Roots: Catholic Youth Evangelization in a Post-Pandemic World

By Pickwick Publications

Youth evangelization is one of the most challenging tasks of the church today, and this book faces that challenge head-on. Roots: Catholic Youth Evangelization in a Post-Pandemic World features essays written by leading scholars in the fields of philosophy, theology, psychology, sociology, pastoral ministry, medieval studies, and ecology. In this timely volume, scholars tackle tough issues presented by contemporary culture while engaging the ripe fruits of the 2019 apostolic exhortation of Pope Francis, Christus vivit. Readers will be treated to a variety of themes, including beauty, belonging, hope, political theology, cultural analysis, vocational discernment, ecclesial strategies, and the history of Catholic youth ministry in the United States. By approaching the general topic of Catholic youth evangelization from diverse angles, the precise nature and demands of ministry with young people in a postmodern context are illuminated. This volume promises to provide ample insights for church leaders active in the field of pastoral care of youth from an interdisciplinary perspective. Readers can be assured that they never will think the same about youth evangelization after encountering the rich contents of this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Jul 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666725582

Book preview

Introduction

Let no one have contempt for your youth, but set an example for those who believe, in speech, conduct, love, faith, and purity.

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Timothy

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The theme of this book drew its inspiration from the 2018 October Synod on Young People, the Faith and Vocational Discernment, convened by Pope Francis. This synod of bishops was anticipated by a pre-synodal gathering of 300 young people from around the world at Rome in March of 2018 in order for designated bishops to take time to listen to the ideas, feelings and recommendations of the youth for the upcoming synod. The age group on which the synod focused its reflections was between 16–29. Following the synod, Pope Francis published the apostolic exhortation Christus vivit on the Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord, March 25, 2019. Christus vivit gives many indications of various cultural malaises affecting young people today, but also proposes keys to healing, hope and empowerment.

Pope Francis begins the exhortation by proclaiming that Christ is alive! He is our hope, and in a wonderful way he brings youth to our world, and everything he touches becomes young, new, full of life. The very first words, then, that I would like to say to every young Christian are these: Christ is alive and he wants you to be alive!¹ These words are reminiscent of those of Jesus recorded in the Gospel of Saint John: I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly. I am the good shepherd. A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.² This truth cannot be repeated enough: Christ is alive and he wants you to be alive! Fully alive! Who does not want this abundance of life for himself or herself? Pope Francis accentuates the fullness of life offered in Jesus to each person individually in and through the Church communally. He reminds us that young people are a perennial sign of this effervescent life emanating from the Most Holy Trinity even before the creation of the universe. He invites young people to reclaim their inherent dignity as sons and daughters of God the Father.

To everyone in the Church, the pope insists that each young person’s heart should thus be considered ‘holy ground,’ a bearer of seeds of divine life, before which we must ‘take off our shoes’ in order to draw near and enter more deeply into the Mystery.³ It is this posture of patient reverence and attentiveness that characterizes the synod as a model for the global Church. The first and most important thing that young people need from their elders is sincere and empathetic listening. Pope Francis never tires of inspiring a Church that listens through the art of accompaniment. Ministry to and with young people never should lack servant leaders whose hearts are attuned to the real feelings and needs of the young. The pope writes later in the exhortation that young people need to be approached with the grammar of love, not by being preached at, because "the salvation that God offers us is an invitation to be part of a love story interwoven with our personal stories." ⁴ Narrative retrieval is essential for the restoration of the special identity, vocation and mission of every young person today. When the real life-narratives of the youth are comingled with the life-narrative of Jesus Christ, most of all in the unified encounter of eucharistic liturgy, the channel of salvation is dilated to the greatest degree.

Yet in order to arrive at this redemptive liturgical encounter, the suffocating weight of a culture of isolation must be surmounted. The technological revolution in which we live is having drastic consequences on young people around the world. Pope Francis writes that for many people, immersion in the virtual world has brought about a kind of ‘digital migration,’ involving withdrawal from their families and their cultural and religious values, and entrance into a world of loneliness and of self-invention, with the result that they feel rootless even while remaining physically in one place.⁵ The missionary pope goes on to admonish those who may be tempted to inhabit the sidelines of life: Dear young people, make the most of these years of your youth. Don’t observe life from a balcony. Don’t confuse happiness with an armchair, or live your life behind a screen.⁶ The proliferation of pixels seems to have cast a spell on everyone, especially the young. A solace of screens reinforces social fragmentation and alienation, uprooting in-the-flesh relational connectedness. It is a paradox that we could move so far away from one another without our bodies moving any significant distance in space.

Among all the chapters of Christus vivit, chapter 6, Young People with Roots, looms the largest. Pope Francis clearly wants to encourage young people to recover their roots as a primary means to fashion their unique identities as unrepeatable children of God the Father. A sharp critique is aimed at ideology and cultural colonization. Such powerful currents of thought are resisted inasmuch as young people remain close to the elderly and cultivate a living collective memory by telling stories that take time to tell. Instead of yielding to the illusion of a culture of the ephemeral in which nothing can be definitive, retrieving one’s roots vis-à-vis communal elders and the living tradition of the Church recuperates the lassitude of the anima technica vacua (the empty technological soul, Balthasar) by reorienting the soul to the Orient that is the uncreated Light of the world, Jesus Christ.⁷

The present book Roots: Catholic Youth Evangelization in a Post-Pandemic World is populated by an eclectic assortment of essays. These essays aim to engage the content of Christus vivit intentionally, whether explicitly or implicitly. The range of contributors extends from philosophers and theologians to social scientists to administrators, and even to a scriptor of Latin manuscripts! Each essay offers deeply valuable insights for better understanding Catholic youth evangelization in the twenty-first century. Given the cultural backdrop and recent global viral pandemic, evangelization with young people is no easy task. It requires incredible ingenuity, innovation and intrepid inspiration from God the Holy Spirit. In this volume, the reader will be brought into contact with a wealth of wisdom presented by both scholars and practitioners of Catholic youth ministry. It is our pleasure to introduce the following essays to you with the hope that we continue to turn the corner of a counter-revolution of culture that will result in a renovation of rootedness.

Ex voto suscepto,

John C. Cavadini and Donald Wallenfang

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. Pope Francis, Christus vivit,

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2

. John

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. Pope Francis, Christus vivit,

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. Pope Francis, Christus vivit,

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,

252

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. Pope Francis, Christus vivit,

90

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. Pope Francis, Christus vivit,

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. See Pope Francis, Christus vivit,

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Augustine as a Model for Cultural Engagement

Elizabeth Klein

Introduction

Augustine of Hippo, who lived in the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, may seem like an odd choice to be a model for cultural engagement today, especially for engagement with the youth. Augustine, however, is in many ways the perfect figure to whom we should turn in order to reflect both on the young and for the young,¹ as Pope Francis challenges us. Augustine faced similar cultural challenges to those of the modern world and he himself struggled with intellectual and moral difficulties in his early life. As a young man, he rejected the faith of his pious (and sometimes overbearing) mother. Generally speaking, as Christianity emerged into the Roman Empire in late antiquity, it was seen as something which was strange, unsophisticated, and anti-cultural. Many traditional Romans felt that Christianity was undermining the greatness of the empire and that Christianity was a religion largely populated by the ignorant. An early Christian opponent named Celsus, for example, sneers at the lack of Christian sophistication, writing that Christianity is vulgar and . . . only successful among the uneducated because of its vulgarity and utter illiteracy.² In the year 410, Rome was sacked by an invading army of Goths. Some Romans felt that Christianity was to blame for the calamity, because the new religion had weakened their society and caused Romans to abandon the worship of their traditional gods. Augustine responded to this challenge with his work entitled City of God. Although the sack of Rome was the immediate occasion for the writing of his book, what resulted was a grand theological project which aimed to show what kind of society Christians envisioned, and how that society compared to the one built and revered by the Romans.

As in Augustine’s time, Christianity today is sometimes seen as something which is anti-cultural. It is portrayed, at least in popular media, as being primitive, behind the times and soon to become obsolete. This attitude is abundantly clear in the writers of the so-called New Atheism, who see religion as a hereditary disease which can be cured by clear-thinking, especially the kind brought about by modern science.³ In short, Celsus’ critique sounds as if it could be found on a contemporary twitter feed. Therefore, like Augustine, our biggest challenge in engaging our culture is not simply responding to this or that critique (although Augustine does respond to many particular challenges raised by his opponents), because Christianity as a way of life is rejected out of hand, especially when it is characterized as a superstition. Rather, the ultimate task of any engagement with the hearts and minds of our youth must be to show that Christian community (that is, the Church) is not anti-cultural and outdated, the result of a barbarian human past, but rather, is counter-cultural. We must demonstrate, as the Second Vatican Council proclaims, that the Church is the real youth of the world,⁴ that it is the source of all true renewal and true life.

That is the task to which Augustine dedicates himself in the City of God. This city of God, as Augustine calls it, is a communion which is completely unlike any other human form of communion, because it is based on and founded by God. Augustine famously defines the two cities—that is, the city of God and the city of earth—in the following way: two loves have made two cities. Love of self, even to the point of contempt for God, made the earthly city; and love of God, even to the point of contempt of self, made the heavenly city.⁵ This society that is the Church—which is not based on political allegiances, class, race or accomplishment of any kind, but on the love of God—is sorely needed today, and it is especially needed by our youth who are struggling to belong in an increasingly competitive and globalized society.

Augustine’s work City of God is divided into two parts. The first part (books one to ten) constitutes a critique of Roman society. Augustine examines the culture around him, and argues that traditional Roman religion offers no benefits either in the earthly life or in the afterlife. Roman society does not promise the fulfillment for which the human heart longs. In the second part (books eleven to twenty-two), Augustine traces the history of the city of God, and presents a vision of a completely different kind of community, which is based on love and worship of God. In this essay, I will accordingly present lessons we can learn about critiquing our culture (taken from the first half of City of God) and then some suggestions about how to present the Christian vision of the Church (taken from the second half).

Part 1: Deconstructing the City of Man

How does Augustine approach the monumental task of engaging and critiquing the culture of the Roman empire, which so far as societies go, was one of the most enduring human cultures ever to have existed? And, what lesson can we learn from his method? We may be tempted to say, along with Augustine in the opening lines of City of God, a great work is this and an arduous one; but God is my helper.⁶ For the modern reader (or at least for this modern reader) sections of the opening part of the City of God can be incredibly tedious to read. The reason for this tedium is in no small part due to the fact that Augustine takes his opponents so seriously. Augustine has read Roman history, poetry, philosophy, and rhetoric, and in City of God more than in any of his other writings, he wears his learning very heavily. In other words, Augustine does not aim for the lowest common denominator when he engages with his opponents. He refuses to argue against straw men, or to refute only the easiest arguments he can find. He repeatedly asserts that he has looked for the very best and most reliable historian—the Roman author Varro—and that he chooses to quarrel with the philosophers who are in fact the most sophisticated and the closest to Christian truth—the Platonists. He frequently reminds his Roman readers that they themselves revere these authors and consider them authoritative; Augustine calls their attention to the fact that he is not taking an easy way out, and that he understands the narrative about Roman society from the inside. He himself, after all, converted in adulthood.

Few of us are capable of reading and thinking as much as Augustine did, and I am not suggesting that every modern Christian must be incredibly well read to engage with the questions being asked by our youth and by society at large. Nevertheless, we do have to make a concerted effort to understand the narrative that our society tells about itself. I have sometimes seen in my own Catholics friends and students a lack of awareness about what atheists, for example, actually think or how they perceive the world. Some Catholics seem to assume that no atheist has ever thought about the question of morality or how to live a fulfilling life in a world where there is no God. So what kind of a world do they imagine? What elements of it are persuasive? From what sources are they getting this narrative? We can sometimes be tempted to surround ourselves with those who agree with us, especially in a society becoming ever more polarized, but we really ought to spend some time and energy understanding the narrative of other people, often just by listening to them.

Augustine, however, does not spend all this time and effort understanding the interior logic of his opponents’ position simply to concede to them as much ground as possible. He understands their position in order to show how their view of society and the world is, in the end, insufficient. Sometimes when we Catholics engage in dialogue we can give the impression that we are back-pedaling. It can seem as if the Church is playing catch-up with the rest of world when we emphasize only the commonalities that we have with the rest of society and the harmony of the Church’s teaching with the insights of modern science or philosophy (for example). We need not be constantly belligerent or argumentative, and we should certainly welcome viewpoints which are complementary to our own, but we, like Augustine, must always keep the larger Christian narrative in mind, the ultimate good or ultimate love, which, as Augustine never tires of repeating, is God himself.

We can find an example of Augustine keeping this grander vision in view in book four of City of God. There are long passages in this book where Augustine is deconstructing the Roman pantheon, showing that the Romans have multiplied the gods they worship to such an extent that they have gods in charge of the tiniest tasks. They have one goddess in charge of rural areas, another god in charge of mountain ridges, one in charge of hills and another of valleys. They have a god for germinating seeds, another for sprouting them and another for protecting them;⁷ and so on and so on. After Augustine has discussed a number of these lesser gods, he speaks about two Roman goddesses named Virtue and Felicity, felicity being the goddess of happiness. Regarding these goddesses, Augustine writes: "it was not truth but folly that made these goddesses. For these virtues are gifts of the one true God, not goddesses themselves. Still, where there is virtue and felicity, why look for anything else? What would satisfy a person for whom virtue and felicity are not enough? Virtue includes everything we should do and felicity everything we should desire."⁸

Augustine has already spent most of book four explaining and critiquing very specific aspects of Roman culture and worship, but he never loses sight of the big picture, as we see here. If Roman society does not have as its end, as its highest gods, human goodness and happiness (i.e. virtue and felicity), what else is worth arguing about? Although polytheism is not so popular in modern America as it was in fifth century Rome, there is an analogy between what Augustine is doing and what we must do. Just like in Augustine’s day, we have multiplied (even ad absurdum) the factors by which we gauge societal success and by which we measure the health of our country and our world—whether these measures are social, political, environmental or educational. We can become inundated with information and indices for just about anything, and data collection has become its own science. Wrestling with specific data points is, of course, necessary. But if we do not make the final measure of our society that of human goodness and of the happiness found in God, and if we do not have that ultimate end in view, all other arguments will fall short of being persuasive.

Therefore, if we take Augustine as our mentor, we will attempt to critique our culture in a way that is sympathetic and intellectually responsible, while always aiming to keep the most important questions of life in the forefronts of our minds. But coherent and persuasive criticisms of those who have differing viewpoints is only half the battle, in fact, it is even less than half of the battle (indicated by the fact that the second part of City of God is significantly longer than the first). Especially in our age of social media and instant reactions, we have an abundance of critique, a glut of clever analysis pieces or witty memes dealing with just about any hot-button issue. So how does one build up a Christian vision of the world rather than simply tearing down a secularist or modernist worldview? To help us, let us turn to the second half of City of God.

Part 2: Building the City of God

Augustine spends the majority of the second half of the City of God interpreting scripture. He knows that he has taken to task the foundational texts of his opponents, and that he must now show that the Bible tells a different story about the meaning of human existence. Unfortunately, the sections of City of God in which Augustine presents the biblical story are often ignored by scholars and casual readers alike. This neglect perhaps reflects a modern tendency to shy away from scripture—it can be difficult to explain, even embarrassing to us at times, and we may not instinctively turn to it when seeking to engage a culture that has rejected it. For Augustine, this tendency is a grievous mistake, one that he himself made in his younger years when he thought that the Bible was poorly written and not as pleasurable to read as Cicero or Virgil.⁹ He came to see, however, that reading scripture is an exercise in humility by design, that meditating on God’s word is as much about cultivating certain habits and desires in us as it is about communicating certain facts of divine revelation. Pope Francis in Christus Vivit likewise reflects this intuition, turning first to the Old Testament and then the New in search of a Christian understanding of the charism of youth, even with the specific view of answering questions raised by non-Christians.¹⁰ If we believe, therefore, that the scriptures not only reveal God to us but also us to ourselves, then the Bible must be the heart of all theology and we need to act in the confidence that the more we read it, study it, and allow it to occupy our hearts, the better we will be prepared to give an account of the faith.

Augustine aims through an exposition of large sections of the Old Testament to tell the story of two cities, of two loves, as Augustine speaks of it. How, then, does Augustine distinguish between these two societies which he claims have existed since the dawn of human history? Through his careful exposition, he determines that these two cities are to be distinguished by their sacrifice. The one city, of earth, sacrifices to itself. The other city, of heaven, sacrifices to God. This enactment of sacrifice is the determining factor and the visible witness to the existence of these two diametrically opposed pulls on the human heart, the attraction or love of these two cities.

One of Augustine’s first biblical examples of these two societies at work is the sacrifice of Cain and Abel. In Genesis 4, God accepts Abel’s sacrifice but not Cain’s. This preferential treatment might seem confusing, since we have just said that Augustine divides the city of God and the earthly city based on whether or not it sacrifices to God, and it seems that both Cain and Abel perform this task. Augustine explains the passage by saying that although Cain gave something of his own to God, he gave himself to himself.¹¹ In other words, although Cain sacrificed some material thing to God, he did not sacrifice himself to God. Augustine is not speaking here strictly about spiritualized sacrifice, that is, he is not arguing that Cain’s sacrifice was worse simply because his heart was not fully committed. Rather, Augustine interprets his text of Genesis 4, which says that Cain’s sacrifice is not properly divided¹² to mean that Cain offered something that was not pleasing, or at the wrong time, or kept the best of it for himself. And this outwardly deficient sacrifice corresponded to the fact that Cain offered to God in order to get something for himself, rather than offering his whole self to God without reservation.

In Augustine’s account, then, the visible witness to the authenticity of the Church is in her sacrifice. But how can we translate this insight into modern terms? How do we communicate to the world that the Church is based not on any human achievement, but is grounded only on its love for and surrender to God, which is mediated by and displayed in her sacrifice? Unfortunately, this orientation of the love of the Church is all too often obscured by sin, or by the half-hearted and poorly administered sacrifices we make more in the spirit of Cain than of Abel. But, if we backtrack a little way in the City of God, we will find Augustine’s suggestion.

In book 10, which is roughly in the middle of the whole work, Augustine transitions from criticizing Roman culture to speaking of the Church (it is the book where he is moving from the first part to the second part). It is no coincidence that it is in this book that we find some of Augustine’s most beautiful reflections on the Eucharist. For Augustine, the Eucharist is the sacrifice of Christ’s body and also the sacrifice of each individual person. He writes: "This is the sacrifice of Christians: although many, one body in Christ. And this is the sacrifice which the Church continually celebrates in the sacrament of the altar (which is well known to the faithful), here it is made plain to her that, in the offering she makes, she herself is offered."¹³ Unlike Cain’s sacrifice, the Eucharist is the proper sacrifice of the whole self. This sacrifice is made possible not by the excellence of the human art of sacrifice (it is not like Roman priestcraft or augury), but by the blood of Christ