The future is not where the older generation seems to think it is

It’s only a matter of time,” they say: my parents’ generation, the generation of Catholics that lived through the Second Vatican Council and put their hopes in it. Only a matter of time till the Church realises what it must do to have a future. It must be avant-garde, open, progressive; it must grasp that seismic changes have taken place in the moral, spiritual and technological expectations of young people; it must adapt to contemporary customs and mores. If the Church does not respond to these expectations, it will become marginalised and irrelevant. 

These older Catholics experienced the dark world of pre-conciliar Catholic liturgy, spirituality and theology. For them, Vatican II held the promise that their faith would be meaningful and spiritually nourishing to their children. They speak confidently about the changes that continue to be necessary: more democratic structures of governance; ordained ministry for women; the acceptance of homosexual unions and of artificial birth control. The list goes on. The alternative, they say, is the slow death of a Church increasingly irrelevant, speaking only to itself. 

Like all dreams of an inexorable onward march of enlightenment, this attitude expresses the ever-recurrent myth that history only goes forwards, in a straight and predictable trajectory from where we are now. But neither the Church nor the world always goes forwards. The confident expectation that ever-increasing “secularisation” would force the Church to change has proved to be the naive dream of a particular moment in modern European social thought. I cannot speak for the culturally and religiously diverse public square, but inside the Church, the future is not where this older generation seems to think it is.

Young Catholics who are actually practising their faith seek a countercultural identity: a sense of self and a community which sets them apart from their peers, which makes them feel, as every new generation wants to feel, that they are special. Just as the Sixties generation did in its turn, they are “rebelling”, but what they are rebelling against is the moral and spiritual drabness and homogeneity of contemporary youth culture. The Catholics whose faith journeys I have shared, whom I live and work with, want a religious identity that is proudly at cross-purposes with what surrounds them; that is unashamedly traditional, in contrast to the prevailing obsession with the novel and the transient. They want markers of this counterculture to be apparent at the deepest level of their behaviour and identity. Catholic sexual and gender ethics is one of the ways many of them stand in strongest relief against their social background. Older Catholics would be surprised by how many of them admire the “theology of the body”, resist gay marriage, embrace gender roles and look forward to practising natural family planning. They celebrate discipline and expect high standards of religious observance. They know and rejoice in their differences from Protestants, and, in particular, from Anglicans. Their heroes are John Paul II and Benedict XVI. 

These young Catholics do not want a faith that is just a hobby, an adjunct to a life otherwise indistinguishable from that of their peers. What excites and motivates them about the Catholic faith is its difference: its demanding, unfashionable, life-altering difference.
Does the older generation realise how brief may be the spell of its particular brand of liberal Catholicism? I watch its slow disappearance with a combination of pride and anxious misgiving. The cherished values of the Vatican II generation are a hard-won treasure that young Catholics tend not to appreciate. But my generation has seen that what the human soul longs for is a high and heroic task: a mountain to climb, a wall to breach, a battle to win. God’s prophets are always at an angle to the world.

It has ever been thus, with the young and the old, whichever way round it is – whether it is the novelty of the rebels then, or the novelty of a traditional religious identity now. Pope Francis is a God-given bridge between these generations, acknowledging the necessary genius of each. The Church must go out of itself to meet people where they are. But the gift it has to give is the unchanging and ever-new Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Carmody Grey is a doctoral student in theology at the University of Bristol.