sundays, according to annual head counts.
“We are not a post-Christian society; we’re a post-ecclesial society. People say, ‘I’m spiritual, but I’m not church-going,’” the priest said. He said sociological studies indicate that less than five percent of non-churchgoers are angry with the church.
“The rest are sleeping or shopping or whatever on Sunday. Churchgoing is just not on their radar screen. They treat the church the way they treat their families: They want it around, but not much — only for major rites of passage,” Father Rolheiser said.
“That’s the power of our culture. Today’s culture is a conspiracy against interiority. We don’t think deeply. We don’t know who we really are anymore,” the priest said. “This culture is the most powerful narcotic ever perpetrated on our planet.”
He referred to the fact that people have so many ways of staying connected with other people that they don’t take time for reflection about who they really are and what they really think.
Part of the trend is sociological rather than strictly religious because parishes are part of neighborhoods, and neighborhoods are breaking down, he said.
The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, Father Rolheiser’s religious congregation, has conducted seven major symposia around the United States since 2002 to study and reflect on what it means to missionaries in a secular culture.
“This is not going to be a problem of technique or who has the right language. It’s maturity. What our children need from us is the Gospel with skin on it,” he said.
The secular culture, the priest said, gives young people much freedom. But it comes mixed with good and bad implications, and young people don’t always have the necessary maturity to carry their freedom and use it wisely.
“The task for us is to show them how to carry that freedom, walking in the secular culture but keeping our Christian ideals and values.”
Father Rolheiser said there hasn’t been much systematic teaching of spirituality in Catholic and Protestant seminaries.
As a newly ordained priest, he said, he thought he had the answers to people’s questions about spiritual things, but he soon discovered that his answers didn’t fit their questions.
“The Scripture, theology and the catechism gave us truth, but how do we take it into our souls? Often, spirituality wasn’t taught in seminaries and wasn’t considered a part of theological science.”
When he taught in Edmonton, Alberta, he was grudgingly allowed to teach the spirituality of St. John of the Cross only as an extension course. But after 100 students registered to take his course, he finally was given permission to teach it as a regular course.
OST has launched a spirituality program over his three years there, and many of its students are young Protestant ministers.
The goal is to have programs on every level, from the Ph.D. level all the way down to “Discipleship for Dummies,” he said.
“This has been a vacuum for many of us. We’ve got great theology, but nobody’s taught the doctrine of the soul. We learn the catechism, the truth and the liturgy, but we don’t hear much about how to tend to our own souls and those of our children,” Father Rolheiser said.
Parents, he said, first and foremost must live out their faith fully and with integrity and fidelity to the truth.
“Try to compromise in compassion, but not in principle,” he said.
They also must find ways to bring wisdom and energy together so that young people don’t have to choose between them. We have to hold that tension together. You have to be a person who radiates the strength, truth and morality of Christ and at the same time radiates life and happiness and health.
“Christianity has to look really healthy; if it doesn’t, young people are going to reject it.”