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Each day for the past seven years, Matthew Lickona has ended
his morning shower by reciting three Hail Marys under a blast
of cold water. He does this not because it gives him pleasure
but because it doesn't. "I am hoping that this exterior
tickle of discomfort will be a reminder that the world is
not paradise, no matter how satisfied I feel," Lickona
writes in his new memoir, Swimming With Scapulars: True Confessions
of a Young Catholic , a chronicle of both the questions he
has had about his faith and the joy and sustenance he derives
from it. "I am hoping that the shock of cold will rouse
me from my God-forgetting material stupor, and remind me to
offer him, along with this brief suffering, my entire day." With his so-square-they're-hip glasses, Lickona looks like the wine columnist he is for a San Diego alternative paper. But, at 31, he's also the father of four--the result of his and his wife, Deirdre's, belief that contraception violates God's design for human sexuality. He embraced this notion just as his junior-high classmates were rushing in the other direction. "My faith taught me that sex outside marriage for your personal pleasure was selfish," he says. "I couldn't be [simply] a Sunday Catholic, because I had Friday and Saturday nights to deal with." If Lickona's Catholicism made him atypical growing up, he has plenty of company today. Even though the majority of American Catholics favor birth control, for instance, a growing number of young Catholics are drawn to the conservative doctrine espoused by Pope Benedict XVI in his pre-election homily before the College of Cardinals two weeks ago, where he spoke out against relativism. These Catholics are a minority in the United States (where only 23 percent of the younger generation attend mass every week), but they are following a global trend. The recent World Values Survey shows that in 58 countries "millennial" Catholics (born in 1982 or later) are more likely to attend mass, pray every day, consider religion important, and have a larger degree of confidence in the church than the previous generation. "It was a surprise," says Mark Gray, a research associate at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University: In its traditionalist religious attitudes and behaviors, the millennial generation most closely resembles the generations born before World War II. It isn't just Catholics, either. Colleen Carroll Campbell, the author of The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy, has identified what she calls "a countercultural trek toward traditional Christianity" --with young men and women embracing some of the very sacraments and rituals rejected by their boomer parents. Data are hard to come by, but a survey released last month by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California-Los Angeles showed that 81 percent of college freshmen attend religious services at least occasionally, 40 percent follow religious teachings in everyday life, and 64 percent feel spirituality is a source of joy. Other numbers suggest the trend is growing. Since 1995, Campus Crusade for Christ, an interdenominational ministry committed to spreading the Gospel, has grown from 18,000 students nationally to 55,000 this year. Enrollment in the 100-plus member colleges of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, which teach subjects from a biblical perspective, has jumped by 64 percent since 1990. Five years ago, when Pastor Greg Thompson arrived at the
University of Virginia to start a campus ministry of the Presbyterian
Church in America, "I thought I was going to have to
spend all my time convincing people I was working for the
good of the culture," he says. Instead, "I opened
the Bible, and 300 students came." Anecdotally, Naomi
Schaefer Riley, author of God on the Quad , has also found
that "young Jewish people are turning to orthodoxy--even
if they come from secular homes." "Extra work." There are two types of believers, says Martin Marty, professor emeritus of history and theology at the University of Chicago: "protean" people who shop in the supermarket of ideas and values and "constrictive" people who "rule out all other signals except the one they choose." The latter, he says, "don't stand a chance of becoming a mass movement" because of "the discipline it takes." As Ally Hill, an 18-year-old freshman at Miami University of Ohio, puts it, "For you to draw closer to God and to your faith takes a lot of extra work. To ignore it is the easiest." Nonetheless, says Riley, "if you look at the movements that demand the most, they're the ones that are growing the fastest." Whether these young people have found a religious home or are simply seekers, a desire for authority is part of the attraction, says Thompson. They are "trying to overcome not only parental but cultural lack of direction. They've grown up with no script." In two recent senior seminars he gave on sex and money, Thompson says, "I watched these people who are so accomplished scribble down every word. The frameworks these students have inherited have not given them answers to questions like 'What am I supposed to do with my body? "How am I supposed to think about alcohol? "Who am I?' Some students say, 'There are no answers; I'll do whatever I want.' Others say, 'I'm going to find some dad-gum answers.' It's an unbelievable hunger." Adds Robert Webber, a professor of ministry at Northern Seminary in Lombard, Ill.: "Enlightenment has run its course. . . . All of a sudden, God is at the heart of existence." Not to mention the heart of the political process, says Wade Clark Roof, a sociologist at the University of California-Santa Barbara: "It's the marker of our times. We're living in an age when religion, even for those who are not religious, is the lens through which we make judgments about things." Old school. In the 1950s, says Marty, people took a pragmatic approach to problem solving: "As soon as we have enough good city planners and folk singers and social workers, we'll solve the problems of war and peace." There were also what he calls "the grand-scale theories of the 20th century. There was a time when people were flirting with Maoism." But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he says, "no one in his right mind could say the communism of Cuba or North Korea is a model. No way you could walk into a bar and say, 'Let's turn Maoist.' " Market forces won, and for many, Marty says, that means "you need ground under your feet. You want to be where people have walked before." Many students at the University of Chicago Divinity School, he observes, have gravitated toward the study of medieval female mystics, long dead but more talked about than modern-day heroes, "bigger names on campus than Gloria Steinem." Lickona can relate. Although he's a lifelong Catholic, he was a teenager when he began to really look at the tradition he had inherited, "poking around in the dusty basement of the church," he says. He took up the scapular, the two small squares of brown felt connected by a string, which carry a promise from the Virgin Mary dating to 1251 that whoever dies wearing them won't suffer "eternal fire." Though his strict interpretation of Catholicism pervades his life, Lickona feels like a regular guy. If you can swim with your scapulars, after all, balancing life and faith doesn't have to be an either-or proposition. |
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